Making Students More Active Agents in Their Learning: TQM in the Syracuse University School of Business

“Total quality management” is a term that makes many faculty bristle, but colleagues working together at Syracuse have developed a way to apply TQM principles in their classrooms, with the promising results reported here by Frances Zollers.

The business school at Syracuse, like lots of others, is hot on the trail of total quality management. It’s an article of faith in the school, and something we teach our students. In fact, the person who teaches our course in quality processes came up with an instrument that I’ve now used to look at the quality of my own teaching. I call it the “requirements exercise.”

The Requirements Exercise
It works like this: Early in the semester you ask students—our “customers”—what their requirements are for: (1) you, the professor, (2) their classmates, (3) the course and material, and (this is my addition to the list) (4) themselves. The top four or five “vote getters” in each category—consensus usually develops around that number of items—becomes the requirements for the course.

Then every two or three weeks during the semester, small groups of students (four to six) report back to you and the class about whether the requirements are being met. In this way, everyone gets to see how things are going, and we have a chance to make mid-course corrections if necessary.

What I’ve found especially valuable is that the process creates an atmosphere of give-and-take. It provides an opportunity for me to remind students that, for example, they said they wanted the course to be highly participatory, but that only five people have been participating. It gives students a chance to say that I’m not meeting a requirement. We can then negotiate about how to resolve this mismatch before it becomes a barrier to learning.

Issues and Opportunities
Some students find the exercise a little odd—they’ve never been asked these questions. And some of my colleagues say that students can’t speak meaningfully to questions about what they “require”; some think the exercise invites pandering. But I’ve been doing it for several semesters, and I’ve never had a student say something unreasonable.

As to the pandering issue, my answer is that you don’t have to meet every requirement the students put forward. Sometimes the exercise is an opportunity to explain that certain expectations will not be met, and to explain why. A student may say, “My requirement is for this course to prepare me for the CPA exam,” and I can then explain that the course is not intended to serve that purpose.

Frances Zollers is a faculty member in Law and Public Policy at Syracuse University, and a participant in the American Association for Higher Education’s peer review teaching project.

This idea is excerpted from Making Teaching Community Property: A Menu for Peer Collaboration and Peer Review by Pat Hutchings (1996), 44–45. Washington, D.C: American Association for Higher Education.