Professor Wim Van der Stede is CIMA Professor of Accounting and Financial Management and Head of Department of Accounting at LSE.
Teaching is inseparable from the other things I do.
I teach what I research and what I write. I love that teaching has real life applicability and forces me to think about my research and how to communicate it effectively through cases and examples.
Teaching also gets me to understand topics that I need to look into further because the teaching of an entire course inevitably takes you partly outside of the more specialised research area. Sometimes this then feeds back into my research.
I’ve been involved in case-based teaching from day one.
It’s very important to me that you explain academic concepts in a language that people can understand, illustrated with examples that students can recognise as having a real world analogue.
For this reason, I teach cases and refer to examples currently in the press to bring the subject to life and out of the text book. I’ve written a lot of the cases that I teach myself, so I know the real life cast of characters involved and the richness of the context. If it works I sometimes even invite them to class – the auditor, manager, CFO or CRO.
The intensity of teaching is like being a Formula One driver.
In the classroom your focus is on the class like a driver focuses on the race. It’s as much a test for me as it is for the students.
I like teaching in Parish Hall, because when I explain something I like a way to reach out and approach students.
There’s multiple different ways in which teaching can be done, but being too far away is a factor for me as I like engaging with students and talking directly to them.
Even in the larger lecture theatres I’m always walking off the stage rather than standing behind the lectern. Actually, if you walked into the Sheik Zayed while I am teaching, you might have trouble finding me as I’m almost never in the front.
To do that you have to be well prepared. I always have the ideas clearly in my mind, know very well what I want to deliver, and use slides as place holders to connect with students. I also have my own clicker, a roving mic (and spare batteries in my pocket, just in case!).
My first “own” class as a newly-minted Assistant Professor was in January 1998 at the University of Southern California.
I was “way younger” then, had freshly finished my PhD, and part of my teaching was an MBA elective, a post- experience course in the US. Several students were older and more experienced than me – I knew the literature but they had the practice. It wasn’t scary, but it was a challenge.
Even though it was really challenging, the theory and case-based examples I taught are actually the areas I’ve always researched. After that MBA course I got involved in writing the book, which is now in its fourth edition.
It doesn’t matter what I think.
I try to give students the ammunition to think things through themselves. I’m not interested in hearing a strong position; I’m interested in the arguments that lead to a valid conclusion. It doesn’t matter if I like that conclusion or not (although I never resist the opportunity to have a good argument). What matters is that students’ inference follows logically from a well thought out, complete, yet terse, analysis.