The Role of Continuous Improvement and Mentoring in the Pursuit of Teaching Effectiveness: Perspectives from Award-Winning Accounting Educators

Abstract

One of the major themes of the Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) is the importance of teaching in a faculty member’s set of core responsibilities. In Issues Statement No. 5 (1993) the AECC called upon accounting educators to develop mechanisms for the sharing of ideas and strategies to improve teaching. This paper responds to that call and reports on specific strategies for enhancing teaching effectiveness as obtained from a survey of 100-plus award-winning U.S. accounting educators. Specific recommendations from our teaching exemplars call for accounting educators to embrace a continuous-improvement philosophy and to “reinvent� themselves as effective teachers. Also underscored from our teaching exemplars is the value of seeking out mentors, identifying and using support services, and maintaining an ongoing commitment to the goal of improving one’s effectiveness as a teacher. These recommendations are discussed with reference to practical concerns expressed in the literature, including possible trade-offs due to the perceived relative importance of teaching, research, and service in the performance evaluation model for accounting faculty. We also discuss our survey findings within the context of developing learning communities of teacher-scholars in accounting. Results reported in this paper should be useful to faculty interested in ongoing professional development, to graduate students in accounting (who are close to entering the profession), and to senior faculty who embrace the dual goals of community-building and mentoring of junior faculty.