Dan Sachau -- Recipient of SIOP's Distinguished Contributions in Teaching Award

Receiving SIOP’s Distinguished Contributions in Teaching Award was a real honor for me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the best part of receiving that award would be the opportunity to interact with other recipients of the award. From Paul Muchinsky, the first recipient, to Dan Sachau, last year’s recipient (who gave his invited address at this year’s SIOP conference), I have had the chance to get to know almost every recipient of the award. These folks continue to inspire me with their ability and passion. And every one of the award recipients will say that they know lots of I/O folks who have the same passion and ability as they do – that there are many, many talented teachers and educators in our field.

Over the last couple of years of this column, I have tried to “catch up” with prior Teaching Award winners, inviting them to guest-write a column, as happened in a prior teaching-related TIP column for the earliest award recipients. With Dan Sachau’s column below, we’re now “caught up”. Next year, this year’s award recipient, Jose Cortina, will write a column here, following his presentation at SIOP. These columns together provide a wonderful archive of thinking on teaching. You can link to all of the prior columns through the SIOP Teaching Aids Wiki (siopwiki.wetpaint.com).

In Dan’s column below, he talks about the importance of having chutzpah – and the story he tells shows that he has chutzpah to spare. The things he has accomplished at Minnesota State University – Mankato by taking chances, being willing to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and just plain “doing it” are truly impressive. The Consulting Challenge, OERG, Psychological Frontiers radio program… it’s worth reading.

Audacity

Daniel Sachau

Minnesota State University, Mankato

Frederick Herzberg said to me, “Dan, good teachers have chutzpah.” 

“Chutzpah?” I asked.

 He explained with a parable:

 “During the Six-Day War an Israeli fighter pilot experiences engine trouble and has to land his plane.  His nearest option is a U.S. aircraft carrier.  The pilot starts to make a descent to the ship.  The control tower calls him off.  He keeps descending.  The tower threatens him.  The pilot lands anyway.  The Captain of the ship, who is feared by all, charges the plane and screams at the pilot, ‘What were you thinking?  We should have shot you out of the sky.’  The Israeli pilot calmly replies, ‘Sorry, I thought the ship was one of ours’”

“Dan,” Fred said, “the Israelis don’t own any aircraft carriers. That pilot had Chutzpah!” 

   I worked for Herzberg in graduate school and he certainly modeled chutzpah.  I am not sure where Fred heard the joke he told, but I’ve had this lesson in mind over the last 20 years when I created programs that were a little, well… over the top.  My recommendation to young faculty members is this, if you find yourself thinking, “I’m not sure what administrators would think about this, but wouldn’t it be cool if we …”, then you’re probably on the right track.  Here are some programs that I started at Minnesota State that I might not have landed had I first asked for permission.  Maybe they will spark ideas for programs at your school.

OERG.  The Organizational Effectiveness Research Group is a consulting practice housed in the MSU I/O Psychology program.  Faculty members serve as consultants and students works as project managers.  Students get to travel, meet with clients, negotiate contracts, manage interaction with clients, perform data analysis, prepare reports and make presentations.  The OERG has local (City of Lake Crystal, MN), regional (OptumHealth), national (U.S. Air Force) and international clients (Atrain, GmbH).  The benefit is that master’s level students get the opportunity to gain hands-on experience while they are still in school.  We use income from the projects to fund student programs and buy equipment.  There is a steep learning curve for the students but they love the opportunities.

