My personal goal is to be an outstanding teacher.
The purpose of this teaching portfolio is help me achieve my goal. In particular, this teaching portfolio is meant to examine the following issues:
In the next section of this Portfolio, I examine my teaching responsibilities,
including an examination of the courses I teach and the kinds
of students who take my courses. In the third section, I discuss
my teaching philosophy, including a discussion of what I do in
my classes and why I teach the way that I do. In the fourth section,
I examine my teaching effectiveness, including an examination
of the methods I use to assess my teaching. Finally, in the fifth
section, I describe my instructional improvement efforts.
I am a Professor in the Management Department of the College of Business at Mankato State University, in Mankato, Minnesota. At MSU, I have taught the following courses in recent years:
In any particular quarter, I prepare and teach two or three of these courses. While due to changes in the MBA curriculum, I have not taught the Techniques of Research course since Winter 1995, I include it in this portfolio. The courses I teach span three different areas of management: human resources, business ethics, and research techniques. Each area is examined individually next.
The first general area in which I have teaching responsibilities is human resource management. In particular, I have teaching responsibilities in two human resources courses: Human Resource Management (MGMT 440/540) and Management of Human Resources (MGMT 693). Each course is examined individually next.
The Human Resource Management course is a required course for the Major in Management in both the General Management emphasis and the Human Resource Management emphasis. It is also a required course for the Minor in Management and the Minor in Human Resource Management. It is not required for other majors or minors.
Virtually all the students are undergraduate business majors, while the balance are typically psychology majors, community health majors, nursing administration majors, and MBA or other graduate students. More than half of the students who take the course are seniors, while the balance are juniors with two or three graduate students. As the Minor in Management and the Minor in Human Resource Management grow in popularity, the student composition may change to include students from a broader range of majors.
The course serves as a survey of human resource management. The students who take the course typically have had no previous coursework in the field. For the students concentrating in Human Resource Management, the course serves as their introduction to the field before they take other more specialized advanced courses in the field; for the other students, the course is usually the only exposure they get to the basic concepts in managing human resources. The course therefore is designed to serve two different types of students: students who plan on a career that specializes in human resource management and students who plan on a career in any area of management.
Since the course is designed to serve these two somewhat different types of students, the course begins with the proposition that virtually every manager, regardless of area of responsibility, has some responsibility for managing the human resources of the organization. Furthermore, since human resources constitute a significant expense for most organizations, it is important that all managers have an understanding of how to manage human resources effectively.
To serve these students, and to give them the tools they need to manage human resources effectively, the course explores the theories, policies, and practices of modern human resource management. In particular, it examines the operation of the labor market, employment law (including affirmative action), and the human resource management functions of job design, job analysis, recruiting, selection and hiring, internal staffing (including managing promotions, transfers, layoffs, terminations, and quits), training and development, compensation, employee performance evaluation, and labor relations.
The class is offered in either two hour blocks that meet twice a week during the day or a four hour block that meets once a week during the evening. The class time is devoted to lectures on the course content, with questions and discussions of the issues to clarify and illustrate the lectures.
Since the field is constantly changing in response to changes in the law and in recommended practices that reflect current research, I find that I must constantly change and update the course content. As a consequence, I typically spend approximately one hour preparing for each hour of class time. In addition, students frequently stop by my office to ask questions about the course content and the career opportunities in the field. To provide students with the opportunity for this personal contact, I typically schedule seven to eight hours of formal office hours per week. In addition to this formally scheduled time, I tell students that I am in my office basically all day every day and they are welcome to stop by to chat at any time.
The Management of Human Resources course is an elective course for graduate students. This course had been on the books for years without being offered. With the revisions in the MBA program, the Management Department decided that there was a need for the MBA students to have the opportunity to learn how to manage the human resources of the organization. This seemed especially important because the MBA program does not require any coursework that would provide MBA students with exposure to human resource management.
As a consequence, the course was offered for the first time in many years during Spring Quarter 1995. The course was offered a second time during Spring Quarter 1996. In the future, it is scheduled to be offered once a year each Spring.
Based on this limited experience so far, the kinds of students who take the class are mostly MBA students, with some graduate students from Computer Science, Manufacturing Engineering Technology (M.E.T.), Health Sciences, Sports Administration , and the Multi-Disciplinary Program. These students typically have not had any prior exposure to the field of human resource management. The course has been tailored to graduate students in the MBA and other programs.
