Effectively Integrating Instructional Method
into Ph.D. Curriculums

In the post-Sarbanes-Oxley environment, our colleagues from audit practice expect academe to do its part in helping to restore credibility in the audit profession. In determining the role that we can play in this important process, it is logical to consider our comparative advantage relative to practitioners. It can be argued that the area that offers the most potential for long-term benefits to audit practice is through our scholarly research efforts. However, it is also clear that audit practitioners would welcome any efforts that accounting faculty make to improve the overall quality of audit instruction.

Of course, the desire to help our students develop into high-level audit professionals is hardly new. Indeed, a clear goal of any accounting department is to help each of their students to reach their potential. Nevertheless, as academics, most of us spent at least four years in a doctoral program where we were immersed in seminars on accounting research and courses in statistical methods. Surprisingly though, at most institutions, there are no courses designed to help future auditing educators to excel in the classroom. This often comes as a great shock to accounting Ph.D. students, who are drawn to the profession out of a desire to become great teachers.

The impetus for this paper emanates from our desire to improve teaching. In order to improve teaching, we must first recognize that excellent teaching requires a set of skills and knowledge that are distinct from the majority of knowledge that is imparted during a PhD program. Once this is recognized, we then need to consider how we can improve this deficiency in most PhD programs.

Indeed, if we are to achieve specific competency goals for PhD students, we must explicitly identify a set of goals and then develop innovative strategies and curricula to facilitate the enhancement of these competencies for PhD students. At the University of Connecticut, the authors both had the opportunity to work with or observe master teachers as part of their PhD program. In one case, the work was completed in one semester and duties as a research assistant were waived that semester. In the other case, two master teachers were observed in the classroom on a more informal basis. The advantage of the more formal program is that it provides PhD students with an opportunity to develop an understanding and appreciation of the nuances of excellent teaching over a semester long period and appropriately reduces their other responsibilities as a graduate assistant.

The program was designed to be a true mentoring program. In the second semester of the program, the Ph.D. student is assigned to teach under a master teacher and required to teach six class sessions on their own. For each session, the master teacher was present in the classroom so that feedback could be provided immediately after the class session. The Ph.D. student is involved in the formulations of the syllabus, making up exams, and grading. In addition, the student is asked to attend each of the master teacher's class sessions. The experience is absolutely phenomenal and we both believe it to be instrumental in developing Ph.D. students as classroom teachers.

An important aspect of the program is the recognition that it takes a significant amount of time to help students understand the issues being covered in class, whether it involves developing an innovative classroom approach or spending extra time with a student in the office. In addition, the experience provides Ph.D. students with an example of how to try to improve the content and delivery of their courses.

Overall, we encourage each of our academic colleagues at PhD-granting institutions to consider assigning PhD students to work under a master teacher for a semester. Importantly, we are not advocating that the core research skills and competencies be abandoned in any way. Rather, we are suggesting that a formal approach to developing Ph.D. students' teaching skills will nicely complement the formal approach taken to developing their research skills.

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