U N I V E R S I T Y  O F  P I T T S B U R G H

Volume IX, Number 2  

Michael Walsh, Joseph M.
Katz Graduate School of Business

I pepper my lectures with rhetorical and probing questions designed to have students actively link my material to their experiences.

Michael Walsh

Photo by Joe Kapelewski, CIDDE

In teaching a variety of graduate and undergraduate marketing and advertising courses, my ultimate success is not whether students can pass multiple choice tests but whether they can transfer theories and applications into the workplace environment. Although student performance in school is important, the ultimate yardstick of education is real-life application of learning. Traditional lecturing (I speak—you listen!) may do well to prepare students for standard quantitative tests, but is inadequate in fostering deeper understanding. To achieve this desired deeper understanding, I have discovered two useful techniques.

First, I work diligently at relating marketing and sales theories and concepts to preconceived notions held by consumers. Perhaps I am lucky in that I teach an applied subject such as marketing, because marketing concepts usually can be linked to behaviors we all have practiced as consumers. To engage students as active learners, I pepper my lectures with rhetorical and probing questions designed to have students actively link my material to their experiences. I force them to formulate their examples by answering questions such as, “What is a product that uses multiple channels of distribution?” Such questions trigger interpretation and, therefore, higher level learning skills.

Second, I insist that my students practice the art of application of theories. Because life does not demand the simple regurgitation of facts and theories, I demand a higher standard in my classroom. My assignments and tests are designed to force students to creatively analyze theories and understanding in real world applications. For example, when I am lecturing on product positioning, I bring a stack of magazines to class. Perusing these magazines, students then must identify specific instances of product positioning. Invariably, students gain a deeper understanding of critical concepts when I link these concepts to active learning exercises.

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