Thank you for your post! I think you bring up a great point that students feel much more engaged when they are engaged with, and when the professor is presented approachably. Making connections with students, as you pointed out, can be done in any number of ways but if done really increases the quality of education for all involved. I think one of my biggest take a ways from this class, my time as a student, and my time TAing is that there isn’t a signal best way to connect, but the most effective are also the most authentic/genuine. I believe this is good – we aren’t all funny, or charismatic – but those things don’t always need to be in play to connect with students… it can be as simple as just caring, or taking an interest and being ourselves.

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Thank you for your post! I really enjoyed your what if/wondering scenarios, especially as they relate to STEM. I do admit, there is still a lot of room for growth and wonder how some of the things you propose would be received by students and faculty alike. I would also like to point out that from my personal experience (granted that doesn’t mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things) I do think my engineering curriculum somewhat followed your model of “While foundational courses adopt critical pedagogical techniques to the degree to which they can, sequential, high-level courses integrate techniques to an even greater degree of experiential learning, student-centered learning, collaborative course creation, etc.” My experience with my engineering classes was that the first couple years of courses was very standard, lecture based, top down learning, while later classes incorporated much more projects, student centered approaches, case studies, and the like. So though it doesn’t seem to be as extreme as some of the suggestions you posed, I think curriculum is applying some of these principles – older students being given more latitude in their education.

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Thank you for your post! I really appreciated the individualistic perspectives each of your provided for your majors. Being a fellow civil environmental engineer myself I enjoyed Japsimrun’s identification of case studies, group projects, and the like. I think one of the harder things teachers run into when trying to foster their student’s curiosity is having answers for ‘why does this stuff matter? Or how does this stuff actually get applied?”. Personally, I think in our field (being that is based on engineering the infrastructure around us) we are lucky to have so many opportunities to really give meaningful answers to those concerns and contextualize our work in the world we live in.

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Thank you for your post and for pointing out that our teachers need to be paid more. I do think that providing higher compensation for teachers in a generally great thing (and needs to be done), but I also want to point out that I don’t necessarily think it is a cure all. I think most people will tell you (reading the comments I feel like this is the case) that the best teachers are the ones that teach because they care about their students and love educating. They are willing to go above and beyond to make sure their students learn and are generally willing to sacrifice for that goal (their time, energy, effort). Yes, increasing teachers’ pay likely makes this sacrifice feel more appreciated (and maybe encourages others to go the extra mile), but in my opinion it takes a special person to do the things needed to be a special teacher.

Increasing salaries may attract ‘smarter’ people, but do ‘smarter’ people make ‘better’ teachers? Are people who are only interested in teaching because of increased pay the type of people who will sacrifice and be motivated to go above and beyond for someone else’s education? I can’t say for sure that they will be. (Granted, it also might motivate current teachers to try harder – which would be a benefit)

Yet again… I think teachers should be paid more. Full stop. But I also don’t think having people primarily motivated by money is a great foundation for becoming educators and strictly increasing salaries doesn’t, imo, foster the mindset needed to be a great teacher.

Regarding the idea about being smarter = better teachers … I don’t always think that is the case, especially at the K-12 range. In fact, I feel one of the most underrated aspects of teaching is understanding why someone doesn’t understand (the so called muddy points) and I feel that the smartest among us struggle to see why ‘you’ don’t see things like ‘I’ see them. It’s hard to explain how to solve an ‘easy’ equation (or question) when you can’t or don’t understand why someone doesn’t think it’s ‘easy’.

Maybe this begs the question… can we all be great teachers? Is being a great teacher something you can teach?

Great post! I really like that you point out how the ‘just google it’ culture is interacting with the fundamental understanding of education and how we teach. For me, I think if you define understanding and knowledge by the ability to memorize then the ‘google it culture’ must not sit very well with you. I imagine we have all had that class or teacher – no equation sheets, no fundamental constants, no anything – where your entire assessment was your ability to memorize xyz. I think there are some benefits of making students memorize things, for example it forces them to maybe think deeper about why an equation is what it is, but personally I do not prescribe to the idea that this is how knowledge should manifest itself. Memorization doesn’t always equate to understanding, and in my opinion being able to ‘google it’ removes a lot of the superfluous need to download facts, constants, equations, etc. into our minds and opens up the ability to focus more on critical thinking. As you also pointed out, it significantly speeds up the process of accessing new information and fact checking.

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