Kevin McCabe TEACHING
My philosophy on teaching has been shaped by my life experiences. I have always been intensely interested in knowing why. Why things work the way they do? Why people behave the way they do? Why do we have rules? etc. As a consequence, most of my important learning experiences occur as a result of a seemingly simple statement which turns out to be the key for unlocking the questions I am asking. For example, I remember, from my youth, telling my Dad about something I had just read from a newspaper. I still remember the cascade of answers that occurred to me when his response was the simple question: "Do you believe everything your read?" The obvious answer is: Of course not! But more importantly, from that point on, I was never again a passive reader, simply along for the ride. Imagine my surprise when 30 years later I get the chance to read M. Adler's How To Read A Book.
I always been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy where authors ask readers to join them in speculating on the following question: How might science, technology, and society develop in the future? I find the openness to speculation, together with the spirit of adventure, portrayed by this genre of authors, very appealing. In contrast, knowing the answer to a question has always been anti-climactic. It is probably this aspect of my nature that has always made me uncomfortable with Plato's ideals. Instead, I am much more comfortable with Heideggers view of being-in-the-world. It has always been the search for the answer that I've enjoyed.
At Villanova University I continued to be challenged by philosophy, math, and computer science. It was here that I learned two important lessons (1) a University is what you make of it, and (2) a University is a meeting place for great minds. This second point led me to seek the best, take their seminars, and learn from them. I still remember with great enthusiasm my classes in German Existentialism and Phenomenology, Romanticism, An Introduction To Algebraic Topology, Religion and Psychology, Systems Programming, Stellar Phenomena, and International Development. I learned from this experience the importance of offering small seminars which allow faculty and students to study and discuss exciting frontiers of research.
In graduate school, at the University of Pennsylvania, I choose to study economics since it seemed to be the most challenging of the new sciences of social interaction. I found that economics models were appreciated for their formal aesthetics with rarely any indication that they were intended to explain real phenomena. To me this was not science. I had a new question: "Why can't we treat the study of economics like any other science?" One of the principal textbooks of the day said quite simply that economics was not an experimental science but instead an observational science similar to astronomy. What was fascinating to me was that such a famous author could ignore the vast number of experiments which provided astronomers with a foundation for understanding what was observed. I learned from this experience that it is very easy for a whole discipline to live in self-serving denial that anything is wrong.
After graduate school I went to the University of Arizona as an assistant professor of economics. While at Arizona I attended a lecture by Vernon Smith, one of the pioneers of experimental economics. I heard, what was for me, a line of reasoning that made perfect sense. Economics is the study of the behavior of economic institutions as conditioned by the economic environment. Theory is used to model this conditional behavior and differences of opinion among economists are settled in the laboratory by designing and running new experiments. After spending many enjoyable months creating hypothesis, designing and running experiments, and analyzing the data, I've added the following element to the outline. The ultimate expression of our knowledge is our ability to predict something new, or our ability to use this knowledge to make something work. Since that time, all of my professional career has been built around this basic understanding of the nature of economics.
From Arizona I went to the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. While at Minnesota I received a Bush Faculty Development Grant for Excellence and Diversity in Teaching. While I already knew that students have very different learning styles, I assumed that one style was best. Talk about self-serving denial! It was at this time that I learned the value in targeting my teaching to include these different learning styles. As a result my classes now use a mix of teaching styles including: lectures, still the best way to cover a lot of ground; cooperative learning, using student teams; active learning, using hands on experiential teaching techniques; problem solving, the best way to find out if you really know how to use an idea; and case discussions, to integrate and apply what we are learning to new topics. A famous quote by Benjamin Franklin has become my teaching mantra, “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me and I remember, Involve me, and I learn.”
As a professor at a major research university I have two major teaching objectives: (1) the transfer of research based knowledge to practitioners, and (2) to expose students to critical thinking. To accomplish my goals I stress the importance of the scientific method in establishing principals of behavior which can be relied upon in practice. As concrete illustrations of the scientific method I use my background in experimental economics to design interactive case studies which give students hands on experience with the theory and techniques important to the application of research based knowledge to real decision problems. In building interactive case studies I use my research background to choose environment/institution combinations which I know are robust, i.e., where the results are insensitive to uncontrollable factors in the classroom environment. I then have students analyze class behavior with respect to theoretical predictions and/or other similar experiments. The critical questions I always want students to ask are: (1) What do we know? (2) Why are we convinced we know it? and (3) How can we use what we know?
There will never be a time when I stop learning, and I’ve discovered that everyone knows something of value. As a consequence I’ve never made much distinction between student and teacher. Lately, I’ve come across a book which is full of good ideas called, What Smart Students Know, by Adam Robinson. At the end of the book he says,
“…knowledge and understanding are not bestowed by the teacher, but generated by the student. Smart students aren’t any “smarter” than other students. They just realize that it’s their responsibility to learn. Smart students do not rely on teachers because one day they discovered a fundamental truth; nobody can teach you as well as you can teach yourself. And it wouldn’t matter if all their teachers were brilliant and charismatic – smart students would still be teaching themselves.” p271
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