TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Mayukh Dass

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself”

Teaching is an integral part of my contribution to the marketing society and I take great pride in playing this role of knowledge generation and dissemination in the classroom. Marketing is not rocket science, but it is common to find many business students struggling to link underlying marketing concepts with real world events. They are not only unaware of the marketing events that constantly change the business world, but also build ignorance towards it. I believe this lack of excitement will hurt the acceptance and credibility of marketing as an academic field in the long-term. My teaching philosophy is based on my motivation to minimize this knowledge gap in the marketing curriculum and encourage my students to appreciate marketing and acknowledge its importance in the business world. This gives my students to realize the relevancy of the material in their lives and the world and expand their appreciation of the curriculum.

Although there are various aspects of teaching, I play the role of a guide in my classes. I help my students to find and understand the answers to most of the business issues by themselves. I extensively use business dailies, documentaries from television shows and even clips from movies to relate marketing to the visual resources they are comfortable with. I assign various �Harvard Business Cases� in my classes to tease out the essence of the subjects from the students' minds and also use television and print advertisements to challenge their understanding of the subject. While teaching my Marketing Research class, I realized that most students struggle with the elaborate use of statistics in the class. This motivated me to create various web-downloadable lectures in movie format that cover all the important topics of Statistics and their uses in Marketing. This fulfills one of my teaching goals of facilitating my students with resources that will be useful to them in their career.

One of the integral parts of my teaching philosophy is to provide a rich and friendly class environment to my students. I want my students to understand the material, improve as professionals, and find the class helpful and enjoyable. To do this I create an open learning environment and use innovative tools and techniques. I take great care on learning their names along with their strengths and weaknesses within the first few weeks of the semester. This enables me to understand my students' learning processes and allows me to make my teaching more effective. My classes provide an open debate for students on marketing topics. Opportunity to express their opinions encourages them to start thinking deeply about the topics. I moderate these debates and lead them towards the objectives of the course. Proper course structure and a detailed syllabus at the beginning of the semester enable my students to realize what is expected from them and how I envision the flow in the class throughout the semester.

Finally, I use my classes as a training ground for job interviews and business presentations for my students. The class activities such as individual presentations and sales role-plays are video recorded, and a copy is provided to the students with detailed comments on their performance. These activities along with resourceful feedbacks on their performance help them realize their mistakes and identify idiosyncratic behaviors that typically haunt them in their career. I firmly believe that the extensive academic rigor and flexible learning environment of my classes have been the fundamental drivers of my teaching philosophy.