The course begins with the proposition that most managers are involved in managing employees. The course therefore examines managing human resources from the perspective of managers and executives.
In particular, the course surveys the conceptual foundations of modern human resource management practice. It involves students in individual and group exercises designed to develop competency in applying the concepts to solve practical managerial problems. The course uses an experiential approach to explore job design and analysis, human resource planning, recruitment, selection and hiring, training and development, performance appraisal, compensation, quality and productivity strategies, labor relations and collective bargaining, health and safety, achieving competitive advantage through human resources, and equal employment opportunity and employment law. Throughout the course, attention is given to managing a diverse workforce in a global marketplace.
The class is offered in a four hour block that meets once a week during the evening. I divide the four hour block into four 50 minute sessions. The first 50 minute block consists of a guided discussion of the first main topic for the evening. In this guided discussion, I pose a series of questions to the class that ask students to recall, interpret, and apply the required reading for the topic.
The second 50 minute block is devoted to a group experiential exercise that involves the application of the topic to a practical business situation. Part of the experiential exercise is completed by students individually before class. In class, I form new groups randomly on the spot. In the first 30 minutes of the second 50 minute block, the students complete a second part of the experiential exercise in the small groups that I form on the spot. In the remaining 20 minutes of the block, each group reports to the class its recommendations and I conduct a discussion of their recommendations.
The third and fourth 50 minute blocks then repeats this process for the second topic of the evening. Thus, we cover two topics per week.
Since the course uses an experiential approach, there are not extensive lectures. I find that many areas of confusion are resolved within the learning groups as members of each group help each other.
The design and preparation of the individual and group learning experience exercises take substantial time. Furthermore, since some of the students' work is completed by them before the class, I typically have students stopping by my office for help. To provide students with the opportunity for this personal contact, I typically schedule seven to eight hours of formal office hours per week. Besides this formally scheduled time, I tell students that I am in my office basically all day every day and they are welcome to stop by to chat at any time.
The second general area in which I have teaching responsibilities is business ethics. There is one course that I teach in this area: Business, Society, and Environment.
This course is an elective course in two different majors within the College of Business curriculum: (1) the General Management Emphasis in the Major in Management and (2) the Financial Planning Emphasis in the Major in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. It is also an elective course in the Minor in Management.
Virtually all the students are undergraduate business majors, while the balance are from a wide variety of undergraduate or graduate majors. The students from areas outside of the business programs generally discover the course from word-of-mouth from friends.
The course is designed to make students aware of the important issues in business and society, provide students with a framework to understand these issues, and help students learn how to solve ethically real world business problems in all their complexity.
The course examines business organizations as one part of a complex socioeconomic system. It analyzes the ways in which businesses and societies interact with each other. It also examines how managers can more effectively deal with issues that arise in society that may affect the organization. Business ethics is the key thread that runs throughout the course unifying the material. The course is usually the one and only concentrated exposure to business ethics that the students receive in their college programs.
There are four main parts to this course. The first part provides the basic principles that are used in the remainder of the course. It examines the nature of business ethics and describes the three main principles that are used to decide whether some action is ethical or unethical.
The second part of the course explores the capitalistic market economic system. It examines the ideologies of some famous philosophers, including John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, and investigates the ethics of the market system. It also examines the main arguments for and against government regulation of business. In addition, it investigates the ethics of bribery and of some specific business practices such as price-fixing.
The third part of the course investigates some of the potentially negative effects of business on society. It explores the issues of pollution and resource depletion. In addition, it examines the ethical duties of businesses to consumers, including the issues of product safety, consumer protection, and product liability. It also examines the ethics of marketing practices and analyzes the conditions under which marketing practices are considered to be deceptive.
Finally, the fourth part of the course examines the relationship between a business and its employees. It investigates the ethics of job discrimination and affirmative action. It also explores the rights and duties of employees and corporations, including specific issues such as drug testing, rights to privacy, conflicts of interest, insider trading, and theft by employees.