Consulting Challenge.  Each year, I organize a case competition for students in I/O master’s programs.  Students from MSU, University of Northern Iowa, St. Cloud State and Roosevelt University participate in the three-day event.  The case is based on a real-world problem that a host organization has experienced.  Students meet on Wednesday morning at a hotel in Minneapolis.  They are given a fictional request for proposals for consulting services and a packet of reports, data and directions.  Teams get to meet with the host on Thursday and they must have a proposal and presentation ready by Friday.  The presentations are reviewed by a panel of judges including executives in the host organization, faculty from the various schools and consultants from the Twin Cities.  Unlike business school competitions, schools do not compete against each other.  Instead, students from each school work together on teams.  The Consulting Challenge is challenging.  Students get very little sleep over three days.  Students face tough questions from judges but they do get a very real look at the life of a consultant. 3M, Data Recognition, PDI Ninth House, Best Buy, Ameriprise, Cargill, UnitedHealth Group, Medtronic, and Target Corp. have hosted the Consulting Challenge.  Case competitions are common in business schools but, oddly, not in I/O programs.  I think many students would benefit from similar case competitions and I encourage faculty to start them.  In fact, come join ours.  We would love to have you.

International Service Learning.  Every other year, I lead an international trip with our graduate students.  These trips are two to three weeks in length.  The first trips focused on international business and I/O psychology and involved travel to Belgium, France, Czech Republic, Portugal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand.  We typically visited U.S. firms with overseas offices.  We would also meet with political officials involved in human resource training and development. In the last few years we added a service-learning component to the trips, and this has increased the value of the tours.  Three years ago, faculty and students traveled to South Africa to work at a school that provides basic business training for students from impoverished townships.  Last year, we traveled to Ecuador and spent time at a technical high school in the rainforest.  The trips are hard work for the students but they are proud of the work they do.  More importantly, the trips have a long term effect on the interests and values of students.  If you want assistance connecting to an international school that needs your help, just give me a call.

Psychological Frontiers Radio Show.  My latest, I wonder if this could work… project involves a weekly radio show.  National Public Radio runs a variety of 2-3 minute radio shows focused on science (e.g. Earth and Sky) and history (e.g. A Moment in Time).  These were the inspiration for creating a show on psychological research.  I contacted the manager of the campus radio station and asked if faculty could write a series of 2 minute spots that summarize current and classic studies in psychology.  The manager was happy to help because most university radio station managers have a mandate to assist academic programs, but few departments reach out to the stations.  KMSU provides studio and air time and the shows run twice a week.  Each of the faculty members in the psychology department contributes two scripts per semester.  Dawn Albertson, a psychology department faculty member is the voice of the show and Emily Stark, another faculty member, helps produce the show.  We are now asking graduate students to write scripts. The scripts are a nice vita entry and I think that the writers enjoy the process of describing their favorite studies in terms the general public will understand.  Interested in writing a script? We need more. Feel free to send them.

Real World Projects.  All of my classes involve hands-on learning projects.  Undergrads in my motivation course learn about job design by taking a job with a local temp agency that specializes in light-industrial work.  Stats homework assignments include company data sets and opportunities to present analyses to managers.  In addition to classwork, students at MSU participate in a weekly speaker series where alumni and local consultants talk to students about human resources and I/O psychology.

No Harm in a Little Fun.  My conspirators in the MSU I/O program include Lisa Perez, Andi Lassiter and Kristie Campana.  They are excellent teachers and wonderful colleagues.  Andi, Lisa, Kristie and I really enjoyed our graduate experience and we wanted our students to have a similar collegial relationship with faculty.  In order facilitate this, we moved all the faculty and students into a suite of offices and spent too much OERG money making the office comfortable.  We also organize an annual Fall Conference.  This is a three-day orientation session held at a resort on a lake in northern Minnesota.  Alumni, faculty and the I/O program advisory board members attend the conference.  The event includes alumni presentations, student presentations and boating.  The Fall Conference is a great way for people to get to know each other.  In addition, we organize yearly Halloween, Christmas, Super Bowl, and graduation parties.  Further, students and faculty convene at a local restaurant every Wednesday night.

Audacity.  Many of the MSU programs are a bit unusual.  Had I first asked for permission, the university administrators might have argued that the OERG model was too complicated, third-world travel too dangerous, the Consulting Challenge too stressful, the temp-agency jobs to risky, the radio show too time consuming and the Fall Conference too fun.  But in every case, the success of the students sold the administrators on the benefits of the programs.  So young professors, have a little fun, try something unusual, challenge your students, give them a safe place to fail, offer hands-on learning experiences, and enjoy your time with them.  It takes a little chutzpah to bend the academic mold, but the rewards are worth it.    

