Consider Instructional Styles When Choosing an MBA Program

The way MBA professors teach – whether through case studies, experiential lessons or lectures – can have a huge impact on a B-school student’s experience.

Frank Rothaermel, a professor in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says students should seek a school that fits their personality and needs. “The individual fit is super important,” he says. “I think students should look for an environment of excellence, collaboration, inclusivity and that accepts students for who and what they are.”

Part of fit is understanding how you will be taught at a particular business school, experts say. Caryn Beck-Dudley, president and CEO of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business – the largest accreditor of business schools globally with 1,300 member schools – suggests prospective students ask about teaching styles at each school where they apply.

“If you really like hands-on (learning) and you like to work in teams, you don’t want to go to a school where there’s no classes that do that or just one class does that,” she says. “On the other hand, if that’s not a skill you are interested in then you might want to choose someplace else.”

Instructors making the effort to know students individually is key, Rothaermel says. “I know where they came from, what they do and what their aspirations are. You must be flexible and learn as you go along.”

Dalvin Dunn, who earned an MBA at Texas Woman’s University in 2020, says he liked being exposed to various teaching styles in the program.

“We would upload videos every week to talk about how we felt about the lecture for the week, the takeaways, what we were lacking, and how we were doing mentally outside of being a student,” he recalls. “That all plays into business in a sense. Those are things that stuck with me.”

A variety of teaching approaches can be found across business schools and often among individual instructors in a particular program.

Harvard Business School in Massachusetts “would be an exception to that, where everybody teaches the case method,” Beck-Dudley says. “But in most schools, individual faculty teach the style they want to teach – the way they think the students learn. Some professors use interesting simulations where you practice being like a businessperson. You make decisions kind of like gaming, but you can apply the concepts.”

Some instructors prefer to lecture, which “we don’t see as much anymore simply because there are new ways of teaching,” Beck-Dudley says. “There’s some interesting tutorial work being done, where each individual student is tutored by the faculty member. Students do their work in the speed at which it takes them to learn it.”

Dunn says his MBA instructors were strong teachers with relevant work experience, which enhanced his learning.

“They had the credentials in academia, research and practice,” says Dunn, and when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, “they transitioned to hybrid classes … but they also kept the more difficult courses – like financial accounting – in person. It was important to tailor the lecture to the student. They even had us voice our opinions and took our suggestions into consideration.”

When it comes to teaching style, “any decent professor must be versatile and audience-dependent,” says Rothaermel, a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow and the Russell B. and Nancy H. McDonough Chair in Business at Georgia Tech. “There’s no one tool that fits all needs.”

Rothaermel, who has taught at various business schools for 25 years, says he has been using “fully immersive team-based projects” for two decades, since “before it became fashionable.”

For these projects, a company sponsors a problem. Students work throughout the semester to solve it “and conclude with an analysis based on the strategist framework they’ve learned,” he explains. “These turn out to be mini recruiting events where the company’s representatives come, the students present and there is open Q&A for all the MBA students, then the sponsors have 10 minutes to make corrections.”

He describes his classes as having less lecturing, more discussion and more use of the Socratic method, an ancient technique that centers around dialogue fueled by the instructor’s probing questions.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve moved to a flipped classroom where I require the basics to be done at home and the students are ready to dive into the content when they get to class,” Rothaermel says. “I focus not on what to think but how to think. I rarely ever reveal what I think.”

Beck-Dudley adds that choosing the right business school goes beyond matching your personality to a teaching style – it’s about all the factors that contribute to a good fit.

“You want to be in a school you feel comfortable in, the teaching methods are there and the coursework matches what you want,” she says. “Students should look at themselves, select a program and do a deeper dive on their research about what that school offers. Know what their placement rates are, what their employment rates are, what type of alumni networking they have available so that students get to meet other people in their area. That’s very important in business.”