The 2026 Excellence in Teaching Recipients
May 11, 2026
By Ted Bartlett
Every year, the Arizona Society of CPAs (ASCPA) awards a teacher who is a trailblazer in their teaching methods and efforts to educate the next generation of CPAs the Excellence in Teaching Award. This year, the ASCPA has awarded two teachers who exemplify this award – Lynn Fiordalisi Clark, CPA from Paradise Valley Community College (PVCC) and Landi Morris, Ph.D. from Northern Arizona University (NAU).
Lynn Fiordalisi Clark, CPA
Clark comes from Long Island, New York, and attended Adelphi University locally — becoming the first-generation college student in her family. She started in public accounting with Arthur Young, before the merger with Ernst & Whinney, in
the days of the Big 8. She and a friend threw the “Goodbye Artie” party the night before the merger closed. After four years in public accounting, Lynn went to work for a client and established a career in financial services.
Clark moved to Phoenix in 1993 and after a few years, opened her own CPA practice. She sold that firm after having her second child and became a financial advisor. Since she was a CPA, she became very active with the ASCPA in the financial planning section around the year 2000. She taught a lot of CPE for the society in those years, and it was very well received by attendees.
Former longtime ASCPA employee Heidi Frei suggested to Lynn that she consider teaching at the community college level and made an introduction to Jeannie Franco at Paradise Valley Community College. Clark began teaching at PVCC in 2010, and Franco became her mentor. She was one of the first people there to learn how to teach online and she threw herself enthusiastically into every opportunity to learn how to teach well.
Clark uses a flipped classroom model in her teaching at PVCC, which means that class time is used for actively working through accounting material, rather than lecture. Clark leads the students through the active work and along the way encourages them to take good notes. She allows students to use their notes on exams and is subtly teaching them to learn to be good note-takers.
Clark makes her teaching relatable by sharing her experiences, such as a fraud investigation she worked on for four years. She helps students understand the different paths you can take with an accounting degree.
Another consistent strength of Clark’s is her ability to see things in people that they may not see in themselves, and she is known for making future accountants out of people who come to her class having little prior sense of what accounting was.
Five years ago, the Arizona legislature authorized community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees and Clark has created the PVCC Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting through her vision and leadership. Since it’s launch in Fall 2025 there are 448 actively enrolled students in the program. She’s now the division chair, but she continues to teach principles of financial accounting and intermediate accounting.
“As Dean of Instruction, I have had the privilege of working closely with Lynn for many years, and I can state without hesitation that she exemplifies the highest ideas of accounting education,” says Dr. Sean Petty, Dean of Instruction at PVCC. “Her impact on students, on our institution, and on Arizona’s accounting pipeline has been both profound and enduring.”
When discussing the implications of artificial intelligence on accounting careers with Clark, she had a very interesting perspective that’s informed by her long career. When she was a college student in 1986, there was a major federal tax code overhaul and people predicted that CPAs would no longer be needed since many deductions were eliminated.
And then, when the internet hit critical mass, there were similar predictions. In neither case did the need for CPAs subside. Similarly, she expects that skilled accountants will be needed to check the output of AI and figure out what went wrong
when something inevitably does.
Away from her work at PVCC, Clark enjoys gardening and spending time with her two grandchildren. She also hikes and enjoys yoga.
Landi Morris, Ph.D.
Morris is a native New Englander, and she started out doing non-profit tax work for Grant Thornton in Boston where she enjoyed the work. When a colleague left to pursue a Ph.D., Morris had her first thought of becoming a professor. The more she thought of it as a career path, the more intrigued she was.
She considered becoming a professor for about a year while continuing to work in public accounting and then decided to pursue it — putting all her focus toward that path. After graduation, when Morris was looking for a job, she and her husband were drawn to Flagstaff by the abundant opportunities for outdoor activities.
Morris enjoys the total experience of teaching at NAU. People in Flagstaff are geared towards balance in their work and non-work lives, and she appreciates having some autonomy there to gear her classes toward the dynamic learning needs of the students.
Morris’ teaching style is designed to be intentionally engaging to students at a time where the attention spans of some have been disrupted by the digital lives they’ve lived since childhood. She focuses on keeping lectures short and then immediately
applying the content to practice problems. She also focuses on a lot of small group work in class, and she gets excited to see students help each other to learn.
She also uses gamification techniques, particularly a game called Kahoot. She’s very intentional with making the study of tax fun and engaging, against subject matter that can be fundamentally dense and difficult.
“I appreciate how helpful and supportive Professor Morris [is]. I feel like my brain is not meant for tax,” said a former student from Morris’ ACC 460 class. “I struggled through the concepts of this class more than in any other accounting class, but Professor Morris is excellent at recognizing when students need help, and at offering support to ensure that a student can succeed.”
As a researcher, Morris seeks to understand topics that are interesting to her, and she feels satisfaction with creating content and knowledge that stems from that entry point. She has a grant from NAU to implement AI in the classroom, and that has been educational for Morris and the students alike.
She realized that she needed to start out by teaching students how to use AI from scratch, in terms of helping them learn how to prompt or recognize hallucinations. The end use case was to use AI to write a tax memo and then have tax research software validate the memo. She also focused on teaching specifically what was and was not appropriate professional use of AI tools.
Morris’ sense of what’s to come with how AI impacts the accounting profession is that work will be different, but jobs probably won’t broadly be eliminated from its adoption. She likened it to when the larger CPA firms started offshoring staff-level work; onshore staff jobs became less about grunt work, and more about validation and reviewing. Similarly, AI integration in the workplace will require early-career CPAs to be more prepared by their educational experience, and Morris takes that responsibility to prepare them very seriously.
Morris stays connected to professional practice largely through involvement with NAU’s Accounting Advisory Council. This group is comprised of NAU alumni in practice with most of the significant accounting firms in both Flagstaff and Metro Phoenix. The group meets twice a year and Morris often invites members of it to speak to her classes. The students gain knowledge of the real world application of tax concepts through these interactions.
One challenge this year has been digesting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to apply to her lessons, since it was retroactively applicable to the 2025 year. That has left a short period of time for practitioners, educators and students to absorb the changes in advance of tax preparation season.
Morris enjoys a challenge, and she gets a great deal of satisfaction from helping her students learn and become excellent tax professionals.
Beyond her work, Morris and her husband can be found outdoors or indoors with their cats.