Learning from Exemplary Teachers: Revision II

Exemplary teaching is of limited use unless other teachers can learn from the exemplars and improve their teaching effectiveness. One objective of this paper is to use The Attentional & Interpersonal Style (TAIS) inventory to identify and analyze the characteristics of exemplary university teachers of finance. A second objective is to use the significant characteristics of exemplary teachers (ETs) to help colleagues enhance their teaching effectiveness and improve student learning. A two-pronged approach was used to identify exemplary teachers of finance. One group of ETs was nominated by the chair or head of finance departments from a large sample of American universities. A list of 17 criteria were developed to identify the ETs. Another group of ETs was identified in a Business Week survey of MBA students. We compared these two groups of ETs with a sampling of finance department colleagues who had not been nominated for the ET status. Using the TAIS instrument, we discovered that exemplary teachers were more spontaneous, confident, experimental, in-charge of their class, intuitively empathetic with students and risks takers in expressing thoughts to their students. In addition, the ETs wrote a brief explanation of why they were recognized as great teachers. Their comments provided rich insights into the multi-dimensional characteristics of great teachers. More importantly they provided valuable recommendations to colleagues on how to improve their teaching effectiveness and student learning. Lowman (1996) concluded that exemplary college teachers excelled in creating intellectual excitement in students and/or interpersonal rapport with students. A qualitative comparison of comments by exemplary teachers in our study provide solid support for Lowman's effective college teaching model-the ability to create intellectual excitement and to establish interpersonal rapport.