learning teaching & understanding understanding

I am a new assistant professor at George Washington University in Engineering Management and Systems Engineering.  For my first semester, being an assistant professor was better than a dream!  No teaching responsibility, so I was only writing proposals and submitting postdoc papers.

My, how much difference winter break has made!

Now, being a prof is easy only in my dreams.  Adding even one class for teaching has made it very difficult to be disciplined about research.  In addition, I have had great difficulty attracting students to my research group. [E-mail or respond to this post me if you are interested in risk and statistical analysis applied to drinking water networks and want to do a PhD at George Washington…]  But by far, the hardest part of my job has been teaching.

Teaching would be, by far, the easiest part of my job if I didn’t care.  Although I was assigned a class (because my original course was canceled) and given the book and course notes, I felt I’d be cheating if I just lectured from the notes provided.  I also would have been shamed for requiring the students to produce their own work on assignments while I essentially plagiarized notes during lecture (call me foolish if you will).  If I was unconcerned about teaching, I’d just read directly from the slides I was given, and go home. [And for folks who read the Chronicle of Higher Education, or other similar pubs, you may think that I am foolish for not taking this approach.]

But teaching was THE reason I applied to graduate school, and I view even research as a teaching process.  So I have invested considerable time in learning how to teach.  Today, in George Washington’s Faculty Learning Collective for Junior faculty (FLC, Jr.) in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Instruction, I believe I have received the most important resource I will obtain with respect to teaching to date: a link to a video titled “Teaching Teaching and Learning Learning.”

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5629273206953884671#]

This video helped me immensely in understanding my students’ feedback into my teaching methods and style.  I still need to understand a bit more about the techniques and resources available to profs for engaging students on Level 3 (creative evaluation; deep understanding) not Level 1 (surface understanding), but now my perception of my students has been regenerated.  I started the class believing the students were all going to be excellent students and diligent about their work.  I soon became jaded, and often visibly frustrated, with their sometimes reasonable rebuke (i.e., not completing assignments or attending class) of my classroom approach.  The above video has helped me to understand that students are simply responding to a system, and I need to make sure that my reward system and assignments match my teaching objectives.  This sounds simple enough, but I realize now that this match was only occurring for myself, through my preparation for class.  In preparing lectures, I was doing what I want my students to do.

This has led me to attempt several things.  First, in the past few classes I have been reducing the number of concepts covered so that we can increase the conceptual depth we might obtain from our discussions [I teach Quality Control and Acceptance Sampling].  Second, I have tried to more explicitly link the assignments to the lecture approach.  I try to have the students talk through the assignments in a recitation period, but two things were making the recitation period unsuccessful: my failure to integrate the course and assignments; and my permission to work in groups while assigning too much homework.  I have now reduced the amount of homework while returned to individual assignments (with acknowledged collaborators).  Hopefully this will improve the effectiveness of the recitation.  Third, I have met with each of my 7 students individually to understand more about how they have approached the course and what they think should be changed.  Viewed apart from the context of the video their discussion seems like bargaining for my lowest permissible standard; Viewed in context of the above video gives me a road map for better learning and understanding outcomes.

What strategies do you use to achieve effective teaching, and how do you relate to your students and understand their goals?  I’d love to hear.  If you’re a student, what are some things you’re hoping your professor would incorporate into your class to make your learning experience worth the considerable tuition you are paying?