Fowler Honors 2024 Teaching Excellence Award Winners
Three faculty members from SDSU’s Fowler College of Business were awarded the college’s annual Teaching Excellence Award for 2024. Professors Shira Cohen, Ami Doshi and Nita Umashankar, were honored for their outstanding skill in the classroom and for their dedication to student learning outcomes. All award recipients are selected by the college’s Faculty Development Committee based on a set of criteria. The award includes a $10,000 honorarium, recognition, and the opportunity to share teaching tips with Fowler faculty.
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Shira Cohen
“Authenticity” is the key to good teaching said accounting professor Shira Cohen.
Cohen teaches Intermediate Accounting II (ACCTG 334) which she says is one of the hardest of SDSU’s accounting courses to teach. “It’s usually the first course that our transfer students take at SDSU,” she explained. “So you have to read the room and be adaptable.”
Some of the ways Cohen motivates her students include:
- Creating a comfortable classroom environment
- Sending students reminders of their class milestones
- Motivating students with guest speakers
“All guest speakers must have an undergraduate degree in accounting,” said Cohen. “This is so that students can envision a broader set of career opportunities for themselves.”
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Ami Doshi
To management professor, Ami Doshi, one of the key elements to teaching success is to create emotional connections between herself and her students, and for her students to connect with each other. “This helps the students to better understand and relate to the material they’re studying,” she said.
Doshi emphasized the key issues in her teaching style including:
- How to use AI (especially ChatGPT) responsibly
- Making the classroom a safe space for the free exchange of ideas
To encourage the exchange of ideas, Doshi has created a team development module where small groups of students learn how to work and problem-solve together. For their final project, each student team is assigned “a boring topic” and asked to make a humorous video about it. She said, “At the end of the semester, the entire class gets to watch and enjoy each others’ videos.”
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Nita Umashankar
According to marketing professor Nita Umashankar, “teaching is a blend of love and demands.” For example, she said that while she has high expectations of each student, she also starts each class with gratitude and a sense of community. “One of the first things I do at the beginning of each semester is to ask the students to talk to each other,” she said. “Then I ask them ‘what do you like about the person behind you?’ This helps make students more receptive to the course material.”
Two of the things she is known for in her classes are:
- Learning each of her students’ names and expecting them to know hers as well
- She is known for “cold calling” or selecting students at random to respond to questions she asks during class. “It keeps them on their toes,” she said.
Getting to know her students has been one of the keys to her teaching success and it has also allowed her to work with them as individuals if she detects problems or issues. In those cases, she said, “You have to be willing to be brutally honest with them to get them back on track.”
