September 8, 1995

Engineers promote excellent teaching

Engineers build bridges, design robots, and develop new materials, among other things. What do they know about teaching? At North Carolina State University, two engineering professors know quite a bit about teaching and take measures to ensure their colleagues do as well. Every summer, Dr. Richard M. Felder and Dr. Richard L. Porter dispense well-researched advice through teaching effectiveness workshops in the College of Engineering.

In the past nine years, over 150 professors and hundreds of graduate students at NCSU have taken part in the workshops--one for faculty and one for graduate student teaching assistants. This year, the workshop for faculty drew two professors from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, and several faculty members from other colleges on the NCSU campus attended to glean ideas for workshops of their own.

Felder and Porter offer participants like Dr. Dave Evans, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at NCSU, the ammunition they need to conquer the uncertainty and provide their students with an valuable yet exciting classroom experience.

"When I started teaching five years ago at the University of Maine, two things became immediately apparent to me: I loved teaching, and I did not have a clue how to do it most effectively," Evans said. "I could only emulate my own professors. I did some reading on my own and tried out a variety of ideas in my classes, but that is a pretty inefficient way to learn how to teach."

For two or three days, teachers change roles and become students. They receive a course plan and a thick photocopied text compiled by their instructors, sit through lectures, take notes, participate in group assignments and even raise their hands when they have a question.

These students, however, have the benefit of fast-talking, quick-witted and visually expressive teachers. Felder and Porter punctuate almost every comment with hand gestures, are constantly on the move and put their colleagues so at ease that teacher and students banter naturally.

To illustrate his point that everyone can fall victim to short attention spans, Felder told the group, "Every one of you in the past minute has found yourself drifting off and then suddenly saying, "Whoa, there's a lecture going on here.'"

Without missing a beat, one of the professors responded, "Huh?"

Now recognized as an engineering and science education authority, Felder has even been named an outstanding educator of the century by the American Society for Engineering Education, but twelve years ago his methods produced glazed eyes and stifled yawns. He started reading cognitive and educational psychology journals and decided his engineering colleagues would be interested in the material if one of their own presented it.

"Engineers are not notorious for listening to educators talking about education, whereas I can write partial differential equations on the board and say things like Íentropy,' and so they think I might know something worth hearing about," Felder said.

Porter joined Felder because he believed existing efforts to improve teaching were not working. "Rich and I were sitting on a committee dealing with teaching effectiveness and realized that all that was happening was talk, talk, and more talk. We decided to do something about it."

The first faculty workshop was held ten years ago. A few years later, they offered one to graduate students, and Felder began publishing papers and giving talks on teaching effectiveness around the country.

Five years ago, Felder and Dr. James Stice, chemical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, initiated the National Effective Teaching Institute, a three-day workshop they now present every June at the Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education. Felder estimates he has reached over 2,000 professors across the country with his message.

In their workshops, Felder and Porter cover a number of topics: learning and teaching styles, planning courses, homework, testing, grading, motivation, creativity, student problems, problem students, problems and solutions for teachers, evaluating teaching. They emphasize two strategies teachers can use to ensure that their students play a crucial role in their own education: active learning and cooperative learning.

When Felder realized that students could simply copy his notes and do no intellectual work of their own, he took the focus off himself in the classroom and put the students to work solving problems in class, brainstorming individually and as groups, and working on projects in teams. Students are resistant to such techniques, he says, so he must sell the approach of active learning.

"I tell them my job here is not to tell you everything you need to know--my job is to prepare you to be an engineer. When you get out there and you're working in the plant or you're working on the faculty or whatever, there's no teacher, there's no textbook, there are no lectures. It's basically you and this information spread out all over the place, and it's your job to pull it in, and it's my job to train you to do that" he said.

Felder and Porter also emphasize cooperative learning, or team-based learning, which forces students to participate in classroom work and prepares them for teamwork in their future jobs.

The two professors themselves adopt a team-teaching approach by helping each other with their respective workshops. (Porter leads the graduate student workshop while Felder takes charge of the faculty workshop.) They demonstrate the virtues of team work and emphasize teaching variety by implementing in the workshops the techniques they advocate for the classroom: brainstorming, team work, individual work, problem solving, assessment.

"The more you throw at them and then prepare them to deal with it, the better you're doing as a teacher," Felder said. "If you can set it up in class so that they never know what you're going to do next, you're probably doing a good job of teaching."

Lueny Morell de Ramirez, special assistant to the chancellor for academic affairs and professor of chemical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, said the workshop does not concentrate on theory as most workshops do but rather gives practical advice and requires active participation.

"It's an eye-opener," she said. "It's learning to do a job you weren't trained to do."

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