One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to link theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.
Community-Centeredness
I consider this dimension as the newest to me and the one that I have spent most of the time working on and the one I most enjoyed. This dimension encourages both students and faculty to learn from one another, and fosters the development identity as a profession in class and out of class.
A statement that I always like to emphasize in my teaching philosophy is to state explicitly in the teaching philosophy document that I would encourage the community-centeredness in developing the systems perspective in my students. Since this was my first time to interact with students at this capacity as a TA, I found myself confused and need to learn with them in so many occasions. I believe that there is no harm of showing that you are confused even though some students do not feel comfortable with that. However, I found that most of the students learn a lot when we are working together on a problem. I am afraid that this feeling would vanish after a while when I start to master the material and the best way to present it, and this is why I should state this in my teaching philosophy that I must show the students that I am learning with them. Personally, and keeping the systems perspective in mind, there are always new angles to look at things when thinking holistically. I would consider this fitting well with community-centered lens in the HPL framework.
During my office hours, it was clear to me that “people learn differently.” Unlike regular office hours for other classes where students approach the TA with their questions, I tried to generate during my office hours an environment that is very similar to the lab environment, in which students sit down on a computer and the TA approaches them when they have questions. It is important to emphasize here that they still had the freedom to work on their own, individually or with their teams, to show up and leave whenever they wanted, and to browse the internet and do any other side activities they wanted. Interestingly, most of the students who showed up did so for the entire period of office hours of two hours, asked questions all the time, were less stressed, and rarely, or never, did they do any other side activities. I think this is because they showed up for a single purpose of completing their tasks; they had the motivation.
Some of the students had team meetings during the office hours and were asking questions as a team. It seemed that their team was well established and they were doing collaborative work very nicely together. Some other students were working individually and they benefited well from the one-to-one interaction. I have to point here that I did not have the key solutions for the homeworks that they were working on, and found myself working with them to solve the problems together. This is a very key point. I think not having the final answers helped a lot in generating more a community-centered learning environment where students and the TA were learning from one another. I felt that students learned a lot from the techniques they were seeing me using to tackle the problems. I found most of them giving me ideas to solve the problems, and they were very good ideas. In the beginning I felt that they lost their trust in me because they felt that I did not have the answer, but that feeling disappeared immediately when they saw me working on the problem with them. It was a mixed feeling of confusion, experimenting with the problems we had, and eventually exploring. I was sure that they learned a lot from these sessions. Compared to other situations where I had the key solutions before the students approached me, I am confident now that this approach of teaching is far more effective. Before this experience, I used to rush to give the students all the details of the problem to get to the solution. But now I think this effective approach is more community-, learner-, and knowledge-centered. A challenge remains on how to generate the same atmosphere of making the students “think” when I already know the answers to their question.
This dimension required me to develop confidence. In fact, some of the students in their feedback to me mentioned that they enjoyed this approach. A question that remains on this dimension is how to maintain this attitude toward teaching without getting bored doing the same thing over and over again. One professor whom I interviewed answered this question by telling me to do new things each time. He himself mentioned to me that he even went to sit down in a class to learn the theory of relativity and then teach it to his students in a new class that he has developed.
I am generally pleased with the feedback that the students provided to me on the course evaluation feedback. I believe the theory we learn about engineering education should be linked to practice.
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