Great points! I definitely agree that learning, as well as teaching, can be viewed as a long series of small changes. Thanks for pointing out the student perspective!

Thanks for your comment, Karen! I think you make a really great point that we don’t always see the full impact of things. But we all can do things that have those far-reaching effects!

Thanks for your comment! I definitely agree that the walls are starting to come down, and that progress will probably be a little bit slower in some of the disciplines. But I do think we have more work to do in both engineering education and the engineering workforce.

And thanks for the link to the program designed to get girls in rural Appalachia interested in IT. I love that it starts with a game! I had to try it out and found out that my results indicate that I could have considered careers such as Network Admin, Web Developer, or Software Developer. This was really cool! Thanks!

Thanks for your post! I really liked your comparison of teaching and presenting. When I taught, I also found myself talking at my students for the entire class. And there were a lot of blank faces staring back at me. One thing that I would do was just try different things, different activities, different ways to engage students. For example, one lecture I gave was on decision matrices. So I had students make paper airplanes and then we used a decision matrix to determine the “winning” paper airplane based on criteria that they specified at the beginning of class. It was really fun and way better than just talking about the concept. And while some things worked really well, other things did not work at all. But I learned a lot about what works for me in the process.

Thanks for the post! I, too, am a big fan of taking notes. I like to color code my notes, reference other sections, and organize the ideas. But I hardly ever did that with courses. I started each semester, with my four-colored pen in hand, ready to learn. But all of the classes moved so quickly (at least for me) that I never had any time to process the information during class. So I just frantically copied down what was on the board and what the professor said with the hopes that I could make sense of it later. I wonder if one thing that instructors can do is give students the time to listen, understand, and decide for themselves what is important. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for your comment! And I agree that context can play a huge role!

I really like your point about seeking advice from people who are good at what you are trying to do. How can we incorporate that into a classroom? Thanks for your comment!

I appreciate your perspective, but I think we just view things differently. For me, my goal in school was to get perfect grades for several reasons that I will not get into now. But in other activities, my goal was to get better and improve. It was a different context and I had different expectations.

And there is a big difference between reflection and simply identifying errors or seeing what problems you got wrong on a test. For me, I would look at the solutions posted online and make sure that I could do the problems before the next test. But I did not truly reflect on what I did and why I did it. It is this step of reflection that is so valuable.

Thanks for your comment!

This is a really great point! Thanks for pointing that out!

I think continuous feedback in an activity like sports was extremely important. And your comment brings up a really good point about educational contexts too! I think students really benefit from feedback during the entire semester instead of just at the end. Thanks for your comment!