(225a) Getting Active: How the Asee Summer School Shaped My Teaching Practices

Understanding how current students learn and engage in a classroom is a topic in which not many young professors are well versed. Traditional educational techniques, such as a straight lectures or a PowerPoint “slide show”, are so prevalent that many new faculty or faculty candidates have very few examples from their own time as students to help shape their future teaching practices. Fortunately, there are a number of passionate educators among members of AIChE and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) community who have identified this problem and organize many resources and events for junior faculty to develop this skillset. Opportunities such as ASEE’s Summer School for Chemical Engineering Faculty, helped expose new faculty, such as myself, to ideas like active learning, time management, and the outside resources available to chemical engineering educators.

To engage students more during lecture, I developed course content based on active learning. Lectures were designed so students solved problems or derived key formulas in teams during frequent in-class activities, rather than providing the information in a traditional lecture. Students were given the opportunity to interact with each other or myself as they completed the activity, before a “random name generator” selected one or more students to offer an answer. Furthermore, courses were structured around the concept of “handouts with holes”. Instead of creating pre-made work sheets or a PowerPoint “slide show”, handouts missing key information or ones that need to be completed during class were provided. This method was employed by preparing very stripped down lecture notes in PowerPoint that were subsequently uploaded for the students to print prior to class. As class proceeded, students filled out the notes, which shifted the responsibility of note taking to them, while still keeping the day’s lecture more organized.

To better balance my own responsibilities, I adopted various new time management techniques focused on grading and content creation. One method was the number of student’s work graded for each assignment. Homework was done in groups, but each student was responsible for submitting their own hand-written copy. To use time more effectively, only one assignment from each group was randomly selected to be grade. Once graded, each group member received the same grade. This allowed for more in-depth assignments due to the reduced grading time burden. Another method was creating answer sheets for the students to use during exams. Making a stream-lined answer sheet for each student to use helped reduce the time and effort it took to grade the assignment. Lastly, resources like the AIChE Concept Warehouse helped build content and refocus the fundamental way I created exam problems for the students.

The ASEE Summer School experience was seminal in changing the way I view education. The practices, workshops, and talks the junior faculty were given access to this early in their career helped evolve my teaching style completely. Furthermore, the program offered the chance to make contacts with other young faculty, all of whom will be my colleagues as we start our journey in academia together. The exposure to these new concepts and colleagues will continue to shape my future academic career.