More on the projects can be found at:

Albertson, D., Stark, E., & Sachau, D. (2010, May). Psychological Frontiers: The radio show

       bringing psychological science to the community.  Midwestern Psychological

       Association Convention, Chicago, IL.

Sachau, D., Brasher, N., & Fee, S. (2010). Three models for short-term study abroad.  Journal of

        Management Education, 34(5), 645-670. DOI: 10.1177/1052562909340880.

Sachau, D., Fee, S., Johnson, A., & Wittrock, J. (2009, April).  International service

       learning. Poster at the 24th Annual Conference of the Society of Industrial/Organizational

       Psychology, New Orleans, LA.

Sachau, D. & Foti, R. (2011, April). Award winning wisdom - Teaching. Panel at the 6^th

      Annual Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology Junior Faculty Consortium,

 Chicago, IL.

Sachau, D., & Naas, P. (2010). The Consulting Challenge: A case competition.  Journal of

      Management Education, 34(4), 605-631. DOI: 10.1177/1052562909358556.

Please address correspondence regarding this manuscript to:  Daniel A. Sachau, Ph.D., Professor, Director of the Graduate Program in I/O Psychology, 23 Armstrong Hall, Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN 56001.  Sachau@mnsu.edu. 507.389.5829

Motivating Students Who Don't Care

I’m in a somewhat administrative role now, mostly focusing on the education mission of my department, so I end up getting a lot of books related to teaching in some form or another (peer review of teaching, dynamic teaching, technology and teaching, re-energizing teachers who are burned out, etc.). One I looked at recently is called Motivating Students Who Don't Care: Successful Techniques for Educators, by Allen Mendler. It has some specific approaches for working with students who “aren't prepared, don't care, and won't work.” I recognize in the author’s suggestions many things that I have tried myself, but in a less-organized structure than presented here. The book is an inexpensive and short little read, but as one reviewer on Amazon.com put it, “It has some good ideas, and when you are an inner city teacher ANY new idea is worth the price of a paperback.”

Now, it’s certainly true that tuition at my university is lower than it is at many places, but it still isn’t cheap. I often see students who I know are paying tuition out of their own pockets who rarely attend class, who don’t try nearly as hard as they possibly could, and who – from my professorial perspective – don’t seem to care. What’s a dedicated professor to do? And so I turned to this little text, hoping to find some answers.

But as I read through the book, I found myself questioning some of the author’s assumptions about why students aren’t motivated in class. He focuses on students who are discouraged, or who have lost their enthusiasm for learning somewhere along the way. Bad teachers, parents and peers who diminish academic success, or who knows what else have led these students into self-fulfilling prophecies in which they see themselves as unlikely to do well or that it is unimportant to do well, leading to behaviors that ensure that they don’t do well. While I certainly see these students, as I think back over my challenging students I see some other types of unmotivated students, as well.

As a Graduate Teaching Assistant many years ago, when first encountered unmotivated students in my own classes, I just didn’t understand them. I felt like the managers at the Hawthorne works who felt that their employees were behaving irrationally when they didn’t strive for the available incentives, or like Skinner when his rats didn’t do what he expected – I remember reading his statement that he used to yell at the rats, saying “Damn you! Behave as you ought!”

