What Students Expect from their Teachers: Roles and Responsibilities of Teachers

Core of the following talk was presented at 3rd Conference of Deans and Directors of Business Schools organized by NBEAC at PC Lahore, Feb17-18, 2016. The talk was presented during the session Roles and Responsibilities of Business Schools' Teachers: Perspectives of Students.

This talk is based on my experiences of managing the expectations of students over the last 20 years as a teacher and predominantly as an academic administrator: During the late 1990s, I was managing scores of sections taught by visiting and permanent faculty as deputy director CCS at IBA. This was followed by my tenure as Dean and VP at PAF KIET from 2001 to 2012 during which I was managing hundreds of sections per semester spread over three campuses in Karachi, and across three faculties. For the last three years as Dean CBM and CES at IoBM I have been looking after over 500 sections spread over two faculties ranging from business disciplines to engineering disciplines and from bachelors up to PhD level.

Who Fails when a Student Fails

Should not this be true also for schools?

Testing/Grading vs Motivation: A Variation on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for Academics

Testing/Grading vs Motivation: A Variation on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for Academics

Whenever there is a discussion of the performance of students, lack of motivation of students is the most frequent complaint of nearly all the teachers, whether in higher education institutions or in schools, whether today or 20 years ago. Performance of students and hence teachers therefore became my first priority when I started in academic administration nearly two decades ago.

13 Myths of Schooling and Education: Resources

Myths of Schooling and Education: Resources

There are popular "Myths" about education and schools that have become a matter of unquestionable belief for a large section of population during the industrial age.

See Changing Education Paradigms by Ken Robinson

Many successful and great people have busted these myths through their own personal achievements, examples, research and successful implementations.

Think of a child who comes from school and says that he hates maths.

What do you think that the school has taught him?

Of course, the school taught him to "hate maths"!




It never taught him "maths", but actually taught him to "hate" maths.

[Adapted from John Holt in "How Children Learn"]

Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra

Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra

In my another post "Beauty is Our Business: Mathematics and Dijkstra", I describe how I came to be enrolled with Dijkstra at UT Austin in the course Capita Selecta and how he and his students understood the meaning of beauty and excellence. But, my intention of taking that course in the Fall of 1988, was not as much to study the course but to have a pretext of knowing the great Dijkstra. As described in that post, I used to spend more time observing Dijkstra than preparing for passing the course. To shield myself from any adverse grade by this guru of Computer Science, I had taken the course on a non-credit basis.

Can Grades and Degrees Measure the Success of Students?

Can Grades and Degrees Measure the Success of Students?

We see schools in Pakistan proudly displaying their biggest achievement as the number of A grades secured or the number of positions obtained in board examinations. There seems to be a mad rush to secure a large number of A's with the benchmark recently set at some 22+ A grades. The schools as well as students define their success in terms of high grades. Why? Because high grades would get them in to good universities and the graduates of good universities get good jobs. High grades are a ticket for economically weak students to secure admission in public universities where there is high competition because of the low fees. Such high grades for economically strong students studying at premier institutions provide literally a ticket for enjoying the university life in liberal western countries, obtaining scholarships and credit exemptions. Even high achievers  studying in public universities in Pakistan plan to go abroad and construct a lucrative life there. The quest of grades boils down simply to earn a better living through a good paying career job.

Structural Paradigm of Schools: Foundations and Assumptions

Current Education Paradigm [1]

Schools anywhere in the world share a common paradigm that was determined by the demands of the Industrial Revolution. In this post we identify the structural elements underlying the current paradigm. Many of the underlying assumptions of these structural elements are being questioned in the light of the transition to knowledge age of the 21st century from the industrial age of the 19-20th century. The structural elements given below are also shared by the universities, with some variations:

Bell Curve Evaluation of Students: Islamic and Secular Perspectives

A "bell curve" is the holy grail for which the academicians force the grades of the students to be distributed in a form that resembles a bell shape as given in the figure below.

Mythical Bell Curve of Intelligence

The underlying assumption is that intelligence is distributed (genetically and empirically) in this bell curve shape which indicates that there are very few people who have very high or very low intelligence and majority of the people have intelligence that lies around the middle.