The class is offered in either two hour blocks that meet twice a week during the day or a four hour block that meets once a week during the evening. Most of the class time is devoted to discussion of the topics and of cases that illustrate the topics rather than to formal lectures. Students are also asked to read the Wall Street Journal every day; we devote class time to a discussion of items in the news that illustrate the topics from the class.
Since I frequently change the cases that we discuss, including the use of current news items, I find that I must spend substantial time preparing for each class session. As a consequence, I typically spend approximately one hour preparing for each hour of class time. In addition, students frequently stop by my office to discuss the course content and to seek my advice on ethical dilemmas that they are facing in their lives. To provide students with the opportunity for this personal contact, I typically schedule seven to eight hours of formal office hours per week. Besides this formally scheduled time, I tell students that I am in my office basically all day every day and they are welcome to stop by to chat at any time.
Finally, the third general area in which I have teaching responsibilities is research techniques. The Techniques of Research course was a required course in the old MBA program. It is no longer required in the new MBA program.
The students taking the course have been roughly three-quarters MBA students with the balance from a variety of other graduate programs. Since the course is no longer required for MBA students, it remains to be seen whether there will be sufficient demand from MBA and other students taking the course as an elective for the Management Department to continue to offer the course. I last taught this course during Spring Quarter 1995.
The course explores the research process as an aid to making decisions. It examines the role of research in decision-making, problem identification and formulation, assessment of the value of research, research proposals, literature reviews, research designs, sampling, measurement, scaling, questionnaires, factor analysis as a measurement tool, data collection, data preparation, descriptive statistics, and the purposes of major data analysis methods.
The class is offered in either two hour blocks that meet twice a week during the day or a four hour block that meets once a week during the evening. Most of the class time is devoted to lectures and discussions of the topics. Students are required to read the textbook material before the classroom discussion. There is a quiz on the material before it is discussed in class.
Since the research methods covered in the class do not change
rapidly over time, it is not necessary for me to make substantial
revisions to the course content from quarter to quarter. However,
I typically spend approximately two to three hours per week preparing
the next weeks' quiz and grading the previous weeks' quiz. In
addition, students write a research proposal as one of the required
elements in the class. As a consequence, students frequently stop
by my office to ask questions about the material on the coming
quiz and on their projects. To provide students with the opportunity
for this personal contact, I typically schedule seven to eight
hours of formal office hours per week. Besides this formally scheduled
time, I tell students that I am in my office basically all day
every day and they are welcome to stop by to chat at any time.
I see teaching as involving a reciprocal relationship between teachers and students-I believe that teachers have duties to their students and that students have duties to their teachers.
I believe that it is my responsibility as a teacher to provide students with the following:
I also believe that my students have duties to me, to their fellow students, and to themselves. I believe that these duties support me in fulfilling my duties to students. Thus, I believe that it is the students' responsibility to be supportive of the teacher and fellow students by being:
Therefore, because of the reciprocal nature of the duties between teachers and students, I believe that it is a fundamental mistake to see students as customers or as clients because such a view incorrectly implies that the primary duties in the relationship are the teachers' duties to the students and virtually ignores the duties of students to their teachers, fellow students, and themselves.
Since I teach four different courses that span three different areas of management, I provide a more detailed discussion of how my teaching philosophy relates to what and how I do things in each individual course.
My general teaching philosophy has implications for the specific teaching philosophies in the two human resources courses that I teach: Human Resource Management (MGMT 440/540) and Management of Human Resources (MGMT 693). Each is examined individually.
As describe previously, the students who take this course have usually had no prior coursework in the field. Thus, the course serves as an introduction to the field both for students who plan on a career in any area of management and for students who plan on a career that specializes in human resource management.
This course is important to my students' lives because they will spend most of their careers as managers managing people-deciding how to assign the work to be done to jobs; recruiting, hiring, and assigning people to do those jobs; training people to have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the jobs successfully; managing promotions, transfers, layoffs, and terminations to achieve organizational objectives; evaluating the performance of people performing their jobs; and determining the compensation of people working for a living. Therefore, my most fundamental objective for this course is to give my students the tools they need to be successful in managing people to achieve the objectives of the organization-I want to give them the best tools available to accomplish the diverse yet integrated set of tasks that managers perform in managing people effectively.