Later on, I began to recognize, just as the managers at Hawthorne did and just as Skinner did, that in many cases, the students are behaving in entirely rational ways. One semester, while I was in the midst of asking myself “why are some of my students so irrational? Don’t they see that school has real potential benefits for them?”, I decided to gather some data. I asked one of my obviously intelligent and seemingly unmotivated students why he didn’t put in a little more effort, because it was clear that he could get an A if he wanted to do so. His reply surprised me. He said “D stands for diploma, man.” When I pushed for a little more detail, he said that he was close to being finished with school. He needed a degree – any kind of degree – because having one would make him eligible for a promotion into management at work. He was working full time while going to school, and the only reason his GPA mattered was to ensure it was high enough to allow him to graduate. All he needed from my class was a D, so that he got credit for the course on his transcript. Getting an A would cost him a lot of time and energy, and there was no payoff for him for doing so – none that mattered, anyway. So while I had been shaking my fist and thinking “Damn you! Behave as you ought!”, this student was doing exactly that. I’ve concluded that one group of students who are “unmotivated” is actually quite motivated – they just have different outcomes in mind than I do. They don’t attend class or put in a lot of effort because they have concluded that it is in their rational best interest to get a specific outcome for the least effort possible. I have to respect the decision they’ve made, and make it clear to them that they have to accept the outcomes they earn, even when they misjudge the level of effort required (i.e., shoot for a D and get an F). I believe that, for many of these students, the topics we cover in class would in fact be useful to them down the road, but that’s a decision they make for themselves.

I think that there is a second group of “unmotivated” students, and over time I’ve concluded that for these students, their behavior is rational but uninformed. By this I am referring to students who have potential but who have never before been required to put in a lot of effort to succeed. These may be students who are underprepared for college but are not yet aware that they are underprepared. They’ve succeeded in the past because not much has been required of them. They are not putting in effort because they have not learned that they need to do so, nor have they learned how to do so. They may be students who have been able to get by on intelligence alone, and are just now reaching the point where they have to apply effort in conjunction with that intelligence, but they don’t yet realize that. These are the students who will show up part-way through the semester, often confused and angry about their performance in class to date. These are students who I can help, but it is often not an easy process. They may have years of bad habits to unlearn, and a new mindset about the relationship between effort and outcome to learn. For these students, one-on-one conversations about their study habits and the expectations of time spent on class work outside of class, along with referrals to campus programs to help students build those skills, can make a tremendous difference.

And then there are the students that Allen Mendler is describing in his book – the student who has become discouraged, who is lacking in efficacy and/or esteem, and who does not see the connection between effort and outcome. For these students, some of Mendler’s five strategies (emphasizing effort, creating hope, respecting power, building relationships, and expressing enthusiasm) and specific suggestions (e.g., praising a student who is habitually late for class when they arrive “less late”, or praising a student who gets an F on a test but whose performance is better than it had been previously, etc.) have a chance to work. But just as we know that there are situational and cultural moderators to the effectiveness of particular leadership behaviors, it seems to me that there are moderators to the effectiveness of these strategies – specifically, what’s the source of the student’s “unmotivated” behavior?

As I look back now on how I’ve thought about and tried to address this “unmotivated student” issue over the years, I’m not terribly impressed with myself. I’ve tried a variety of things over the years, starting off with a simplistic approach that focused on class attendance. I’ve made class attendance mandatory, non-mandatory but rewarded with points, non-mandatory but helpful, and I’ve made attendance entirely optional. I’ve tried focusing on engagement rather than attendance – if I couldn’t make them attend, then perhaps I could make them want to attend. In the end, I’ve had to conclude that Taylor was wrong – on this issue, there is no “one best way” to motivate the seemingly unmotivated student. So I continue to wrestle with this – it is still hard for me to fully accept it when a smart student chooses not to invest time and energy in doing as well as he or she could do. But I am focusing on doing a better job of understanding why a student might not be behaving in the ways I think of as “motivated student” behaviors, and then tailoring my response accordingly.

What about you? How have you approached the challenge of seemingly unmotivated students? I’ve set up a blog to accompany this column, and it can be found at http://maxclassroomcapacity.blogspot.com/. I’ll post these columns there, and invite your feedback. When possible, I’ll cycle back through to a topic, and report here on SIOP members’ input. I hope that you’ll join in the conversation on teaching, moving us all closer to reaching our Max. Classroom Capacity.