What Makes a Great Teacher?

Chris Wright knows firsthand that Jakki Mohr is an incredible teacher.

Mohr, a Regents Professor of Marketing in UM’s School of Business Administration, is world-renowned for her “deep specialization in a very narrow field,” as she puts it, regarding technology in marketing. In her 33 years as an educator, she’s impacted thousands of students who’ve taken her classes at UM and across the globe – from Missoula to Finland to Uruguay.

Wright, however, isn’t one of those thousands. The funny thing is, he didn’t even take a class from her.

“Nope,” Mohr says. “I never had him in class.”

But that doesn’t keep Wright from heaping praise on Mohr.

“She is one of the most passionate people I know,” says Wright, a 2002 University of Montana marketing graduate. “She is a genuinely curious person – always searching for new information – and when faced with a challenge, she attacks it head on.”

If one of the hallmarks of teaching is having a significant influence on people, relationships like this are proof that Mohr scores off the charts.

“This whole idea of creating a meaningful connection, it’s what we all want in life,” Mohr says. “I think students are hungry for that. They want somebody who knows them. Who sees them. That’s what I try to do.”

Cultivating Relationships

Wright, a product marketing manager at Google, where he’s worked for 13 years, was introduced to Mohr through a friend a couple of years after he graduated. Mohr loves to have younger alumni in the field speak in her classes, and Wright definitely fit the bill.

“I seek out speakers who are intellectually curious, who share that same desire as me to look at things from different angles or play devil’s advocate,” Mohr says from the beautiful disaster that is her office on the third floor of the Gallagher Business Building. “Chris has that style. He’s very irreverent and humorous. I mean, he’s from Butte.”

Wright speaks in Mohr’s class about once a year. He’s also presented to her classes in Uruguay, too, where she is on the faculty at ORT University in Montevideo. In fact, a few years ago, Mohr and Wright coordinated a tour of the Google campus in Silicon Valley for about 30 Uruguayan students and faculty members.

In working for Google, Wright provides a timely, pertinent perspective on issues Mohr feels her students should be exposed to.

“That speaks to my teaching philosophy,” Mohr says. “Relevance and critical thinking are the underpinning.”

Mohr teaches in what she calls a “flipped” classroom, where the students are in charge of creating the environment. At the beginning of her course, she’ll give the students, for example, a list of 15 topics to possibly cover: artificial intelligence, drones, virtual reality, etc. Then she puts the challenge on the students to analyze data and come up with a list of the five most important topics, and why.

“And then I go with that,” Mohr says. “It’s all based on how they analyze the data. Marketing increasingly is based on how we get data to determine strategy, so I try to weave that into all my classes.”

Wright says that Mohr subscribes to the notion that each class is unique and may require a different approach.

“That is pretty awesome coming from someone who has been an educator for such a long period of time,” he says. “Jakki is continually reinventing herself and her classes, and she always works on ways to impact students’ lives.”

“I’ve found that if you treat them like adults, they act like adults,” Mohr says. “They rise to the occasion. I think they’re not expected enough to manage their own experience, and in my classes, it’s their job. It prepares them for the real world.”

If there’s a lasting lesson outside the curriculum Mohr wants her students to learn, it’s this: Be responsible.

“If you say you are going to do something, do what you say you’re going to do,” she says. “And don’t do it half-assed. That’s so important to me. Own what you’re doing.”

Leading by Example

Some of the best teachers out there don’t need a classroom. For Griz men’s basketball head coach Travis DeCuire, his laboratory is Dahlberg Arena.

“For me, with basketball or with any sport or any coach, you are teaching all the time,” says DeCuire, who’s in his third year coaching the Griz. “On the court you’re teaching concepts, how to work with others. Then off the court, you teach time management and social consciousness.”

DeCuire, who graduated from UM in 1994, was a stellar point guard for the Griz. He set the school record for assists with 435. After graduating, he worked as a youth counselor in the Seattle area, then took a job as an assistant hoops coach at Mercer Island High School – his alma mater – for his old coach, the legendary Ed Pepple.

DeCuire moved up the ranks, learning from some of the best coaches in the nation. He worked for Blaine Taylor – his coach at UM – at Old Dominion, and another former Griz coach, Mike Montgomery, at Cal.

His coaching style is a blend of the three, but at the core of it all is teaching.

“What separates coaches like them is they are willing to teach,” DeCuire says. “A lot of coaches win a lot of games because they have the best talent. My influences are great coaches because they’ve had success at places that traditionally don’t have the best players. Blaine has the highest winning percentage at (UM and ODU) because of his ability to teach – to take an average basketball player and turn him into an overachiever. He could take an average talent-wise team and win a championship. Mike has done the same thing, and Ed did that for a long time.”

