Our 2026 graduate Academic Teaching & Excellence Award recipient

What stands out most, however, are the students. With diverse professional backgrounds and significant responsibilities outside the classroom, they bring depth, perspective and commitment to every course. That dynamic, he says, pushes him to continually evolve his teaching and create learning experiences that match their level of investment.

Q&A with Dr. Jack McGourty

What does receiving this award mean to you?

Being nominated by a student and recognized by colleagues means more to me than any award I’ve received in 32 years of teaching. It’s especially meaningful because it comes from those who experience my teaching day to day.

When students nominate faculty, it’s because they feel seen, supported and challenged to grow. That’s the essence of teaching for me: not just sharing knowledge, but investing in each person’s potential. This recognition tells me that students felt that investment, and I can’t imagine a higher honor.

What does great teaching mean to you, beyond delivering course content?

Great teaching is about investing in every student and creating learning experiences that matter. I want students to see themselves solving real problems and building real value, not just checking off assignments.

For me, it’s about designing conditions where students surprise themselves and recognize their own progress. It means being present, responsive and committed to their growth as thinkers and professionals who are capable of navigating complexity.

When you think about your impact as an educator, what matters most to you?

What matters most to me is creating a learning context where students feel genuinely cared for and intellectually challenged. In our Innovation capstone, students don’t just write hypothetical business plans. They build real ventures with real customers, real product testing and real strategic pivots.

We’ve documented 150 venture projects so far, and many students keep developing them long after the course ends. Some launch, some evolve, some shift into something new, but all of them give students the experience of doing work that really counts. That shift from academic exercise to authentic work, where the stakes are real and the learning lasts, is what drives me as an educator.

What’s something you’ve learned from your students that has shaped how you teach?

Early in my career, I started giving students real community-based projects instead of simulated classroom exercises. Over the next decade, we completed 800 projects that addressed real community needs, from accessibility improvements to operational redesigns for nonprofits.  

Watching students engage with this work changed how I teach. I saw students rise to authentic challenges in ways I rarely saw with hypothetical assignments. When the work matters to real people, students bring creativity, persistence and solution-oriented skills that surprise even themselves. They demonstrated to me that authenticity is transformative. It changes how students understand innovation, creates real community impact and has completely changed how I design my courses. Every class I’ve taught since has built on that lesson.