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Reflections on the Role of Teacher and Student

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Reflections on the Role of Teacher and Student

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My opening teaching statement speaks of the roles of teacher and student as having the teacher in providing direction with topic selection and topic breakdown and the student engaging and taking that information in and expanding on it with their own study.

This viewpoint was mainly formed during my time running an electronics lab and evolving that over a few years based upon student feedback. Since I started the PGCert I have had the opportunity to design and run my own module in a more traditional manner. I have tried to keep this mentality at the core of how I designed the module.

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Still from one of the "training" videos on MATLAB

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Still from one of the "training" videos on MATLAB

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I have designed the module with this in mind, it’s a “System-level” module with many topics, none of them studied to any great depth. The aim is to give students a good working knowledge of a number of topics so they can participate in all areas of EV design instead of just the area that they are specialising in. To aid in keeping the students engaged through the modules many different topics I have created a setting of a small (slightly shambolic) EV firm and employed them all as interns. I use this setting during the intro lecture and particularly during the coursework. The coursework tasks are pitched as investigations for the company into new technology. The aim is to put the students into the mindset that they are trying to write a report that proves a point rather than simply answering a list of numbered questions.

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Overall I found that the setting worked well to keep the students on-board with the module. This often also allowed me to speak about my experience in industry which helps the students appreciate that the module is not just a random grab-bag of topics. For the coursework tasks the setting only partially worked. Often I found the students struggled with the idea that the way that they present their ideas is as crucial as the actual numerical or graphical answer they provide. This came up most commonly when I would provide feedback on report writing and they did not really want that, instead wanting to be told the answers and where they went wrong. Unfortunately the tasks do not really lend themselves to a single iron-clad correct answer.

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Going forwards I plan to keep the setting and the coursework style but improve my lectures and materials provided to the students to ease them into the report writing style. My intention is to augment the setting and tasks with an even more ambitious hardware coursework task in the near future as I feel that student engagement and involvement will improve if they can see and experience the results of their work in the real world and not just on a computer screen.

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I maintain a continuous cycle of taking in student feedback each year and using this to improve my teaching for the next year. The lab which I have run for many years and features significantly in my opening teaching statement is a good example of this. Whilst the lab topic remains static, the process alters each year to iron out issues that students have had. This is true for the student materials which I initially removed a lot of the scaffolding and step-by-step nature but have reintroduced some of the support in the early stages of the lab after students had significant issues. In the past two years of the lab I have had to work mostly on the extension exercises which introduce new topics to the students which they later use in their summer term projects. This, I feel, shows that the earliest parts of the lab have worked well.

Whilst the lab has been my teaching role for many years, I have only recently started lecturing and this is an area I feel I have grown significantly in the recent past. Student feedback, once again, has been invaluable in this. I have included much more clarity on my coursework style and what I deem to be important in their reports and (most importantly) why it is important to me and in their future careers. Particularly in the lecture course, I have found that it is important to maintain a balance between taking student feedback onboard and standing my ground on principles I feel are critical to their success as engineers. This is why I have chosen to increase the clarity of my reasoning for having an investigative report structure rather than altering the courseworks to be more formulaic or question based.

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The revision of the motors section of the EV module is very much focussed on a hardware experiment. Making this work is the final goal for the students and will provide them with something to aim for and also instant feedback on their progress (if its not spinning theyre not finished).

The existing version of this coursework is a simulation task and I have found that the students find it challenging to interpret the simulation results and conceptualise what the results would mean in the real world. This is also a common feedback point when discussing it with the students. Changing to hardware will help to resolve this issue but significantly adds to the challenge of the task.

The more challenging task means, in turn, that the task is better suited to a group activity. I had originally been reticent to do this as students often complain but when I asked them directly in a mentimeter, the majority were happy to work in groups.

Working in groups, in turn allows me to include the ideas presented in Dan Borglunds paper (Borglund, 2007), this is discussed in more detail in the Educational Design assignment. The aim is to include more student guided learning through allowing them to select topics for future lectures to address what they feel they need to know to solve the overall problem. Through a process of iteration each week over a number of weeks the students will work together to simulate the hardware experiment and then implement their solution on the hardware.

