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NUMBERS ARE REMARKABLY SIMILAR, WITH ONE DISCREPANCY: PROFESSORS GIVE MUCH HIGHER MARKS THAN STUDENTS DO TO THE VALUE OF STUDENTS' CLASSROOM PRESENTATIONS. New Deans: The First Hundred Days Seminar last fall: ■ Understanding the school and its business unit. ■ Developing rela- tionships with morale. ■ Organizing the Deans who have just stepped up to their new roles are confronted with a host of challenges that can seem over- whelming at first. It might make their lives easier to know they can focus on these five top priorities, as identified by 33 deans surveyed at AACSB's New Deans culture. ■ Building faculty/ staff relationships and How Students Learn As evaluating teaching effectiveness be comes more and more important to business school administrators, deans and professors are looking for ways to determine which teaching meth- ods yield the best results. Carl A. Ro- drigues, professor of management at the School of Business at Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, recently conducted a survey of students and professors at his school in search of answers. Over four years, more than 600 students answered the survey; more than half of the school's 98 business school faculty participated. While the sample was small and external stakeholders. ■ Developing strategic planning and setting goals. The results of the survey were could not allow for variances such as individual teaching performances and discrepancies in class sizes, Ro- drigues derived a ranking system for Top Ten Teaching Techniques presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Business and Behavioral Sciences by Al Spritzer, holder of the Allen and Ruth Harris Chair of Excellence in Business and former business dean at East Ten- nessee State University in Johnson City, and Ron Green, new dean of the School of Business at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. Spritzer notes that, at the begin- Ranked by Ranked by Students Faculty Lectures by Instructor 11 Classroom Discussions 22 Reading Textbooks 33 Case Studies 45 Individual Research Projects 56 ning of their terms, the majority of new deans surveyed do not give much weight to challenges such as develop- ing the school's mission/vision, ad- dressing budgetary issues, recruiting faculty and staff, and gaining support for accreditation. He says, "This may suggest that new deans recognize the importance of dealing with the basics of their new positions before attack- ing certain specific issues." Computerized Learning 67 Assignments Group Projects 78 Guest Speakers 89 Videos Shown in Class 9 Classroom Presentations 10 by Students the top ten teaching methods as viewed through the eyes of faculty and students. Numbers are remark- ably similar, with one discrepancy: Professors give much higher marks than students do to the value of stu- dents' classroom presentations. Rodrigues notes that the study confirms that different students learn better through different teaching techniques. "For example, students enrolled in behavioral courses, such as marketing, may learn better through active tech- niques such as case studies, individ- ual and group projects, and class discussions. Students enrolled in more quantitative courses, such as accounting, may learn better through passive techniques such as lectures, textbooks, and com - puterized assign- ments." 10 4 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2003 9