On Teaching
I just found out that my American Chemical Society courses have been officially added to the ACS spring schedule:
Computer Simulation of Reactive Flows: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=RFWEB
Essentials of Chemical Kinetics: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB
This inspired me to write on the subject of teaching – specifically, why most engineering courses are taught in such boring ways, and what can be done about it.
Teaching is one of the best ways to learn something. I love both teaching and learning. Unfortunately the teaching process is very frequently looked down upon in the engineering and scientific research communities.
I bet every one of you reading this, has heard a professor complain about “having to teach” a class, more than once. While, ironically, teaching is looked upon as the necessary evil in our educational institutions, the process of teaching happens to be one of the best ways to learn about a particular topic in excruciating detail.
In University of Delaware, I was lucky enough to take a few courses from professor (Dr. Alan Fox) who was an incredible teacher. The entire class hung on his every word. His discussions were fascinating. All week long I would look forward to going to his three-hour class on Wednesdays, and feel sad when each class would come to an end.
As you might have already guessed, this was not an engineering course. The instructor was a professor of religious studies and I took his courses on Chinese and Indian Religions and Philosophy. I enjoyed his classes so much that I actually added a religious studies minor to my ME degree, even though I was not particularly interested in religion or history.
I wish I could say that many of my engineering courses were just as riveting. I did have a few excellent instructors. Professor Hai Wang taught my undergraduate combustion course and managed to make the theory of combustion interesting enough, so that it became my major in grad school. At UC San Diego I had a wonderful astrophysics professor, who made learning Einstein’s Theory of Relativity a blast. I actually kept taking his astrophysics classes, well after my grad school course requirements were filled.
But still, my religious studies courses at UD stand out as the most interesting and creative courses I ever took. I asked myself many times: What made those classes so much more interesting?
Many of you would probably point out the obvious – they were not engineering courses, duh! There were no formulas to derive, nor dimensionless numbers to memorize. A technical course (even with an enthusiastic and dedicated instructor) can not possibly be compared to a class where students get to philosophize about a bunch of nebulous concepts.
Maybe it is as simple as that. Maybe that is why so many engineering and science professors look upon teaching as an afterthought. Why bother, it’ll still be a boring class, right?
I would like to change that perception. Perhaps a technical course cannot be designed to be as thrilling and inspiring as a class in World Religions, but I feel that an instructor should always strive to bring out the creative thinking in a technical class. Creativity is just as important to good research as it is to art or philosophy – shouldn’t engineering and science classes reflect that?
I do my best to follow this philosophy with all of the courses that I teach. I adapted some concepts used by Dr. Fox in his teachings. He tended to use the Socratic method of instruction – teaching by asking students questions. Think back to your science/engineering courses – how many of your professors bothered to ask students anything, without the “I am right, you’re wrong” attitude? How about actually taught an entire class simply by asking students questions?
I can tell you from experience that this way of teaching is a heck of a lot more difficult and requires a LOT more preparation and knowledge then teaching by a regular lecture method. That probably explains why so many instructors choose to simply lecture. It’s a cope-out method.
Students do not get bored and tend not to “zone-out” if they are actually participating in the class. Teaching via a Socratic method actively engages students through out the whole class. This is true whether students are high school kids or professional engineers.
When I teach a class, whether at another company or through an association like ACS, I try to keep in mind the principles of a Socratic method. My teaching style is far from perfect. But I can feel the interest of the participants increase drastically every time we come to one of the discussion portions of the course. And I know that when the students are interested and engaged, they are much more likely to retain the information I give them, even if that information is a formula or a dimensionless number.
Happy Holidays MVP Readers!
Masha
Have a corporate training budget you need to spend by end of 2009?
Take a look at these great courses offered by MVP Modeling Solutions:
http://www.mvpmodelingsolutions.com/Training_and_Services.html
Or sign op for the on-line American Chemical Society courses in Spring 2010:
Computer Simulation of Reactive Flows: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=RFWEB
Essentials of Chemical Kinetics: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB
Tags: ACS, Ameriucan Chemical Society, chemical kinetics, chemistry, education, mvp modeling solutions, reactive flows, teaching
Great post, Masha.