DeCuire knows that things in the classroom and on the court aren’t the same as they were 25 years ago. There has been an evolution, and if it’s embraced, success  is imminent.

“It used to be where if you had 15 guys on a team or 30 students in a classroom, they had to adjust to that teacher’s approach,” DeCuire says. “In the classroom, I think it’s still that way sometimes, but the way we’ve evolved as a society now, you have to adjust to the personality, the characteristics and the socioeconomic background of the student or player. If you’re willing to do that, if you’re willing to get to know your students, you can get more out of them.

“Then they become faucets more than drains.”

DeCuire’s philosophy has had immediate success at UM, as he recently became the second-fastest coach to reach 50 wins. The fastest? DeCuire’s mentor, Blaine Taylor.

“I try to teach my players to compete between these lines, but we demand they compete just as hard for the best grades possible. I honestly feel if they learn to compete in the classroom and they learn to compete on the floor, then they’ll be able to compete in every aspect of their lives. If you do that, you’ll be the best father you can be, the best brother, the best husband, or whatever roles you take on in life, you are going to try your hardest to be the best you can be because that’s what you’ve been forced to do here.

“There’s just so many things we communicate about in competition that carry over to later portions of your life. To me, this is as important as anything you’re going to learn from a book.”

The Art of Humor

The last time I sat face-to-face with Professor Harry Fritz was 20 years ago.

An awkward freshman sitting in Fritz’s tiny office in the Liberal Arts Building, I nervously watched him take a second look at the blue book exam I recently bombed. It was the first midterm in Montana History – admittedly, an aggressive class choice for a newbie – and the first test I had taken in college.

The big, red F I earned had me second-guessing my abilities as a student. Would I be better off in the military? I mean, I went to most classes, thought I took decent notes and skimmed the readings. What else could I have possibly done?

Fritz looked at a couple of pages and graciously bumped my grade to a D-minus.

He told me not to contact a recruiter just yet. He said he grades on improvement, and there were two more exams. But he also told me this isn’t high school. Come to ALL classes. Take GREAT notes. Complete ALL the readings.

So I did. And lo and behold, I got an A on the next midterm, an A on the final and an A in the class.

Fast-forward two decades, again face-to-face with Professor Fritz, and I relate this anecdote. I can hear him chuckle while I talk. Foolishly thinking he’d respond with great awe or praise or offer some other feel-good words, I ask him his thoughts on my story.

“I’m wondering what the hell was the problem with the first exam?” he asks in his booming voice.

Fritz, a UM alum himself, is teaching that same course this spring. It’s his 50th year teaching on campus, and as he says, “undoubtedly my last.”

The first class he taught was American History. It was 1967. Since then, he’s taught a remarkable number of students. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a UM student who didn’t take a class from him.

“Well, I had roughly 800 students per year for 50 years,” he says with a smile.

Ultimately, Fritz says the job of a historian is to discover and disseminate knowledge.

“I discover knowledge by reading books,” he says, “and I disseminate it by teaching as many students as I can.”

Fritz also says part of his job is to spark an interest in history within his students. He lit a fire under Keith Edgerton.

Edgerton, who affectionately calls Fritz “Big H,” is the chair of the history department at Montana State University-Billings. While many students only know Fritz from his lecture courses, Edgerton got to know him on a different level in smaller class settings and as his master’s adviser.

“Big H has that manner about him where, when he walks into a room, he’s the center of attention,” says Edgerton, who earned his B.A. in ’83 and his M.A. in ’85, both from UM. “He commands your attention. He has all of this knowledge and is very well-read. He’s passionate about what he teaches.”

Fritz greatly influenced Edgerton’s style of teaching, especially when it comes to spicing up a lecture with dashes of humor.

“He taught me that humor is an essential ingredient in human interaction,” Edgerton says. “When you’re in a class like American History, it can be dry. But if you weave in something funny, that’s the way to do it. It’s not one big joke, mind you. You’re serious, but teaching can work well when lightheartedness is interjected.”

He says Fritz is famous for this, and some of the jokes can be rather crude. This art is not lost while Fritz chats with me.

“So in the 50 years you’ve been on campus,” I ask, “what’s the biggest change you see in students?”

“People don’t read books anymore, don’t read magazines, don’t read newspapers,” Fritz says. “I mean the biggest difference between then and now is this (he mimics looking at a smartphone).

“The smartphone,” he booms, “has become the leading hand-held operating device in the world, recently replacing the penis.”