Early in my teaching career at IIM Ahmedabad, I chose to teach the Finance I course. One of its modules was the bank financing of working capital.
I had studied the topic in theory. I knew the models. I could explain the principles of working-capital management, the mechanics of credit assessment, the structure of a loan facility, the four C’s of credit: capacity, collateral, covenants and character. I prepared my notes, assembled my slides, and felt reasonably ready to walk into the classroom.
Then I asked myself a question I had not asked before: do I actually know how this works?
Not how the textbook says it works. How it actually happens, in a real branch, with a real borrower, with the paperwork, the negotiation and the judgement calls that never appear in any textbook.
I realised I did not. I knew the theory of bank financing. I had no idea about the practice.
So before I taught the course, I spent ten days sitting with the manager of a bank branch, not as an evaluator but as a learner.
I discovered a great deal about how India’s credit system works in practice, particularly the financing of working capital. I learnt how Maximum Permissible Bank Finance (MPBF) under the cash-credit system actually operates, how the Tandon Committee norms are applied, how a branch manager assesses a borrower’s working-capital requirement, how the calculation moves from a balance sheet to a credit limit, and what happens when the numbers look right but something in the conversation feels wrong. I watched loan applications being reviewed. I sat through a few credit-committee discussions. I asked questions that, in that environment, were not naive. They were the questions that needed asking.
When I walked into the classroom, I was teaching something different from what I had prepared. The content was the same; the texture was not. I could give students not just the formula but the human reality behind it: the banker’s scepticism, the borrower’s optimism, and the negotiation that bridges them. I could describe a real calculation on a real balance sheet. I could tell them what a branch manager looks for when the numbers are ambiguous. That difference, between theory illustrated and theory alive, is what stayed with students. I drew the balance sheet as pictures, again and again, to make the concepts visible.
Take another example from my own corner of the discipline. Picture a core course on bank financial management running across six sections. The visible lesson is a lecture on asset-liability management, or on capital adequacy and the Basel ratios. What actually makes that course effective?
The course anchor has made sure that all six sections share the same learning outcomes and the same rubric for the credit-appraisal assignment, so that a student’s grade reflects their learning and not which teacher they happened to draw. That is consistency, and it is invisible to every student who benefits from it.
In one section, a faculty member opens with the morning’s monetary-policy decision, or a bank’s latest stressed-asset disclosure, so that capital adequacy stops being a formula and turns into a live judgement about a real balance sheet. That currency is nowhere in the course plan. It is the teacher’s own reading entering the room.
After class, a student unsure whether to take a treasury role sends an email. The teacher replies, points to a reading, suggests someone to talk to. That single out-of-class exchange, what the Chronicles call OCAC, may shape the student more than the lecture did, and it will appear on no instrument we possess.
No one mandated any of this. No one monitors it. It happened because the faculty culture treats staying current and being available as simply what good teachers do.
A student-rating average will capture the performance in the room. It cannot capture the system that produced it. If we evidence only what the rating sees, we will reward the performance and starve the system that feeds it.
Teaching effectiveness is a system, not a solo act
Here is where I want to bring in the longer view from the Chronicles.
We talk about teaching effectiveness as if it were a property of one person performing in one room for one hour. It is not. The classroom hour is the visible tip. Beneath it sits a system, and the process is where effectiveness is made or lost.
Some of that process is observable and monitored: a well-designed course outline, a rubric, an assessment blueprint, a coordination meeting that is genuinely run and not merely held.
Much of it is not observable at all. The judgement to abandon a topic that is plainly not landing and rebuild it overnight. The decision to rewrite a case because the news changed a few days earlier. The quiet word with a student who has gone silent. None of this appears on a timetable, and most of it never reaches a feedback form.
Three forces in this system deserve naming, because a rating cannot see any of them.
The first is coordination for consistency. When the same course runs across many parallel classes, effectiveness is not one brilliant section sitting beside a weak one. It is whether every student, whichever teacher they happened to draw, reaches the same learning outcomes. The course anchor who holds this together is doing invisible work that decides fairness across the whole cohort. A dazzling solo class next to a neglected parallel section does not make an effective course. It makes an inconsistent one.
The second is currency, the bringing of live knowledge into the room. The teacher who carries this week’s development into class turns an abstraction into something a student can feel. This is the teaching-and-research connection in its everyday form: faculty who stay intellectually alive teach differently from those who recite last year’s notes. Currency is rarely in the syllabus. It is the teacher’s own scholarship finding its way into the classroom.
The third is what the Chronicles call the invisible curriculum: out-of-class academic contact, or OCAC. The mentoring, the corridor conversation, the email answered late at night, the example chosen to widen a student’s sense of what is possible.
No one mandates this. It springs from the ends a faculty member sets for themselves, and from the culture an institution chooses to build. You cannot order it into existence. You can only cultivate the conditions in which faculty decide, of their own accord, to offer it.
Teaching effectiveness, in the end, is a cultural output. An institution that rewards only research teaches its faculty, quite rationally, to divert their energy. An institution that celebrates teaching and protects time for it gets the invisible behaviours for nothing, because people give them willingly.