Last Updated on July 24, 2026
MBAUniverse.com News Desk
As Indian business schools strive to strengthen research quality and global academic standing, one critical challenge remains largely overlooked: preparing doctoral students not only to conduct high-quality research but also to become effective teachers. In this thought-provoking column, Dviwesh Mehta, Director of Harvard Business Impact Education, argues that excellence in research alone is insufficient for developing future faculty. Drawing on insights from Harvard Business Impact's doctoral teaching initiative, he makes a compelling case for integrating structured pedagogical training into doctoral education so that the next generation of management educators can excel in both research and classroom teaching.
Picture a business school doctoral student in their sixth year. They've spent the past five years immersed in research, i.e., learning methodologies, designing and conducting studies, analyzing data, and publishing papers. They know their subject deeply. But then, almost overnight, they're asked to walk into a classroom full of MBA students and teach.
The space between those two disciplines—research and teaching—is hard to cross by yourself. Yet, this abrupt jump is the standard career trajectory for doctoral graduates across India's top business schools. That is why we see so many bright, capable PhD students struggling when it is time to pass their knowledge on to others. Each new faculty member faces students for the first time without adequate preparation, and as a result, most default to the only method they know: slides and a lecture, delivered front-to-back, a box checked.
That leads to less engaging, less effective learning for the next generation of graduates. It is a structural defect hiding in plain sight. And it is precisely the defect that an innovative doctoral student workshop, hosted by Harvard Business Impact, and in collaboration with the HBS India Research Center and Harvard Business School, held in Mumbai in May 2026, was designed to address. The gathering shed light on how we can begin the crucial transition toward a system that prepares business students to research and to teach.
What Are We Losing Under the Current Faculty Prep Model?
It is entirely understandable that faculty who arrive in the classroom without pedagogical training would gravitate toward the path of least resistance. This is the predictable outcome of a system that prepared them for one job and then asked them to do another.
That mismatch comes at a significant cost. For example, in management education, one of the most powerful methods available to educators is immersive, decision-based learning. And the case method is an approach that develops judgment, analytical thinking, and collaborative instincts that distinguish good managers from great ones. Most times, fragments of this methodology appear in new faculty’s courses. But much of the benefit is lost as they default to cases delivered as lectures. It’s a bit like using a wrench as a hammer: the tool is still working in some sense, but you are nowhere near its constructive potential.
No matter what learning technique educators favor, what matters is whether they know how to use it to generate genuine engagement. Deep learning happens in the back-and-forth, the productive discomfort, that great teachers know how to cultivate.
Most doctoral graduates entering the faculty pipeline have never practiced that teaching skill. They have observed and named it at best, or merely developed a vague sense of it at worst. And by the time trial and error enables them to recognize shortcomings in how they teach — typically five to ten years into their careers — thousands of students have already sat through their courses.
What Intentional Preparation Looks Like
The doctoral student workshop in Mumbai explored an exciting improvement on that process. Hosted by Harvard Business Impact, and in collaboration with the HBS India Research Center and Harvard Business School, the event brought together 74 participants from some of India's leading institutions for two days of intensive faculty preparation. It was designed to teach the Participant-Centered Learning (PCL) approach and simulate the experience of a business school faculty member. PCL is similar to but not equivalent to the case method, since it also incorporates video, simulation, discussion, and any number of other tools.
Expert instructors led sessions on how to read a room, how to use cold calls and hot calls with intention, when to let a discussion breathe and when to redirect it, and how body language and movement through a physical space shape the energy of a session. These are the small mechanics that experienced educators internalize over years. The workshop participants absorbed key PCL principles in a structured format, early, making good habits the foundation of their teaching practice.
Then, on day two, they taught. Using a well-known Harvard case, participants led demo classes that were critiqued by instructors and by each other. Twelve groups received real feedback and got real experience applying what they had just learned. The improvements visible within a single session were, by more than a few accounts, striking.
The premise that drives the program is that great teaching is a learnable craft. It is a set of skills that, like any skill, develops faster with deliberate practice than by winging it in front of real students.
Participants also received access to the Fundamentals of Case Teaching online course, an ongoing resource that creates a bridge between the workshop experience and the long-term practice of building great classrooms. Graduates from the inaugural 2025 cohort are now in their first faculty roles at reputable institutions across India, and early reports back suggest the preparation made a meaningful difference, not in their command of subject matter, which was never in question, but in their confidence and their ability to create the kind of engagement their students had not expected.
This Matters More Now Than It Did a Decade Ago
There was a time when the value offered by a business school classroom was mostly informational. Students came to learn frameworks, formulas, and domain knowledge they could not easily access elsewhere. That era is over.
In a world where every concept, model, and analysis technique is a search prompt away, the lecture-based transmission of information has lost most of its competitive advantage. Students today can access the content. What they cannot access on their own is the experience of wrestling with ambiguous problems in real time, under pressure, alongside peers who see things differently.
That experience is what business schools want to produce, but producing it requires faculty who know how to create those conditions using frameworks like PCL. Right now, the system is not reliably training them to do so. The realization that teaching matters as much as research does not require dismantling the research priority. It simply requires recognizing that the roles of educator and researcher demand different skills, and that preparation for one does not substitute for preparation for the other.
We should not wait until a faculty member is five years in to prepare them for their next role. The doctoral years are the right time. Institutions need to insert intentional preparation to teach early in the arc of a faculty member's development, so that by the time they’re in front of students they’re fully confident and fully capable. That is what the students sitting in those classrooms deserve.
Author Dviwesh Mehta is the Director for South Asia and the Middle East at Harvard Business Impact, with decades of leadership experience in market strategy and enterprise growth.
