Teaching

Partnership

Teaching is a shared responsibility. I want students to understand that from the first day, and I establish it in two ways: by saying it directly and by modeling it in how I show up for every class. As instructors, we are partners in students’ education. My job is to create the environment, set the pace, and bring genuine investment. Their job is to show up ready to engage. When a student struggles, my first question is not "what is wrong with this student?" but "what can be done to help this student achieve their full potential?"

Tone is a critical variable in that partnership. If the tone is punitive or dismissive, students stop engaging. They stop asking questions. They stop taking intellectual risks. Everything else becomes harder. I have seen what the wrong tone looks like from the student side: as a graduate student I took an engineering ethics course where the content was delivered flatly, the instructor did not seem interested in the material, and I could have gotten the same result reading the slides alone. Ethics is inherently interesting material. The failure was not the subject; it was the absence of energy behind it.

What the right tone looks like is easier to describe with a specific example. In a guest lecture I led in a mechatronics course, the learning objective for the day was the successful integration of discrete components, motor control, and pulse width modulation using an Arduino. I opened with a circuit diagram and assembled the circuit live on a document camera while students built theirs at their desks. We coded the basic functionality together with my screen projected, tested it as a class, and then I gave the students class time to work on their own circuit and code. As the students troubleshot their work, I moved through the classroom to help. Students who finished first then started helping students who were still working through the activity. By setting up the classroom as a shared learning environment and encouraging students to work through issues and ask questions, students took ownership of the shared educational goal.

My Classroom

Engineering is an applied discipline, and the classroom should function the same way. I see the advantages of the flipped classroom model where short, pre-recorded lectures cover the conceptual material before class, and in-person time is freed for active problem solving and student questions. This structure gives direct insight into where students are struggling and lets the instructional team address misunderstandings immediately. What students traditionally completed as homework then becomes an interactive learning experience in the classroom, and the artificial separation between faculty and students starts to break down.

Working through problems live, including the wrong turns, is an important part of how I use class time. I will sometimes introduce a bug deliberately. Debugging is a skill, and students learn it by actively debugging, not by watching someone produce clean, correct code on the first attempt. It is important to show students the thinking process of an experienced engineer navigating a problem, as it normalizes struggle and models effective problem solving. A lecture format often keeps that thinking invisible. Sometimes unplanned bugs happen too. During one of my live demonstrations, I made an unintended mistake; we took it in stride, worked through it together, and the class learned something in the process. Those moments are worth embracing, as they show students that all engineers, even experienced engineers, need to try, fail, learn, and repeat.

I want my classes to be interactive regardless of format. Even in a traditional lecture-style course, I work to include frequent student interaction, demonstrations, and small group activities such as think/pair/share, small group problem solving, and other similar approaches. This provides opportunities for students to practice skills in real time with guidance, an approach that research consistently shows improves both learning outcomes and student success rates (Freeman et al., 2014). Our student body is diverse and providing varied opportunities to engage with the material benefits them all.

Empathy and Student Focus

Empathy shapes how I deal with people generally, and I carry it into the classroom. Students are adults with adult lives and real responsibilities. Many carry significant obligations outside of class, including work, family, and financial pressures, alongside the mental health and wellness challenges that have become increasingly common on college campuses. We cannot expect students to leave any of this at the classroom door, nor should we. An abundance of understanding costs very little and means a great deal.

In my experience, positive industry handles missed deadlines more thoughtfully than people might expect. When a developer surfaces a problem early, the response is often support, not punishment. What matters is whether the engineer ultimately delivered something useful, and whether they communicated honestly along the way. A team member who goes quiet and resurfaces at the deadline has a very different conversation than one who raised the flag early. I carry that same expectation into my classroom. Honest communication is what I ask of students, not perfection.

When academic integrity issues arise, I want the response to be oriented toward recovery. I have dealt with one directly: a student was caught copying code from another student's submission. The evidence was undeniable. We followed the process, spoke with everyone involved, and notified the appropriate people. From that point forward, there were no further problems. That student pulled their semester around and successfully recovered from what started as a rough semester.

Assessment

Ideally grades should reflect a student's mastery of the course material. Armacost and Pet-Armacost (2003) found that mastery-based approaches led to improved learning outcomes. Mastery-based grading evaluates students on whether they have achieved command of the material, not on when they achieved it or how many attempts it took. Students can resubmit work for re-evaluation as their understanding deepens, within reasonable course constraints. Mastery-based grading requires individual evidence of learning, which means projects are completed individually or in very small groups.

When possible, I favor projects that require students to integrate skills across the course, with milestone deliverables that create checkpoints for feedback and help build self-regulated learning habits that carry into professional work. My approach to grading homework is to grade on attempt and completion, reflecting that students are in the early practice stage of the learning process. Just as athletes need practice time with their coach ahead of a big game, students need the opportunity to work through problems, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes before their mastery is evaluated. When wrong answers at this early-stage cost points on the final grade, students optimize for points rather than understanding.

Creating a Positive Learning Environment

Every student who walks into an engineering program brings a different starting point. Some have been coding since middle school. Others are picking up a circuit for the first time. That range is not a problem to be managed; it is the reality of teaching, and it is something I find genuinely energizing. Intelligence and capability are developed through sustained effort (Ericsson et al., 1993). One of an instructor's jobs is to create an environment where that development can happen.

Retention of engineering students is often a particular problem in the first two years, and the cause is often not academic. Students who can succeed sometimes leave because they start to feel like they do not belong. The former ASEE president, Jenna Carpenter (2022), framed the challenge well: instead of asking who we can weed out, ask what we can do to weave students in. That shift in framing matters. It encourages the instructor to take on the role of guide.

When a first-year student tells me they are not sure they belong in engineering, I want to have that conversation. Sometimes the honest answer is that their goals point toward a different path, and I will support them and help guide them there. But if what they mean is that they are not sure they are smart enough, then the student is expressing a fixed mindset. By helping the student shift to a growth mindset, they can see that they are smart enough and that with time and effort they can succeed. Not every student starts from the same place, but everyone can grow, and the question is whether the environment supports that.

Continuous Improvement

I am excited to try new practices in the classroom, and I want to study where, when, and how they contribute to student success. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is a field I intend to draw from and continue to contribute to. I approach the classroom the same way I approach engineering problems: with curiosity, a willingness to iterate, and an honest read of what the evidence is telling me.

Experience

I find that I am energized by leading a classroom and am thankful for the opportunity to teach. During my time as a graduate student, I had the opportunity to lead multiple interactive problem-solving lessons in 3 different classes: Introduction to Engineering Problem Solving, Information Systems Design, Mechatronics Engineering for Smart Device Design.

References

Armacost, R. L., & Pet-Armacost, J. (2003). Using mastery-based grading to facilitate learning. *33rd Annual Frontiers in Education, FIE 2003.* IEEE.

Carpenter, J. P. (2022). Weave students into engineering, don't weed them out. *ASEE Prism, 32*(1), 40.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. *Psychological Review, 100*(3), 363–406.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415.