Joe Hoyle’s 100 conversation starters for accounting educators
Every accounting teacher wants students who can think — weigh evidence, argue a position, spot when a headline number is obscuring an underlying truth. We also have a syllabus stuffed with content and rules.
Joe Hoyle has spent a career refusing to trade between content and critical thinking. He’s just published a free book to help the rest of us do the same. I urge you to download it.
Joe is an award winning Associate Professor at the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond, and this autumn he begins his 56th year in front of a class. Back in 1991 he abandoned lecturing for a question-based, Socratic style — and quickly learned it collapses without good questions.
As we all know, dull mechanical prompts get dull mechanical answers. So for thirty-five years he has written questions designed to intrigue students first and teach accounting principles second, on the sound theory that a curious student learns more than a bored one.
The book gathers 100 of those questions for intermediate and financial accounting. They are designed with US GAAP in mind, but are easily tailored to suit your teaching context.
Joe traces the whole project to a single line in Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?
Sometimes I think that we, as teachers, are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question.
Joe’s done all the hard work for us. His conversation starters provide a practical way of doing just this — problems you can drop into a class to get students talking rather than transcribing. It will work whatever your own style. You don’t have to teach Socratically to raid it for a good question.
And it costs nothing. Joe has released it free through the University of Richmond’s repository, out of a conviction that higher education needs to get both better and cheaper.The only thing Joe asks in return is that you share the link and spread the word.
You can download it here: https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/400/
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How to cite this article: York, T. (2026) ‘Joe Hoyle’s 100 Conversation Starters for Accounting Students.’, Accounting Cafe, 11 August 2026. Available at: https://accountingcafe.org/2026/08/11/100-conversation-starters/ (Accessed: [insert date])