This is a significant redesign of the course and thus will impact the whole course. I plan to move other topics to pre-recorded videos and ask the students to watch them in their own time to free up teaching session. Additionally to give more time, I plan to overlap this coursework and another more report based one so each can have a much longer time between the students getting it and the deadline. I will need to monitor the success of this as it goes and take and respond to student feedback during the running and in subsequent years.

This also needs to have a hardware setup design and tested. I have found that the testing phase is very challenging as students in my lab have proven extremely capable of breaking hardware that I have tested and thought suitable. Never wishing to waste a teaching opportunity, I am running an MSc project (with a former EVT student) to develop this hardware over the summer and the result of this will act as my prototype.

This is quite an ambitious redesign so I expect I will need to phase it in, the videos will be introduced this year, and the hardware may be partially introduced this year possibly as a demonstration of their simulation results led by me rather than a full coursework task in itself.

Borglund, D. (2007). A case study of peer learning in higher aeronautical education.

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I dont have a photo of the motor test hardware but its a little like this but MUCH smaller

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I dont have a photo of the motor test hardware but its a little like this but MUCH smaller

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from https://www.iqsdirectory.com/articles/dynamometers/electric-motor-testing-dynamometer.jpg

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As well as continuing to evolve my existing teaching in the lectures and labs I have discussed two significant new pieces of teaching in the essays of the PGCert. They are the rework of the motors section of the EVT module and the Digital Wattown project.

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Through my studies in the various modules in the PGCert I have been introduced to a number of different pedagogical theories describing the process of learning and teaching. Within the realms of constructivism I have found scaffolding and the Bruner spiral theory of curriculum design to be the most compelling to me as I can immediately put them to use to improve my teaching.

I have considered the concept of a spiral curriculum and scaffolding while creating my lectures but also in working on my wider teaching in labs and in my outreach work on Digital energy with Hitachi. I have found them to be particularly useful when first building these pieces of teaching and putting the first notes together before I flesh out the material fully.

The principle of constructive alignment between the ILOs, the material and the assessment is another that I find to be very useful in planning my teaching. I have tried to maintain this with my lecture module through the setting within a fictional company. This also allows me to create a much more authentic assessment environment which I feel is to the benefit of the students.

In the future, I feel that having access to a significantly improved pedagogical vocabulary (including the word pedagogical itself …) means that I am better equipped to find the resources that will help me inform myself of best practices and allow me to understand the reasoning behind others choices of teaching style. This in turn means I can incorporate the pieces that I find useful and combine them with my own style.

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In the Digital Learning assignment I wrote about an idea I have had in the back of my mind for a few years. The structure and language of the course allowed me to take this idea and add a bit of flesh to the bones in a more formalised manner so that it may actually be a useful teaching tool when it is made.

The Digital Wattown game is intended to use a game-like structure to introduce elements of the future of electricity grids and (more importantly) the reasoning behind the change. It is intended for a younger audience and to be mostly student-led and self teaching.

This is a long term project, I am going to run a final year project for a student in the EE department to prototype this (similar to the motors project) over the next academic year. This should be a really interesting project for the right student and allows me to get a feel on how it will come together. After this I will likely need to bring in outside expertise as much of the process is outside my skill set. I look forward to keeping this project rumbling along as I believe it has a lot of promise!

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This shows my plan for a sort of diagramatic look and isometric style. The left side is the town and progressively as you go to the right you go to the larger, higher voltage bits of the grid.

In this diagram there is railway networks, a road network for showing EVs (the horizontal lines), and would also include energy generation at the various scales.

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This is the kind of stylised and simplified grid structure diagram I use in presentations about Digital Grids, this is the kind of imagery I would like to use in Digital Wattown

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Gridlington - A similar but less gamelike idea ...

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Gridlington - A similar but less gamelike idea ...

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Gridlington is a more University-level teaching tool/scenario/setting I am putting together to help structure the teaching of Electical Power topics within my department as part of my role as "Theme Champion"