HTM Professor Wins UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award

“If I were to summarize her courses, in their entirety, in one word, it would be ‘purposeful,’” wrote Sophia Larco ’21 in a letter supporting Associate Professor of HTM Melissa Baker’s nomination for campus-wide recognition as an instructor. “I have not been in a single class with her where I thought, why are we doing this?”

Baker, who was named one of three tenure-track winners of the UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award in April, confirms that she plans her classes strategically with the goal of keeping students engaged by providing meaningful lectures and assignments—she describes her own approach to teaching as “equal parts passion and strategy.”

And she deploys a lot of both, teaching on-campus and online undergraduates, online and hybrid MBA students, PhD candidates, and short-term study abroad programs to Europe. Baker—who is the first-ever Distinguished Teaching Award winner from Isenberg’s Hospitality & Tourism Management department—remains willing to dive in to new challenges: “This is the first time I’m teaching a first-year class,” she says. “Not only first-years, but first-years who’ve spent the last year and a half in remote learning. How do we connect with them? How do we get them involved in Isenberg? It is an immense challenge we now face as teachers in a post Covid-19 world.”

Teaching across such a wide variety of audiences, Baker says, requires constant reworking of her instructional material and plans. “In business, you always want to tailor your product or service to your audience,” she says. “Teaching is the same thing—particularly when we teach in business. The audience of a first-year student is very different than teaching to the audience of a senior. Teaching in an online medium is very different from on-campus live. They have different experiences and different levels of knowledge. So we have to adjust our strategy and content.”

 

Individualized Focus

Baker’s students agree that she goes out of her way to understand their perspectives in order to engage with them effectively. Maggie Mulligan ’21, an HTM major who took Baker’s course on Service Experience Management, wrote in a recommendation letter for the Distinguished Teaching Award, “In class, Dr. Baker facilitated discussions that had students think back on our experiences and connect them to what we were learning… Her teaching style goes beyond learning to later regurgitate information on a test, but rather, she had us reflect, form opinions, critique, and create something that we could apply to our current jobs and leadership positions.”

Yeon Jung Kang, a PhD student in HTM who came to UMass specifically to study with Baker, has served as her teaching assistant and has participated in Baker’s thoughtful class preparations: “I have witnessed her dedication to reflection, growth, and excellence,” Kang wrote in her recommendation letter for the Distinguished Teaching Award, emphasizing the degree to which Baker focuses on not only her own teaching methods, but also encourages others to help them improve. “We meet weekly to discuss her pedagogical approach and instructional techniques and challenges and how I can develop my own pedagogical excellence as a future professor.”

 

Supporting Isenberg Instructors

Baker’s focus on helping others improve their teaching goes well beyond supporting her own doctoral students—she is in the midst of her second year serving as an Isenberg Teaching Fellow. The program was instituted in spring 2020, as the school was rushing to move all instruction online at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. She was one of five faculty members with experience teaching in both online and in-person programs who was chosen to share insights, solutions, and best practices for using classroom technology with all of Isenberg’s instructors. The group provided individual mentoring, led multiple lunch-and-learn seminars, and built a web page to house all the videos and written content they produced, as well as an open discussion board where faculty and PhD students could discuss teaching issues with peers. The tools helped instructors teach effectively online during the pandemic, and now that on-campus students have returned to physical classrooms, Baker says the focus of the Teaching Fellows is on integrating innovative technology into all types of courses—something she personally finds helpful.

“One of the things from remote learning that my students really loved was Zoom polls, so I’m using new technology to do a series of different polls throughout classes,” she says. “Instead of asking students to raise their hands and half the students not really participating, I can instantly see that some percentage of the class thinks that X is the most important thing, and we can dig into why they made that choice. It allows for deeper engagement, critical thinking, and learning from diverse perspectives.”

 

Taking on Varied Challenges

Baker has taught at UMass since 2013, including teaching human resources management to hybrid and online MBA students since 2017. Working with students remotely has honed not only her digital teaching skills but also her ability to structure a course for maximum effectiveness.

“MBAs are a different audience because they have a lot of work experience across a lot of fields,” she says, adding that some have high-level positions in their organizations and many are physicians who really appreciate the ansynchronous environment—they can do their work at any place at any time. “Having good course structure is a key, and so is creating meaningful work. We don’t want students to do busy work just to get an A, so creating assignments that provide a lot of value is really important.”

Baker also maintains multiple academic research streams focusing on customer experience management. For one, she looks at how service industry employees can manage difficult customer complaints and recover from customer failures (including how bad interactions affect employee mental health). She also examines how appearances can affect impression formation. That research has included work with the Korean Edible Insect Laboratory, looking at—among other issues—how images of insects affect willingness to eat them, and how celebrity endorsements affect customer opinions. Baker says edible insects are a healthy, nutritious, low-cost, sustainable protein source, but the trick in the United States is getting past the “yuck” factor. She says there are a lot of great edible insect products—she has tried many of them, including a five-course dinner by a celebrity chef. (She adds that you may actually be eating them already as edible insect protein powders are incorporated into foods such as protein bars, rice, baked goods, cookies, and soups). 

Baker and the other Isenberg Teaching Fellows are also gathering research for some educational and pedagogical journals—she says her research always informs her teaching, and vice versa.

“I will always care for the benefit of the student and I want to be better,” she says. “I never stop and say we’ve achieved all we need to achieve. I will always want to push the status quo.”