Transformational Education > Distinctive teachers
Audio Clip – Lawrence Fouraker on field-based research and cases
Transcript
I think the history of the School has been, if you bring in people with very different disciplinary backgrounds, some of them are going to get caught up in this new research methodology, a new means of gaining insight about management.
And once it takes, you become converted. I haven't read Econometrics, I guess, in 15 years. And I used to send manuscripts to them. The ability to choose your problem—! You go into the field and you define a problem, or you pick an issue that you think is important, confront it, and you try to analyze it with your colleagues here during a teaching group. You work out a teaching method, a teaching strategy. You have some idea of how to respond to this, or what the alternatives are.
And you take it into a classroom, whether it's MBA with 90 students or an executive program with 160. You confront your problem, and your analysis of it, with this array of experience, from all these different industries, all these different countries, all these different educational and cultural backgrounds. And if you're confident enough to listen rather than to speak, you inevitably learn something and advance your own understanding of the problem.
And, typically, I think a traditional pattern here, is that you write a case. You teach it. You come back from the class. You say, "Boy, you need an exhibit here. This one is wrong. This is a dead end, so I better"—You revise the case.
Lawrence Edward Fouraker