GUIDING
PRINCIPLES

• Encourage contact between students and faculty:
  Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement. Faculty must help students deal with high stress and keep on working to achieve results. Knowing a few faculty members well enhances students’ intellectual commitment and encourages them to think about their own values and future plans and develop mutual trust. This is what mentoring is all about.
• Develop reciprocity and co-operation among students:
  Learning is enhanced when it becomes team effort rather than a solo race. Good learning, like good work, is collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated. Working with others increases involvement in learning. Sharing one’s own ideas and responding to others’ reactions sharpens thinking and deepens understanding.
• Encourage active learning:
  Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn by sitting in classrooms listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and regurgitating answers. They must cogitate over what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.
• Give prompt feedback:
  Knowing what you know and realizing what you don’t know focuses the mind on learning. Students need appropriate feedback on performance to benefit from courses. When getting started, students need help in assessing existing knowledge and competence. In classrooms, students need frequent opportunities to interact and receive suggestions for improvement. At various points during graduation and towards the end, students need chances to reflect upon what they have learnt, what they still need to know, and how to assess themselves.
• Emphasize time on task:
  Time plus energy equals learning. There is no substitute for time on task. Learning to use one’s time well is critical for students and professionals alike. Students need assistance in learning effective time management. Allocating realistic amounts of time means effective learning for students and effective teaching for faculty. How an institution defines time expectations for students, faculty, administrators, and other professional staff can establish the basis of high performance for all.
• Communicate high expectations:
  Expect more and you will get more. High expectations are important for everyone—for the poorly prepared, for those unwilling to exert themselves, and for the bright and well motivated. Expecting students to perform well becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when teachers and institutions hold high expectations for them and make extra efforts.
• Respect diverse talents and ways of learning:
  There are many roads to learning. People bring different talents and styles of learning to college. Brilliant students in the seminar room may be all thumbs in the lab or in an art studio. Students rich in hands-on experience may not do so well with theory and rote exams. Students need the opportunity to display their talents and learn in ways that work for them. Then they can be pushed to learn in new ways that do not come so readily to mind.
• No Compromises:
  Students have to be prepared for very vigorous course work. We are sure that we wish it that way since that is what the real corporate world is like. Students have to be prepared to spend over 100 hours per week in classes, tutorials, workshops, seminars, preparatory work and industry interaction. That is how great managers are forged and at FOSTIIMA we don’t believe in any shortcuts. Smart work and hard study is the surest path to a rewarding career and enhancing self worth.

We strongly feel that within the larger organism, we must have a purposeful sense of shared mission and fundamental core values, concrete support from administrative and faculty leaders, CRS, Environment, adequate sources of funding and consistent policies and procedures with continuing re-examination of how well our objectives are being realised. When we achieve this, we would have successfully overcome the problems of meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

We, with our extensive and varied corporate experience and supported by the high ideals inculcated in us by the pioneering vision of Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Vikram Sarabhai and the inspiring leadership of Ravi Mathai of IIM (Ahmedabad), affirm to provide the relevant education for the current corporate environment. With our fraternal network in the industry, we shall certainly be able to provide the productive, gainful and fulfilling careers to each individual student’s requirement.