Since students typically come to this class with limited previous experiences with the topics that are covered, and since research is constantly affecting the policies and practices that are judged to be effective, the direction of knowledge transfer tends to be mostly from teacher to students. At the same time, student experiences, no matter how limited, provide an important opportunity for me to link the knowledge that I wish them to learn to their lives.
Thus, I have been teaching the course using a lecture format. I nevertheless find myself wondering if there are not better alternative formats. On the one hand, lectures are fairly efficient in time and energy in transferring a body of knowledge from one person (the teacher) to a group (the students). But on the other hand, lectures can be boring and may not help students see clearly how they can apply the knowledge they are allegedly absorbing to their lives.
As a consequence, I have been moving over time in this course to lessen the time spent in formal lecture format, and to increase the time spent in discussion format. I am also exploring making more fundamental changes in the way that I approach teaching this course based on my experiences teaching Management of Human Resources (MGMT 693) using an experiential learning format, which is described next.
As described previously, the students who take this course are graduate students who may not have any prior exposure to the field. Thus, the course serves as an introduction to the field for managers and executives at the graduate level.
This course is important to my students' lives for the same reason as Human Resource Management (MGMT 440/540)-most managers and executives spend most of their time managing people. To do this in a haphazard fashion increases the risks of failure both of the manager and of the organization.
As with the 440/540 course, the 693 course provides students with the tools they need to manage people successfully, which would suggest a lecture format. However, given my concerns about a traditional lecture format described above, coupled with the somewhat greater maturity of graduate students, I have decided to experiment with this course by adopting an experiential approach that uses both individual and group experiential exercises. While as is discussed later in this portfolio, students have responded well to this experiential approach, it is still too early to judge how effectively this experiential approach is working. If, based on my experiences with this course, I find it to be effective, then I plan to begin to experiment with experiential approaches in my Human Resource Management (MGMT 440/540) course.
As described previously, the students who take this course have little formal training in business ethics. A key objective, therefore, is to show students the role of business ethics and to give them the tools they need to identify and work through ethical dilemmas.
This course is important to my students' lives because they are likely to face situations that raise ethical issues. To fail to identify ethical issues, or to ignore them, or to underestimate their importance, or to deal with them ineffectively, is to run the risk of making a decision one will regret for the rest of one's existence. While my students almost always seem to recognize the potential importance of ethical issues, they also admit that they feel unprepared to deal with ethical issues. They sometimes tell me that they are frustrated by their other courses failing to grapple with ethical issues.
Thus, I have used ethics as the thread that runs throughout the course and that ties the course together. In particular, I want to teach my students a set of core moral principles. I want my students to be able to use these basic moral principles to decide for themselves what course of action is ethical and what is unethical. I want my students to be able to use these moral principles to tackle real world ethical dilemmas in all their complexity. I want these moral principles to change my students lives for the better.
To accomplish these objectives, I have designed the course to use two different approaches to the material. First, by having the students read about basic moral principles, by lecturing on those principles, and by conducting a guided discussion of the principles, I try to teach a deep understanding of the principles. Second, to embed those principles in my students and to help them develop their skills in applying them to a wide variety of different situations, I use case analysis and discussion. Furthermore, since student opinions and experiences are extremely valuable in enriching the course, I strongly encourage students to bring their opinions and experiences into the class discussions. To keep the applications current, I require the students to read The Wall Street Journal every day and devote class time to discussions of current news items that illustrate the subjects covered in the course.
As discussed previously, the students who take this course are MBA students and graduate students from other programs with little previous training in research techniques. My objective with this course is to teach students how to use research to help make better decisions.
This course is important to my students' lives because they will have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty in their careers. I believe that in order to make better decisions in the face of uncertainty, one benefits by understanding the role research can play in attempting to reduce uncertainty.
Since the students have limited previous experience with research techniques, and since the material tends to be fairly technical, I have taught the material using a lecture format. To give the students some practice in using the tools of the course, I require them to complete a project that consists of a research proposal.
I believe that the course should serve two needs-the course should
give the students both the tools they need as producers of research
and the tools they need as consumers of research. To help accomplish
this, I have designed the project to allow students to practice
both roles.
I use the same basic tools in all of my classes to evaluate my teaching effectiveness and to give me ideas for how to improve. I use multiple tools because I believe that each different tool provides its own somewhat unique view of my effectiveness. Furthermore, no one tool is perfect. Thus, by using multiple tools, the potential weakness of any one tool may be offset to a degree by the potential strengths of another tool. Each of the tools that I use is examined individually.