Living in Delaware, I can tell you that Dr. Fox is well-known outside of the University as one who helps people of different religious beliefs see and respect each other’s beliefs and non-beliefs. It sounds like you were lucky to have a class with him.
One of my favorite chemistry professors as an undergraduate began his physical chemistry course by asking all of us if we believed in electrons - and, of course, while everybody said that they did, nobody could offer a coherent explanation of why. Thus began a wonderful exploration into the quantum physics of chemistry that I’ll never forget. He took us from the macro to the micro and back again. It was great.
I think that you’re right about the Socratic method of instruction - but even more than that, teachers that can make the connection between technical knowledge and our shared human experience can really make an otherwise dry subject unforgettable.
Hi Masha,
Thanks for the great and the relevant and the informative post.
I think the creative teaching in a technical course gets self limited by the dictates of the ABET or the Course Curriculum that the Professor pre-designs in the begining of the course, in terms of the topics that need to be covered and the problems that need to be solved and the projects that need to be completed within the semester.
Secondly, and on a more obvious note, a teaching Professor need to have good presentation skills of the subject matter so that the students feel engaged. A more tougher job for a teaching Professor will be to write a good text book, in terms of the number of pages and illustrations he would use, in order to make the whole course content coherent and be brief and make the points rightfully across to the reader. Even text-books can be qualified into good and bad, some of which can ask for humongous effort from the part of the readers to run through its pages while others can be fluid enough.
An ideal situation will be, to have a “mandatory” review system in place, not at the end of the course, but at the onset, in terms of course material and the expectations of students from the course material (topics, problems, case studies and examples from the Industry and daily lives) . The Department can then have a panel to sit upon that review of the course material and suggest necessary changes and revisions. This will at least optimize the problems of too-much reading, too much of homework or too much of classwork, either of which can at times make the course “less interesting”. At the same time a semester revision of each technical course will make them “more” relevant in terms of timely updates of the outside world. So, for example (a lame one by any standards), in a heat-transfer course, you can always update your examples, numerical problems and case studies from the climate science or from the building environments or from nano-micro scales, all of which are on a curve of constant changes and inventions.
A good teaching professor will have the ability to write a good text-book, and if this is the metric of judgement that can be put into place, I am of the opinion that this might help the academic community (both faculties and students) to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Thanking you again for the wonderful post and this one is as good and relevant as the previous ones are.
Sincerely,
Saurav Mitra
http://menet.umn.edu/~samitra
Thanks for posting your thoughts on teaching. When you come to what courses are boring and which are exciting, my experience differs. I’ve endured many more boring religion courses (mandatory in Catholic schools) than engineering courses.
What makes a course boring or exciting is mainly the degree to which the professor himself is bored or excited by the material he or she is trying to teach. When we are delighted and fascinated by something we discover or learn, we are eager to communicate it to others, and our own excitement is perceived and shared by those we teach. Someone who remains excited by their subject will continue to learn it more deeply each time they teach it. The study of any serious subject, whether religion or engineering, is a continuing quest for wider and deeper understanding by teacher and student, both of whom learn more in the process. I always found that trying to answer the penetrating questions students ask challenges me to better understand any subject I’m teaching.
Of course, there will always be those who regard education as simply filling the student brain with a cargo of memorized ‘facts’, as when you fill your car’s fuel tank with gas. However, this is not education, but the lowest level of training, and does not engage the brain’s higher capacities at all. A physics course that concentrated only on making the students memorize the numerical values of the fundamental physical constants would produce no understanding of physics whatever. Learning the locations and names of the 100 brightest stars in the sky would not make you an astronomer, though it might be enough to impress the ignorant.
Finally, I’d like to point out that in engineering courses the objective is normally to bring the student to a high level of mastery of the material, consistent with successful future use of that course material to design systems that must actually work in the real world. This is unlike a discussion course in comparative religion or music appreciation, for example, where the objective is familiarization of the student with a wider range of beliefs and achievements, with no attempt to achieve high proficiency or real expertise in the subject matter. To achieve working mastery of technical engineering material requires a much more intense effort on the part of the student than merely to achieve a nodding aquaintance with the ideas presented in a liberal arts course.
