applause awards help mackie, mcdaniel and nolen stay at the head of the class

Each semester the Graduate Business Council at McCombs celebrates full-time MBA students’ favorite teachers by handing out the MBA Applause Awards. Three perennial winners are Marketing Lecturer Kate Mackie, who specializes in marketing strategy, Professor Reuben McDaniel, who teaches organizational and management theory in the Information, Risk, and Operations Management Department, and Finance Lecturer James Nolen, one of the school’s small-business experts.

Exchange asked Mackie, McDaniel and Nolen about the secrets to their successes and what it means to them to be voted tops by full-time MBA students.

Can you describe your teaching style?

Mackie: My teaching style is oriented primarily toward helping students to truly learn and retain the lessons that will be useful going forward in their careers. That includes marketing theory as well as practical ways to use the theory. It also includes thinking and communication skills, as well as self-knowledge in the sense of how does this fit with where I want my career and life to go?   To best learn and retain, people need to be mentally engaged, to think back about what they have learned in the past and constantly link it to the present moment. To that end, I try to keep the classes interesting and challenging, using cases, simulations, exercises, examples and occasional stories (my own and the students’) to help them make linkages. My style in the classroom is usually pretty active, and I really like to get the students interacting. Sometimes I will say something totally absurd just to get them to push back and say, “Whoa, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense.”

McDaniel: My teaching is very student centered. Are they learning what they want to learn and are their minds engaged? I listen to them and pay attention to their questions, their answers and the way they talk to each other. Most people can learn without much teaching. In fact, a lot of the time when you try and teach students something you get in the way of them learning. I don’t use case studies, I don’t tell any war stories. Now, they may tell their own war stories. I let students bring their experiences to the discussion. I am a resource, and I provide a lot of rich material. If you are interested, you will use the material to guide your own learning. Of course, my classes are electives.

Nolen: I have always employed three or four different teaching techniques as I realize that students learn differently. Confucius said “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” So my courses have a combination of lecture, case study, team projects and computer simulation. I draw on my consulting work with small firms and my executive education work with large, public companies to give examples of the theory I’m teaching. Many of my former students will tell you they remember my “stories.” However, if you ask them why the example was used, they usually can recall the underlying theory. Finally, I think my teaching style could be labeled as integrative and multi-disciplined, which is a result of small business owners having to wear so many functional hats.

How have the students changed over the years, if at all? 

Mackie: It’s hard to say the students have changed dramatically over the years. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and really don’t see a lot of differences. They are extremely bright, practical and achievement oriented. They are also extremely competitive—which can be harnessed to encourage learning.

McDaniel: When I first came to The University of Texas at Austin in 1972, most MBA students were UT Austin alums. At that time, the undergraduate Business Honors Program included much of the core curriculum for the MBA. So there was an emphasis on getting the undergrads to stay and get the MBA. There was obviously much less emphasis on having work experience. Now students are from more places around the world with many different experiences. In traditional academic terms, the MBA students today are better. My sense is they were in the second quartile when I started and now they’re in the top quartile.

Nolen: In the past 26 years, I have seen more women enter the program and more international diversity. The admission requirements have been narrowed to make the business school one of the hardest programs to get into. Over the years, I have seen students transition from the hippie generation to the disco era to the Gen X slouch to the Gordon Geckos of the world to the socially conscious, “the-world-is-flat” business student of today. That said, I have always found McCombs students to be intelligent, hard-working team players without some of the egos you might find at other top business schools. The camaraderie between the students is much better as a result of the cohort system, the Plus and global programs, and the class size. One of my great thrills is going to reunions and catching up with former students and hearing about their successes after graduation.

What have you learned since you began teaching MBA classes? 

Mackie: One of the reasons I love working with the MBA students is that I learn from them nearly every day. They have wonderfully varied backgrounds and experience and bring richness into class discussions and conversation. 

McDaniel: There is a tendency for teachers to think, “How am I teaching? Am I delivering good lectures?” One day it dawned on me that nobody cared. So, I used to think I was guiding students. Now I think in terms of helping them get to go where they want to go.

Nolen: The great thing about teaching is that by trying to reach the student who has the most difficult time understanding a concept, and in approaching the problem in different ways, I end up going much deeper into understanding an issue. In industry, you often use only a portion of what you have learned. By teaching, I get to interact with the best and the brightest students and faculty and continually stay intellectually stimulated and get to keep up with the latest business trends. 

How does it feel to be honored with the Applause Award? 

Mackie: It feels absolutely fabulous to be honored with the Applause Award, and it means a great deal to me. The MBA students are a challenging group, and they are constantly seeking practical ways to use theoretical ideas. They ask tough questions, and that can be both good and bad. It certainly gets the adrenaline up, which is fun. It can also get scary if you run out of prep time and have to go into the classroom less than fully prepared. 

McDaniel: I am very grateful and feel lucky. It’s always good when the students can tell that you are doing something right. It’s very important to me.

Nolen: There are few professions like teaching where you can make a difference in so many lives. Most faculty work very hard, and many have opportunity costs for teaching. Student recognition of those efforts is the rationale we use for justifying the investment. While we probably shouldn’t value the award as much as we do (since it is our job and we should always want to do our best), the recognition by the GBC based on student voting provides the feedback we all need to re-energize our efforts.

—Rob Meyer