I use the Mankato State University Instructional Evaluation forms for every class at the end of every quarter, including summer sessions. I have found these standardized forms are extremely helpful precisely because of their standardization-they allow me to track my performance over time using a consistent instrument and they allow me to compare my performance to that of other teachers using the same instrument. I believe that both types of information are valuable.
Tracking my performance over time allows me to examine the effects of changes in my courses. Such feedback is critically important to me because I continually try to change the courses to improve them each time that I teach them. For example, when I first started teaching the Business, Society, and Environment course, business ethics was one major topic among several other topics. Over several quarters, I changed the focus of the class to give much greater emphasis to business ethics. By examining the instructional evaluation reports, I discovered that my ratings went up every time I added more on ethics. The open-ended questions confirmed that students liked the discussions of ethics, believed that ethics was important to their lives and careers, felt that they were poorly prepared by their other courses to deal with ethical dilemmas, and wanted even more.
My ratings are generally quite positive-on a one to five scale, with one low and five high, I almost always earn average ratings above 4.0 and usually earn average ratings above 4.5. Even though the ratings are generally positive, the evaluations still help me identify areas that would benefit by change and improvement.
Copies of Instructional Evaluation summary reports for each of my classes are available on request.
I always reflect on what I do and do not do in each class. Part of this process involves thinking back over the class immediately after the class session has finished. By reflecting on the class session while it is still fresh in my mind, I try to identify what worked and what did not work. I also try to identify the reasons why what worked did work and why what did not work failed to work. This process of continual self-evaluation over the quarter allows me to make mid-course corrections.
I also engage in self-evaluation during each class session. I make a conscious effort to monitor the body language and facial expressions of my students. If I notice a growing number of bored expressions, then I consider whether to speed up the pace or move on to the next topic. If I notice mostly dazed and confused expressions, then I consider slowing down and providing additional explanations or examples. If I notice blank expressions, then I stop and explicitly tell the students that I need their feedback on whether they are understanding the material and are becoming bored or whether they are so confused that they do not know what to do or ask.
An important part of my self-evaluation has been my active use of my Professional Development Plans (PDPs). A significant part of my PDPs have been an extensive self-evaluation of my teaching. I use the PDPs to describe what I have done and how it has worked.
I frequently ask peers to examine my course materials and provide me with feedback. Not only has this provided me with specific comments and ideas, but it has also occasionally served as a springboard for a dialogue with a peer on a variety of teaching topics.
I have won several teaching awards over the years. I believe that winning teaching awards is one signal of teaching effectiveness.
I was selected for Who's Who Among America's Teachers in 1994. This award is based on student nominations.
I was selected for the Mankato State University College of Business "Excellence in Teaching" Award in 1990-91.
Before joining the faculty at Mankato State University in 1987,
I was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities)
from 1981 through 1987. I won the Teacher of the Year Award (the
Herbie) in the Industrial Relations Department of the School
of Management at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) three
times. I also won the Teacher of the Year Award for the entire
School of Management at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities)
once. All of these awards at the University of Minnesota resulted
from nominations and elections among the undergraduate and graduate
students.
To try to pick up ideas and tips to improve my teaching, I have been attending numerous workshops and seminars on content or pedagogy, including the following in the recent past:
In addition to these workshops and seminars, I also try continuously to improve my classes by monitoring my teaching effectiveness as described previously.
I also talk to managers and executives. In these discussions, we talk about the problems that they face in business and about my courses. I use these discussions to gain insights on the relevance and importance of the content of my courses.
These efforts, taken together, result in continuous efforts to refine, change, delete, and add both to the content of my courses and to the methods I use to deliver that content. Over the years, as my Professional Development Plans document, I have made evolutionary changes to the courses that I teach.
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Last Updated: 4/1/97
© Copyright 1996, 1997 by Paul L. Schumann. All rights reserved.
The information on this page and all other pages is provided for educational entertainment purposes. Paul L. Schumann, the Department of Management, the College of Business, Mankato State University, or any other individual or organization make no promises or warranties, expressed or implied, about any information. All users are warned that they use all information at their own risk.