Learning is a shared experience; all parties must be active in order for it to occur. The student’s responsibility to bravely engage with novel material is as crucial as is the instructor’s responsibility to present it from several perspectives.
As an educator, I am tasked with integrating new concepts into the working knowledge of my audience. By treating learning as more of a conversation than as a sermon, I take my knowledge off of a pedestal rather than lecturing from atop one. Central to this goal is an equitable and inclusive treatment of students; if an instructor is not sensitive to the diverse backgrounds present in his or her classroom, the learning environment cannot flourish into a collective endeavor and students with great potential may never successfully engage with the material. For example, when running weekly discussion sections in a graduate-level intermediate dynamics course, I always invited students to send me questions by email before attending in person. This enabled students to share their uncertainties even if they were uncomfortable with raising them in front of their peers. Then, in the discussion sections, we as a group would explore confusing aspects of the material together rather than singling out individuals who encountered conceptual roadblocks.
This direct engagement with the material, I believe, is a symptom of effective learning -- and by extension effective instruction. I will have done my job well if I am no longer necessary: if my students can confidently explore their own problems and ideas in the context of material we covered without my constant guidance. In engineering projects, this manifests as a shift in my role from technical consultant or chief engineer to simply project manager or design reviewer. I observed this occur during a senior-level aircraft design course in which I was a student; the instructor was inundated with conceptual and methodological questions at the term's start, but by the end of the project the students were asserting conclusions based on simulations and derivations and proposing next steps independently. When my students are capable of putting concepts into practice, I succeed as an educator.
In my experience, students learn and retain material more effectively by repeatedly and directly engaging with it. This pedagogy is ubiquitous in physical education but is less common in STEAM fields. In my several years of instructing ballroom dance and helping lead karate classes, I have found that active teaching and learning yield more interest, enjoyment, and comprehension than do more passive alternatives. In a newcomer ballroom class which I have taught for two semesters, students with little to no dance experience are gradually exposed to increasingly complicated techniques through repetitive exercises. While the moves that they are practicing remain relatively simple, the level of detail imparted to them increases with each iteration. As such, the repetition does not become monotonous, but rather exploratory. Students consistently respond well to these techniques; their interest in the material remains high as their skills improve to a point of competitive competency.
I apply these same techniques in STEAM classes, with similar encouraging results. While traditional lectures can expose students to certain concepts and techniques, the result is just that: exposure to, rather than engagement with, the material. I observed this effect in a classical aerodynamics course for senior undergraduates and first-year graduate students, for which I served as a teaching assistant. The course employed traditional lectures but the assignments challenged the students to think creatively about the material – to question it – and apply it to problems very different from those explored in the lectures. At my request, the instructor allowed me to also provide optional discussion sessions each week in which I employed more active learning techniques similar to those used in my dance classes. No new material was covered in these discussion sections; rather, the students were tasked with identifying the inherent assumptions and shortcomings of different theories from lecture by trying to apply them to problems for which they were not designed. They took ownership of the material and began to understand not only how the theories worked but also why they were constructed in certain ways. Students who attended the discussion sections attained higher grades in both the homework assignments and the examinations throughout the semester. It would be naïve to conclude a direct correlation between my endeavors and the students' performance, but the results were certainly encouraging.
Another valuable quality of active learning is how it encourages the instructor to also remain engaged in the classroom. When students are active participants in the learning process, I have the fortune of 1) seeing familiar material from new perspectives and 2) discovering novel ways to explain concepts. Diversity of perspective is as valuable for me as it is for the students. I must work to ensure students with a spectrum of learning styles all interact equitably with the material -- and with one another. An active classroom makes lectures come alive; it enables my teaching methods to continue to grow with the help of my students throughout my career.
My pedagogy will also actively grow from observing my colleagues in the classroom. I learned what I know now about instruction from countless excellent educators in my life, and I will continue to learn from more throughout my career; I hope I will also serve as a strong role model to other aspiring educators.
It is an ongoing challenge to fairly assess a student's understanding of material. Does memorization of theorems correlate with comprehension of their principles? If a student can construct a finite-element program following the exact procedure outlined in textbooks and lectures, does it mean they understand the method's limitations and the theory's inherent assumptions? How can assessment be equitable to all learning styles?
There is of course no one answer to any of these questions. In engineering, where product design and testing are at the foundation of the field, I feel it is appropriate to assess through application. A student demonstrates comprehension through application to standard problems of theories and procedures; a student demonstrates proficiency through identification of the limitations of those very concepts. If a student's comprehension of a subject enables them to work effectively on these kinds of problems, then I feel it is fair to grade them highly.
In my experience as both a student and an educator, a large number of low-risk assessments better demonstrate one's comprehension of a subject than do a few high-risk ones. In dynamical systems nomenclature, a student's performance in a semester is not ergodic: their performance on one day rarely represents their performance over the span of a semester. Therefore, why should their quantified semester's performance be concentrated into a few hours of examinations? I employ regular, small assignments and when possible replace singular midterms with weekly quizzes. As a student, this technique encouraged me to engage with the material more regularly and therefore more intimately; this resulted in improved confidence in applying what I had learned. As an educator, this technique allows me to receive much more regular feedback from my classes as to what they do and do not understand. With more assessment opportunities, I can also be more creative with what I ask of my students. For example, they can be challenged with more application-based problems if I have the time throughout the semester to ask both fundamental and peripheral questions about the material.