When Class Materials Collide
Introduction
Dialog by Herb Rotfeld
INTEREST CATEGORY: TEACHING AND LEARNING
POSTING TYPE: Dialog
Posted by: Herbert Jack Rotfeld
Cleaning out some old email, I found the message below that I would send out to all of my students at some point during every semester. Do any of you convey something similar in your marketing classes? When reading it, remember that it was addressed to my students in 4000-level or higher courses. you = the students.
Herbert Jack Rotfeld
In a time not long ago, a student told me after class that something I said seemed to be in direct conflict with something stated by one of my colleagues in another course. I said I’d check it out with the other faculty member not naming the student, of course and explain the clarification to the whole class once I had more information. Of course, student perceptions of this sort of conflict are far from uncommon. But to the detriment of their educations, few students ask about it.
There are three possible explanations when you hear statements from different faculty that can’t seem to co-exist:
1) Your memory of what was said in one of the classes is in error.
2) You might have confused both instructors attempts to provide their personal interpretations of materials as statements of the underlying facts. In other words, the materials were not in conflict, with both faculty coming to equally valid conclusions. In this situation, you might even have an additional perspective that you could convey to both instructors. When this happens as it did with the example of the opening paragraph of this message I explained to the student how both possible conclusions are correct, that the underlying facts were the same and that the information was not in conflict. Of course, if any of this came up in a test question, the answer key would have to handle the other possible direction(s) to an answer.
3) One instructor is/was in error. None of us are absolute experts on every single small detail of every undergraduate class. We make mistakes. One instructor might not have learned of information updated by recent research or business innovations. Once upon a time, I showed my colleague his error as revealed by research conducted by a third member of the department.
Whenever this happens, whatever the reason, the faculty are expected to clear things up, both between themselves and for the students.
However, if you don’t tell us when this happens, you are left trying to place information from each class in different discreet mental compartments, leading to all sorts of other problems. And if the problem is #2 above, it can get in the way of your own understanding of the underlying facts.
Many faculty say in their syllabi that if you feel there is a difference between lecture materials and the textbook content, the lecture materials should be used as a basis for answering exam questions. I try to always explain why something in the book is out of date, especially when it was written a long time ago, or how some assigned readings might sometimes be misunderstood by students. Sometimes in class, you could explain why you think I might be in error based on the available information you possess. University courses outside of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math are not “all opinions.” There are some consistent facts involved. There is substance. And the substantive concepts are what faculty want students to understand.
If you are interested, you can read an old essay on the seemingly-endless collection of usually-irrelevant lists found in just about any business textbook
An article in Journal of Marketing explained a problem of textbooks refusing to correct errors repeatedly pointed out to the authors of those books. When possible, the faculty member must point out these errors to students, along with possible explanations of why the course instructor knows the book is in error