While I was working on my doctorate at Harvard Business School I took a one semester job teaching a graduate finance course one evening a week at Babson College, a business-only undergraduate and graduate college in Wellesley. This is the story of the first night of the course.
The course began in January; I had prepared carefully – I thought – as I wanted to make a good first impression. (As Babson was unofficially associated with HBS, having many of its graduates as faculty, teaching ratings were important.) I had assigned a case in the class notes, but no one had even read it.
Note: A case in this context is a description of a situation in an organization that requires a decision. Its length can range from a single page to thirty or more. A finance case includes financial data, which requires analysis – generally arithmetic and thinking. The case I had assigned was probably about a dozen pages. My plan was to use elements of the decision for very short lectures on finance.
I tried to turn the session into a lecture, based on the case and my short lecture planning, asking the class to take ten minutes to read it. My problem was that I hadn’t considered that I might have to do this, so I did it poorly. I stumbled through it until the break, it was a three hour class with a fifteen minute break in the middle. The break finally arrived and I walked outside to think.
“What to do” was my problem. I wanted to get in my car and drive home, but I knew I couldn’t do it. So I had to go back in. I thought about the material that the class would need to know to analyze the cases for the following week. Normally, the assumption for a case is that the student would do the needed reading in order to analyze the case. But I decided that a lecture on it was the only thing I could do that might regain some ground with the class. But I had to tell them what I thought was going on, so that they could understand why I was doing what I was.
The first thing that I did was to apologize. I told them that this was my first course to teach, and that I hadn’t considered what I would do if they hadn’t gotten my request to prepare the case. I felt that this explained the situation without any hint of me blaming them, which I felt was important to get them working with me. Then I told them I was planning to lecture for the remainder of the evening on the material for the next week and asked their help in putting an outline on the board. They did help, expanding some of the points. And the lecture seemed to go well.
At the end of the evening I described the decisions needed in the cases for the next week, and how the things I’d lectured on might relate to them. Finally, I told them I was looking forward to the next week and I hoped that they were too. I was very happy to find that most were there the following week.
I learned a lot from this experience. I feel that I dealt well with a bad situation by: first, admitting that it existed; and, second, by getting others involved in fixing it. Then, I learned that I should avoid that particular situation by better planning for the first class: never again did I assume that material was read – far less, prepared – for a first class, not even by graduate students.