Imagine how differently poetry classes would be taught if the students all knew they would be required to earn their living by writing (and successfully publishing) their own original poetry for the rest of their lives.
In teaching your engineering courses, you should proceed as if one of your students will in future help design a process plant that will be built near your home, and must operate safely to protect the health and welfare of your own family. Consider that possibility also when you are assigning grades.
How to teach Engineering is a question dear to my heart, as you can see on my blog
Hello
IF you want to hear a great lecture where the audience is asked for answers, try Mohamed Hashem, from Shell and a distinguished SPE lecturer who combines the theoretical with the practical for engineers but in reality every investor in oil and gas should go to it. Absolutely the best experience in 35 years with the SPE - he is going all over the world this year so I am sure Richardson can find an event near you. As an investor and engineer it armed me with new questions on determining reservoir fluids (gas or oil) and reservoir size which I thought I had mastered years ago.
Pat
The engineering education in the US is in dire straights. The inbred status of the academia and the tenured system resulted in professors teaching from their pet notes for decades and using simpleton problems in MATLAB. Hence the undergraduate level engineer coming out into the industry is useless off the bat and this is exacerbated by the fact that the high school graduates going into the engineering fields are those to begin with who could not get into the areas ultimately resulting in medical, law or business degrees.
We need about six months internal training to make an engineer start to understand the industrial reality. In order to fill the gaps in their knowledge in numerical methods, computational science and engineering fundamentals I wrote several books specifically aimed at engineers during the past decade in the topics of approximation techniques, calculus of variations and finite element analysis. Some of them are very slowly adapted in academia by professors who are not part of the incumbent clicque.
Any insightful, industrial educational support like yours is welcome. Hopefully we can turn around the tendency and prevent loosing leadership in engineering as much as we already did in manufacturing and production.
Masha,
A great topic and somewhat never-ending…I can recall a number of very good and even great instructors in the sciences and engineering. I have had the chance to do some teaching as well, and now know how difficult it is to so a good job, let alone a great job as an instructor.
The most consistently great instructors usually love their job. For junior faculty this speaks to the overall departmental and institutional environment in which they operate, as well as their own personal virtues.
Teaching is also not the only focus in engineering (and science). Research is also a priority. Of course there is research and publishing in the humanities as well.
Where are the Carl Sagans or Jacques Cousteaus of engineering?
Carver Mead comes to mind as an example of an especially innovative teacher in Engineering (EE) as well as Lynn Conway. No doubt there are many more examples in many sub-fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
Also important are the basic science teachers, as well as humanities that round out an engineer’s education, as well as the multidisciplinary fields (biomedical, neuroscience, bioinformatics, many others…) where many jobs reside and important research is being done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller
(had the pleasure of taking freshman physics from him many years ago now…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/210
(now educating the English speaking world about the brain, with Charlie Rose)
These are of course extreme examples.
I have had the pleasure of having many great teachers in my academic experience, as well as being grateful for the early confidence to recognize and avoid as much as possible, the least great…
It seems to me like the information (however imperfect in the form of teacher evaluations) is out there. Good teaching needs to be rewarded, and bad teaching improved.
Thank you, Curt.
Great thoughts! Thank you for sharing the links.
We have all had boring teachers, but I will have to admit that I have had a large number of fantastic teachers who were also first rate researchers. It is obvious that the better teachers are the ones who influenced us most, but I honestly cannot think of a year in undergraduate studies when I did not have at least one exceptional teacher, and I cannot think of a single lecturer in grad school who bored me. The methods of my better teachers who managed to captivate me during class have been the model for me when I lecture, anywhere from 20 minutes at conferences, or full day tutorials. Keep the participants involved, interested, on their toes and challenged. Use humor whenever possible. Above all, find a way to make the topic hit home. Find the intuitive link that makes the abstract concrete and comprehensible.
I remember a lecture from my class in Statistical Mechanics by professor Mark Azbel. One student asked a question. Although I do not remember the question, I remember it was not trivial. Mark stood there for a moment, thinking, looking out the window. After a moment, he turned to the class, and said, I know the answer, now I am just thinking of a way to explain it so that it will be simple.