Core Competency 1

This course aided me as a practical course in engineering pedagogy for my academic career. The course is a mixture of three components: developing practical skills and knowledge of pedagogy, understanding engineering education literature and best practices, and special topics relevant to building a successful academic career. The EGR 811 course syllabus can be viewed from here.

Through this course, I learned several practical knowledge that will help in my academic career. This includes:

(1) Designing course objectives
(2) Implementing backwards course design
(3) Understanding and developing different assessments methods related to the course objectives
(4) Writing an effective Teaching Philosophy Statement

Since academic positions requires an teaching statement or philosophy, this course gave me the opportunity to craft a teaching statement that reflects my teaching philosophy, methods, experience, and goals.

The teaching statement shall reflect:

• Why and how and I consider teaching as my prospective career
• Why I think my teaching will facilitate and enhance the student learning process
• How my teaching reflects my philosophy and goals
• How I plan to anchor the student knowledge to practical applications by making on-field visits to industry firms on a regular basis
• My teaching expertise and what the new course(s) I can develop
• How I plan to use active learning, collaboration, and group communications to enhance the student learning

After drafting the teaching statement, I got a feedback from the course instructor that additionally fine-tuned my teaching statement. The teaching statement can be viewed from here.

Teaching in the university could be challenging and requires practice for newly PhD holders who joins the academia. This course required me to teach one class by substituting one of the faculty for a course that intersect with my specialty or experience. I delivered a class to ME 391 students. The class objectives included examining three types of behavior for unforced Mass Spring Damper (M-S-D) system and introducing the forced M-S-D system and resonance in mechanical systems.

Before this lecture, I prepared several questions for the students to trigger their thinking. I connected the class content with an application they see everyday. For instance, the door closer mechanism is a an example for a critically damped system, which can be manually adjusted to control the damping ratio.

What I learned after giving this class that students like to change activity in the class. There are various and many activities that the lecturer can initiate such as: playing a video that support a presented information, asking questions with think pair and share strategy, or providing clicker questions. This is much more effective compared to a long lecturing period where students are more likely to loose concentration.

To get new ideas related to effective teaching from the class participants, each participant in the class was required to research and present about a topic that touches one of the class topics and present to the whole class. I selected the topic of effective teaching. Effective teaching can be incorporated in classes in several ways. I delivered a presentation on "Effective Teaching Methods in Large Classes".

In this presentation, I discussed the question: Is lecturing effective?

In 1976, a study by Johnstone, Alex H., and Frederick Percival determined that students needed a three- to five-minute period of settling down, which would be followed by 10 to 18 minutes of optimal focus. Then — no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter — there would come a lapse. In the vernacular, the students would “lose it.” The study was done before the age of texting and tweeting; presumably, the attention spans of younger people today have become even shorter. Thus, changing activity within the class is essential for the students' engagement.

I also introduced the advantages of small and large classes. It was shown that small size classes enable teachers to be more effective, and research has shown that children who attend small classes in the early grades continue to benefit over their entire lifetime”. On the other hand, large classes promote competition with more students and expose the students to more ideas and insights.

Furthermore, I presented ways to increase the teaching effectiveness in the classes such as

1. Requiring the students to study the lecture material before class and using Entrance and & Exit tickets to assess their pre and post understanding.
2. Changing activity
3. Recap! This was shown to increase the students retention.

Finally, I presented ways to deal with disruptive students. Examples include

1. Try to physically move to the part of the room where the students are, and continue to lead the class whilst standing next to them.
2. Direct a question to the area in which the noisy students are sitting. This focuses attention on that area of the class.
3. Try speaking more quietly. This causes the noisy students to become more obvious in contrast and other students may ask them to quieten down.

The lecture slides can be viewed from here.