My teaching philosophy
The United States has a demand for engineers which higher education is not supplying. The gap between demand and supply is such that those of us engaged in engineering education cannot afford to indulge in preconceptions regarding who will succeed as an engineer and who will not. We need to promote interest in engineering as a potential career in as many people as we can, and we need to encourage and to nourish that interest in everyone in whom we see that interest.
In my classes, I accomplish this end by establishing a personal relationship with each student. This action not only recognizes the social aspect of learning but also allows me to gain insight into individual needs and to tailor my approach to individual students accordingly. One such student in my engineering statics class was someone we will call Andy. While establishing relationships at the beginning of the semester, I learned that some students had worked with Andy previously in other classes and expressed concerns that Andy would not carry his share of the workload if he were in their group. Through my encouragement and mentoring, I was happy to watch Andy pick up his share of the group project and perform wonderfully. That change will help Andy in his future engineering career for years to come.
Another change that will help Andy and others like him succeed in an engineering career is one of identity. Some students have a conception of engineers that exclude them as a part of that group. I want my students to self-identify as engineers, and I help to accomplish this end by establishing relationships with each student and spending more time mentoring those who lack the confidence to see themselves as engineers. I also assign projects that have students do what engineers would do, and I speak with my students about these assignments as though they are full professional colleagues in the engineering profession. Those efforts have produced good results. In the last statics class I taught at Howard Community College, 87% of the students selfidentified as engineers in a survey administered at the beginning of the semester. By the end of that same semester in a follow-up survey, 100% of the students saw themselves as engineers.
In order to meet the challenges of the future more effectively, engineers will need to embrace lifelong learning and continuous improvement. I believe students bear the primary responsibility for their own learning. At the same time, I recognize that students in my classes may not have enough experience with that responsibility to manage it effectively. Thus, I provide my students with the tools and the environment to identify and fill their knowledge gaps. I see my role as the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on a stage."
One example of how I have accomplished this end is through the writing assignments I gave to my engineering statics students. In addition to the traditional analytical homework problems I assigned every week, I also assigned students to write about their experience working those problems. The prompt I gave them invited them to reflect upon their understanding and their performance as well as ways to improve. Reading the student responses to this assignment gave me an opportunity to glimpse inside the thinking of an individual student and to respond with individualized feedback, including mentoring and guidance as appropriate. One of the results of this approach was an improvement in the exam scores of my students when compared with the previous semester in which I did not give the writing assignment. The average grade for an individual exam improved by a letter grade in all but one case, and in that one specific instance the improvement was two letter grades.
The whole idea behind using the writing assignment in my statics course came because of my commitment to continuous improvement, which I embrace as a part of my professional lifestyle. I have never taught the same class twice; each iteration always contains some improvement over the previous semester. I actively elicit ideas from my students for this process all throughout the semester, not just at the end of the semester. I also explicitly explain to them why I want their feedback and share with them examples of how I integrated changes into previous iterations of the course. Such communications not only empower the students to feed my continuous improvement efforts but also exemplify a commitment that can help them in their careers both now as a student and in the future as professional engineers.
Among all the courses I have taught, the statistics course I taught at CWI has seen the most iterations of improvement. During my last semester there, the demand among the students to be in my class was so high that the room assigned for my class was standing room only on the first day of class. I placed some of my instructional videos online, and to this day many students complement me in their comments for my effectiveness of helping them understand concepts with which they struggled in ways that were easy for them to understand. The appreciation they express for relieving their frustration always fills me with gratitude and further solidifies my own commitment to continuous improvement not only in my teaching but in everything I do as an engineering educator.
In my classes, I accomplish this end by establishing a personal relationship with each student. This action not only recognizes the social aspect of learning but also allows me to gain insight into individual needs and to tailor my approach to individual students accordingly. One such student in my engineering statics class was someone we will call Andy. While establishing relationships at the beginning of the semester, I learned that some students had worked with Andy previously in other classes and expressed concerns that Andy would not carry his share of the workload if he were in their group. Through my encouragement and mentoring, I was happy to watch Andy pick up his share of the group project and perform wonderfully. That change will help Andy in his future engineering career for years to come.
Another change that will help Andy and others like him succeed in an engineering career is one of identity. Some students have a conception of engineers that exclude them as a part of that group. I want my students to self-identify as engineers, and I help to accomplish this end by establishing relationships with each student and spending more time mentoring those who lack the confidence to see themselves as engineers. I also assign projects that have students do what engineers would do, and I speak with my students about these assignments as though they are full professional colleagues in the engineering profession. Those efforts have produced good results. In the last statics class I taught at Howard Community College, 87% of the students selfidentified as engineers in a survey administered at the beginning of the semester. By the end of that same semester in a follow-up survey, 100% of the students saw themselves as engineers.
In order to meet the challenges of the future more effectively, engineers will need to embrace lifelong learning and continuous improvement. I believe students bear the primary responsibility for their own learning. At the same time, I recognize that students in my classes may not have enough experience with that responsibility to manage it effectively. Thus, I provide my students with the tools and the environment to identify and fill their knowledge gaps. I see my role as the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on a stage."
One example of how I have accomplished this end is through the writing assignments I gave to my engineering statics students. In addition to the traditional analytical homework problems I assigned every week, I also assigned students to write about their experience working those problems. The prompt I gave them invited them to reflect upon their understanding and their performance as well as ways to improve. Reading the student responses to this assignment gave me an opportunity to glimpse inside the thinking of an individual student and to respond with individualized feedback, including mentoring and guidance as appropriate. One of the results of this approach was an improvement in the exam scores of my students when compared with the previous semester in which I did not give the writing assignment. The average grade for an individual exam improved by a letter grade in all but one case, and in that one specific instance the improvement was two letter grades.
The whole idea behind using the writing assignment in my statics course came because of my commitment to continuous improvement, which I embrace as a part of my professional lifestyle. I have never taught the same class twice; each iteration always contains some improvement over the previous semester. I actively elicit ideas from my students for this process all throughout the semester, not just at the end of the semester. I also explicitly explain to them why I want their feedback and share with them examples of how I integrated changes into previous iterations of the course. Such communications not only empower the students to feed my continuous improvement efforts but also exemplify a commitment that can help them in their careers both now as a student and in the future as professional engineers.
Among all the courses I have taught, the statistics course I taught at CWI has seen the most iterations of improvement. During my last semester there, the demand among the students to be in my class was so high that the room assigned for my class was standing room only on the first day of class. I placed some of my instructional videos online, and to this day many students complement me in their comments for my effectiveness of helping them understand concepts with which they struggled in ways that were easy for them to understand. The appreciation they express for relieving their frustration always fills me with gratitude and further solidifies my own commitment to continuous improvement not only in my teaching but in everything I do as an engineering educator.
My commitment to continuous improvement
The presentations below document my commitment to continuous improvement for the classes I taught at the College of Western Idaho and Boise State University. You can download these presentations by using the links below.
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My students have their say
Here is what some of my students have said about my statistics instruction, taken from screenshots of the YouTube channel where I post statistics videos.
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Want more? Check out this presentation with many, many more comments like the ones you've just read.
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And here is a sample course evaluation for one of the statistics classes I taught at the College of Western Idaho.
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