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Today's truly effective teachers must be able to convey knowledge and enthusiasm in an environment that promotes active learning. Yezdi Bhada's views on effective teaching were strongly influ- enced by a comic strip he once read. "In the cartoon, one child is telling an older boy that he has taught his dog to whistle," says Bhada. "The bigger boy bends down and listens to the dog but says, 'I don't hear him whistling.' The smaller child replies, 'I said I taught him. I didn't say he learned it.'" Bhada, who is professor of accounting emeritus at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has made the topic of effective teaching his major focus of research. Co-director of the Southeast Master Teacher Program and special advisor to the dean at GSU, Bhada has conducted numerous programs on teaching improvement in the U.S. and around the world. One of the reasons more business schools are focused on L teaching effectiveness these days, Bhada believes, is that there has been a paradigm shift in how schools view its importance. "When I first started teaching, the implicit criteri- on was 'survival of the fittest,'" he says. "A good teacher was tough. Whoever had the highest attrition rate was the best teacher. At that time, if you had a Ph.D., you were still breath- ing, and you could solve Problem #17-9 on the board, you were a teacher." This period of traditionalism in teaching gradually gave by introducing teaching portfolios and awards for teaching innovations," says Bhada. "Organizations like the American Association of Higher Education and the Carnegie Foundation began to have a stronger influence on the practice of teaching." Today, the emphasis has shifted to student learning out- way to a series of other models. First came a more teacher- centered era, in which administrators focused more on student and teacher satisfaction. At this time, success was measured by student evaluations, faculty self-assessment, and judgments made by the department chair. This era was followed by a stu- dent-focused stage, when schools began to engage in active learning and incorporate certain accreditation standards for student learning. "In the '90s, schools began to work on process improvement comes, the scholarship of teaching, and the incorporation of active learning techniques. "The paradigm shift has been from teaching to learning," says Bhada. "We are changing from an emphasis on lecturing in the classroom to designing learn- ing methods that rely on discussion, teamwork, and off-site communications." In fact, teachers not only are teaching their students to whis- tle, but are devising methods to gauge how well they've learned to make music. In the following pages, Bhada outlines the traits that enable any teacher to become truly effective. Learning how teachers teach and students learn—in effect, how faculty behavior influences student learning—has become a key focus for me and other colleagues at Georgia State. I've worked closely with professor Harvey Brightman in studying three different groups: faculty (service providers), students (service receivers), and colleges of education (research con- ductors). The faculty: A study by Joseph Lowman, professor of psy- chology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provided us with an excellent starting point. Based on obser- vation of faculty members who had been identified as suc- cessful, Lowman came up with a two-dimensional model of the "master teacher" and published the work in Mastering the Techniques of Teaching. According to his model, the master teacher is successful both in the "intellectual dimension" and the "interpersonal dimension." In the intellectual dimension, teachers are well- organized, good at establishing relevance, dynamic in the classroom, and appear to love teaching their material. On the interpersonal side, they treat students as individuals, encour- age questions and discussion, and behave in a positive manner toward students. Lowman's model was further validated through a later perceive teaching effectiveness, we found that literally thou- sands of studies had been done in this area. Initially we looked at teaching effectiveness in a general way. Eventually we nar- rowed our focus to teaching effectiveness from the perspec- tive of business schools—specifically to the business school at Georgia State University. The most influential piece on students' perceptions was study that looked at how faculty and administrators articulate teaching effectiveness. For this, he content-analyzed the material submitted on UNC teachers nominated for teaching awards. Among the words that came up over and over again in the letters of nomination were enthusiastic, knowledgeable, clear, organized, concerned, caring, and helpful. Students: When we turned our attention to how students a meta-analytical study done by John Centra in Deter - mining Faculty Effectiveness. His factor analysis provided clustering of attributes that influence overall teaching effec- tiveness as perceived by students. The primary factors iden- tified by Centra are organization/clarity, student-teacher rapport, communication ability, workload challenge, grad- ing, and motivation. Through research we conducted at Georgia State University, using a home-grown instrument, we were able to confirm Centra's top factors that influence student per- ception of teacher effectiveness. Listed in order of impor- BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 23