Professor Luke Pittaway has worked extensively in SoTL and his research also evidences the way he supports and mentors through collaborative projects.
" Improving Doctoral Educator Development through Scaffolding " was recently published in the Journal of Management Education , and was co-athored with Maha Tantawy, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada; and Andrew Corbett and Candida Brush, both of Babson College & Nord University, Wellesley, Mass.
According to Pittaway, “In this work we explored the student’s perspective about doctoral education in management and entrepreneurship to consider how we prepare doctoral students to teach. Increasingly this is an area of concern given the pressure on new faculty to perform in the classroom as tuition costs increase. We discover many serious concerns and uncover how students prepare themselves in the absence of support from their program. We conclude a different more scaffolded approached is needed within doctoral programs.”
Abstract:In response to a need for improved training of business school teaching, this research explores US doctoral programs in management and finds a need to purposefully embed scaffolding—the process of gradually enabling the doctoral student to take on more challenging aspects of teaching—into doctoral program design. We also recommend a more influential role to be played by professional organizations to address doctoral educator development. As we followed a grounded theory approach, our methodology started with an analysis of program marketing documents and materials followed by behavioral event interviews (BEIs) and perceptual interviews (PIs) with doctoral students in management.
Following coding, we reviewed the literature on doctoral education to explore how our emergent data mapped against prior research. By also taking into consideration the lived experience of students, the study data provides evidence that doctoral programs are not properly designed to support educator development. We discuss our findings related to what programs do to support students and what students do to support themselves. Theorizing from our data, we present our model that illustrates how programs could embed scaffolding to support programs’ commitment to develop future educators.
In " Assessment and Development of Coachability in Entrepreneurship Education ," another recent paper, Pittaway supports colleagues Tatiana Somià, Marie Curie Global Research Fellow at Free University of Bozen and visiting scholar at Ohio University, and Christian Lechner, LUISS Business School, Italy.
According to Somià, “Investors often ask that entrepreneurs pitching to them for funding are coachable – but what does this mean? And how do we prepare entrepreneurship students to be coachable? Our work explores the concept of coachability as it relates to investors perceptions of entrepreneurial readiness. We unpick the competencies that students might need to be ‘coachable’ and consider what aiming to help students to be coachable might mean for educational practice.”
Abstract: As coaching and alumni mentoring are used to develop student startup talent the coachability of students becomes an enabling factor for reflection- and action-based learning methods in entrepreneurship education. There is limited research on how to assess and develop coachability, especially in entrepreneurship education. This paper aims to narrow the gap. This study adopts a competency-based approach by devising competency assessment tools, undertaking a coachability survey and using Behavioral Event Interviews. It thus adopts a mixed method design, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. Our exploratory research shows that coachability has a positive relationship with educational outcomes and that coachability competencies, such as self-awareness and flexibility, are important. We show that coachability can be developed through experiential learning and that such learning enables the acquisition of competencies, such as transferring learning into action and taking initiative. The opportunity to develop coachability through entrepreneurship education fosters the design of experiential learning and strengthens students' coachability competencies, thereby aiding graduates’ capacity to attract venture funding. We make an original contribution to assessing coachability by adopting a multi-method and multi-perspective approach and provide a way of creating greater impact when assessing and developing coachability.