Скачать или смотреть Professor of the Year 2006 - Frank Coglitore | University of St Thomas

Frank Coglitore of Lakeville is Professor of the Year, recognized for excellence in teaching, scholarship and inspiration to students.

Coglitore, 63, has been teaching accounting at St. Thomas for 23 years and has no plans to retire. I truly love going into the classroom and teaching, and plan to keep doing so as long as I enjoy working with our students and feel Im making a contribution.

As a teacher, he has three broad goals.

Whether it is in the field of accounting, or in life in general, we want our students to learn how to learn. We use various teaching techniques to do this, and its one of the most important things we do.

Next, he says, is teaching students to be competent in their field so they can pass the required professional exams and be productive employees.

Third is to expose students to situations in which they must consider the right thing to do. This has to do with ethics, of course. While some could consider the field of accounting to be fairly cut and dried, there are many things that are open to interpretation; our students need to know what is the right thing to do, he said. We instill in them a professional code of conduct.

Coglitore grew up in New York and remains a Yankees fan, something that comes in handy for starting good-natured arguments with his Twins-fan students. He majored in accounting and minored in philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, received an M.B.A. at the University of Scranton, and continued his studies at the University of Minnesota, where he held a teaching fellowship.

When he took the certified public accountant exam in Minnesota, he received the Harold C. Utley Award for having the highest test score in the state.

After two years in the Army, Coglitore joined the faculty at Mankato State University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in accounting from 1971 to 1976. He then spent five years at the international accounting firm KPMG, where he was a manager, and joined the St. Thomas accounting faculty in 1982.

He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in accounting and auditing. He has served as department chair and helped develop new programs.

He also has given more than two dozen presentations at accounting conferences locally and nationally. One of his research specialties has been in the field of problem-based teaching, which emphasizes critical-thinking, writing and communication skills. A paper he co-wrote on the topic was voted Best Faculty Paper at a regional conference of the American Accounting Association.

A second research specialty has been gender issues in accounting. Women have been making promising strides in the field, Coglitore said. Thats the case at St. Thomas, where slightly more than half of accounting students are women. Coglitore recalls that when he started teaching at St. Thomas, there was only one woman on the accounting faculty. Today, five of the 11 full-time accounting professors are women.

We are tremendously proud of Franks accomplishments as Professor of the Year, commented Dr. Christopher Puto, dean of the College of Business. His approach to his classes and to his students embodies all of the elements we value so highly at St. Thomas.