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Summary Notes on "The Future of Engineering Education: Part
4. Learning How to Teach," by J. E. Stice, R. M. Felder, D. R. Woods,
A. Rugarcia, Chemical Engineering Education, Spring 2000,
pp. 118-127. (The paper in its entirety is available on the Internet
at http://www2.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching/)
[55 references]
Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 7/7/00
"… With rare exceptions, no one teaches college teachers to
teach! They receive training as researchers, join faculties, and
enter their classrooms without so much as five seconds of instruction
on what to do there. …"
"Every skilled craft provides formal instruction and/or mentorship
for its new practitioners … except college teaching, which
expects its newcomers to learn everything themselves by trial-and-error.
… Much of the knowledge and many of the skills college teachers
need to be effective can be taught. … There are several reasons
why such courses are not commonplace, their benefits notwithstanding.
First, most faculty do not see a need for courses on teaching, believing
that the knowledge and skills required to teach effectively can
be just as well be picked up on the job. … In addition, many
dissertation advisors actively discourage their graduate students
from taking courses that are not required to pass the qualifying
exams and take time away from research. Finally, most engineering
faculty do not feel prepared by their own education or experience
to teach courses on teaching. …"
"… In the first three papers in this series, we proposed viewing
undergraduate education less as amassing of information and more
as learning how to think, how to create, and how to develop the
motivation and skill to be a lifelong learner and problem solver.
In this paper, we argue that a graduate education should be viewed
in a similar way. …"
"Workshops and seminars lasting anywhere from an hour to a week
are far more common than academic courses as vehicles for teaching
about teaching. These programs may be external to any campus (e.g.,
professional society conference workshops), campus-wide, engineering-specific,
or departmental. …"
"In most skilled professions, novices are mentored by experienced
practitioners who provide guidance and constructive feedback on
the novices' initial efforts. This process can cut years off the
learning curve normally required for unmentored novices to reach
an acceptable level of effectiveness at a skilled profession. …"
"Felder described a mentoring program in the Chemical Engineering
Department at North Carolina State University where each new faculty
member is assigned a research mentor and a teaching mentor. The
teaching mentor - who should be an excellent teacher with a desire
to serve in that capacity - and the new professor co-teach a course
in the latter's first semester. The mentor initially takes most
of the responsibility for planning lectures, class activities, assignments,
tests, and conducting classes; the mentee observes and takes notes;
and the two discuss the class at a weekly debriefing meeting. As
the semester progresses, the mentee gradually takes more responsibility
for the instruction and the mentor becomes more of an observer,
refraining from intervening in class if the mentee get into difficulty
and troubleshooting the problem at the next debriefing. Next semester,
the mentee teaches a course and mentor functions only as an occasional
observer in class and consultant at periodic … debriefings.
The mentor also makes an effort to introduce the mentee to faculty
colleagues with related interests, both locally and at professional
conferences. …"
"An important requirement for a mentorship program is for department
heads and deans to recognize that effective mentoring takes a certain
amount of skill and a great deal of time. Several hours of mentor
training should be provided by campus instructional development
staff or experienced mentors, and all mentors should be compensated
in some manner for their efforts."
"The most common - and arguably the most effective - way for new
members of a professional organization to learn the ropes and adapt
to the local culture is informal networking with experienced colleagues.
… It does not always happen, and it is least likely to happen
to women and minority faculty in engineering, who may have the greatest
need for such support. …"
"Analyzing a videotape of a lecture with the help of a teaching
consultant is an effective (albeit sometime humbling) first step
toward teaching improvement. … Before the class, make a list
of six questions you have about your lecturing and write down your
guesses at the answers. Have the class videotaped and ask the class
members to complete a traditional student evaluation form. Complete
the same form yourself twice - once based on how you felt the class
went and once based on how you guess the students rated the experience.
Then watch a replay of the videotape and analyze it in the context
of your six questions. Compare the student evaluations with your
two sets of responses and identify five strengths and two areas
to work on. …"
"ASEE Prism is the news journal and The Journal of Engineering
Education (JEE) the research journal of the American Society
for Engineering Education. … Other journals containing useful
articles for college teachers include The Journal of College
Science Teaching, College Teaching, Change, Journal on Excellence
in College Teaching, the AAHE Bulletin … A substantial
and rapidly growing collection of resources for instructors can
be found on World Wide Web (such as World Lecture Hall www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/index.html,
National Engineering Education Delivery System www.needs.org,
Resources in Engineering and Science Education (Richard Felder's
Web site) <www2.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching>, Collaborative
Learning Website <ww.wcer.wisc.edu/nice/cli/cl/clhome.asp>
Deliberations on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education www.lgu.ac.uk/deliberations/,
For Your Consideration www.unc.edu/depts/ctl/fyc.html,
Links to a Better Education http://w3.nai.net/~bobsalsa/linkstoa.htm,
…) …"
"Beginning in 2001, engineering departments seeking accreditation
will have to show that they are equipping their graduates with a
specified array of skills and that they have established a program
to assess the level of these skills and remedy any deficiencies
revealed by the assessment. … To implement these changes, most
engineering professors will have to be educated in the new instructional
methods, as opposed to the relative few who have been motivated
to learn about them in the past. …"
"An essential component of a successful faculty development program
is strong institutional support. An adequate budget is of course
a necessary condition. Beyond that, academic administrators should
convey a clear expectation that the faculty will be good teachers,
good teaching will be rewarded in tangible ways, and inadequate
teaching will be penalized. …"
"Few engineering schools explicitly prepare their graduate students
to teach, and new professors consequently join faculties equipped
with a Ph.D. in their discipline but no background in pedagogy.
Also, most colleges and universities have few criteria to screen
prospective candidates for their teaching ability; much of the emphasis
in hiring is on perceived potential as a researcher. ... Teaching
is a complex craft, but the skills required to do it effectively
can be taught. … To recapitulate, we advocate a program that
includes a subset of teaching improvement workshops, courses, seminars,
mentorships and partnerships, learning communities and consultation
with campus teaching experts. Graduate courses in college teaching
should be provided for those students who think they might be interested
in academic careers. The faculty development coordinator should
maintain resources for self-study, including books, journals, multimedia
resources and guides to useful Web sites. …"
[Readers who are interested in this article are encouraged to
read the original paper in its entirety. Other summary notes on
faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu
under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]
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