Ep. 125: Steve Orpurt - Spruce Up Your Learning

Contact Professor Orpurt:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-orpurt-phd/


"Spruce Up Your Learning", Strategic
Finance (January 2021):
https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/january-2021-spruce-up-your-learning-skills/


Telling Ain't Training by
Harold D. Stolovitch  and Erica J. Keeps:
https://www.amazon.com/Telling-Aint-Training-Expanded-Enhanced/dp/1562867016


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:05)
 Hey everyone! Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast
about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm
your host, Adam Larson and this is episode 125 of our series. How
can you spruce up your learning skills and why should you? Well,
Steve Orpurt, Clinical Professor of Accountancy at Arizona State
University joins our show to talk about how you can become a
better learner and the benefits of doing so. Professor Orpurt
teaches corporate governance, ethics, and sustainability
reporting. His recent research focuses on the statement of cash
flows with top tier publications and presentations to the
international accounting standards board. His conversation here
with Mitch was inspired by a recent article he wrote in IMA’s
strategic finance magazine titled, Spruce Up Your Learning.
Whether you're a seasoned professional, a young professional just
starting out, or a student preparing to embark on an accounting
and finance career, keeping current on your learning is
imperative. So let's keep listening to learn how.

Mitch: (01:08)
So we started talking based on your article, Spruce Up Your
Learning, in IMA’s strategic finance magazine. My first question
for today is how did you really become interested in learning
about learning?

Steve: (01:20)
That's an interesting question. I had an opportunity quite a long
time ago 20-25 years ago to work at a startup company that worked
with Stanford University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, London
School of Economics, called younext.com. And when I joined that,
they were trying to build an online MBA program and they hired a
number of instructional designers. I had never heard of an
instructional designer and I ended up working elbow to elbow with
them and they taught me a lot about their profession, which is
learning. So I've always had an interest since then. And as you
know, I'm an academic accountant so I had no background in that
area and I've just kept reading and one of the more influential
books that I read over the years was a book entitled, Telling
Ain't Training by Stolovitch and Keeps. The title kind of
undersells the book because it really focuses on learner centered
learning, not the teaching. And so that's been a substantial
influence on what I do in a classroom. And so from there I just
started reading all the research on learning and just kept going.
So that article that I wrote was more to help students and others
who are interested in improving their learning, most of that
material is actually written to a teacher or an instructor to use
to help students learn, but I thought it should be put in the
hands of the students themselves to improve their abilities to
learn.

Mitch: (03:05)
Following up on that and making a connection to our listeners.
Why is it so important? Why do you think it's so important for
someone to improve their own learning skills? And like I said,
particularly for the management accountant?

Steve: (03:17)
Well I think learning, which is a skill, is just becoming much
more valuable today than perhaps even a decade ago. If you stop
and think about the management accounting role, maybe 10 or 15
years ago, it would be fair to say that it was kind of a
departmental role, but now it's an enterprise wide role. And you
can think of some reasons for that. We can look at things like
artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, process
mining, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, enterprise risk management,
cloud computing, mobile computing, sustainability reporting,
sustainability reporting standards. These are all topics that we
didn't talk about much 10 years ago or so, and now they're front
and central for our management accounting and they require
substantial learning. So I think that the role of a management
accountant has really moved from kind of a departmental role into
an enterprise wide role. And it just requires a lot more learning
and learning well, so it's just a more valuable skill. So one of
the reasons I wanted to write that article was simply to say, we
can learn faster and better.

Mitch: (04:38)
It's a great point. And, you know, particularly from the IMA
perspective, all those topics you just addressed are things that
we are certainly pushing out there and are very interested in
upscaling or rescaling in order to learn the necessary skills on
the job and for the profession, the industry at large. For our
listeners who, whether they're familiar with the article or not,
when it comes to improving your learning, do you have any
recommendations or what's an important learning strategy that you
advocate for?

Steve: (05:11)
Well there are a number of them. I think the, one of the most
valuable and one of the easiest to implement, because you can do
it right now is to ask yourself questions before you start
looking at the learning material. Most of us will pick up an
article or something we're learning from, we just start reading
and a better approach is to take a minute or so and think through
what questions you have about that material. Because when you ask
questions, you engage your mind and you read more actively to try
and answer those questions. Continuing with that then as you
read, you create more questions that you are looking for answers
for and so it just creates a more active involvement with the
learning and obviously that means you'll learn better, but as it
turns out, most of us that have tried this would say you learn
not only better, but faster because you remember material, you
can apply it better, and if you want more extensive material, you
know what you're looking for. So I think this notion of asking
questions before you start reading something, and then actually
while you're reading it, is easy to implement and extremely
valuable habit to build. Ironically, I've had really good success
by asking questions before I read articles, because it's led me
to actually set aside many articles that once I start
questioning, I realized I'm not going to get that much out of it
and I'm not that interested in it. So it's actually been a time
saver just in terms of organizing material that is valuable to
me. And, so again, I think even at the most basic level, this is
really easy to implement this idea of asking questions and, very,
very valuable in terms of time management, but also in terms of
just improving your learning.

Mitch: (07:18)
So I know myself as a learner, one of my go-to strategies, and I
think this goes for many people is, as you said, you just start
reading and you start highlighting, you start taking your own
notes. How does asking questions in advance and really engaging
your brain? What are the benefits above and beyond taking notes
and highlighting and simple learning strategies that I'm sure
many of our listeners frequently do?

Steve: (07:46)
Something that almost all of my students do. It's extr...