Defining success in higher education teaching

"What are you most proud of to date in your teaching career in higher education?"

That was one of the questions during my interview for an assistant professor position at a primarily undergraduate institution in the United States. 

I think that every teacher, professor and lecturer has had some very positive moments, but also negative experiences in their past teaching activities, no matter how advanced they are in their career. It is extremely valuable to reflect on these experiences, and usually you can draw important conclusions for teaching in higher education in general. I will try to do this in today's blog post by considering one of my greatest achievements thus far as a teacher. Perhaps I am going to do the same in a future post, but with a negative example. 

So, what am I most proud of? I can think of one particular example, namely the conception and realization of group projects on numerical simulations for an elective course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- "Magnetic Materials and Applications", MSE 498 / MSE 598. The professor came up with the idea and asked me whether I could imagine the students to conduct simulations on recent problems in research. I thought about it, planned how students could use an existing Python (a popular programming language) interface to a simulation software package named OOMMF without the need of downloading or installing anything, designed problem sheets with a PhD student from our group, introduced the simulations and problems to the students in the class, and mentored the students during the 6-8 weeks when they were supposed to carry out the simulations. Afterwards, they had to present them in front of the class and write a report on their work. We asked them to work in groups of two to three students. 

Some groups did an incredible job and told us that working on the project was extremely interesting for them, because they learned a lot about how to apply the subject matter to current problems in research on magnetic materials. Unfortunately, others came up with pretty confusing and underwhelming results. What was the problem? Communication! Communication between the students within the groups, but also communication with me as their advisor and with the other teaching staff members. Consequently, for the same class in the subsequent year, we introduced virtual meetings with the students halfway through the period of time during which they were working on their simulations. We could easily figure out together with the students what the major issues were for them, whether they needed additional help or resources, and if they had made any mistakes thus far which would keep them from obtaining reasonable results. Sometimes, it is hard for students to tell whether their results are reasonable or not, so it may be helpful to give hints if things are going well. 

In the more recent class, the overall level of the students' results and presentations was significantly better than it had been in the previous year. At the same time, the feedback on the group projects was overwhelmingly positive. Some folks said that this has been one of their highlights of their time at the university. Others said that they certainly learned more about the subject matter than they would have learned during a conventional lecture. They said that they enjoyed working on topics that are relevant in the current research community and that they could also use creative thinking to come up with sophisticated solutions to the problems we had given them. I was very delighted to receive such positive feedback, and eventually I was also proud of myself, the instructor of the class, and especially the students -- together, we had been highly successful with these group projects.

So, to summarize, what are the key learnings that I could take away from the aforementioned group project activities? 

• Group projects are a great way to enhance communication among students. Students become actively involved in a class by working on problems together. 
• Mutual feedback between students and teachers is extremely important. During group projects which are ongoing for a few weeks, it may be beneficial to hold regular meetings in order to discuss potential issues and questions. Also, the teacher can clarify certain details about the problem that might not be clear to the students. 
• Students want to understand how they can apply the subject matter and in which way the contents of the class are relevant for their future career, current research problems or technological applications. Therefore, examples and current research topics should always be highlighted in a course, even in undergraduate courses such as classical mechanics or electromagnetism. I think that we, the teachers, are not always very good at that. 
• As a teacher, one can always improve and learn from mistakes in the past (e.g., in our case by introducing additional meetings between teachers and students before the project reports are due).
• Simulations in general are a great way to let students discover the current content of a class in physics. For instance, by varying certain parameters or energy terms, the behavior of the physical system can change significantly, which is displayed in the results of the numerical modeling efforts. 

That's it for today's blog post. As you can tell, this was a pretty specific and personalized story, but I do hope that some of the conclusions might be helpful for the reader's teaching or learning activities. 

Cheers, 

Martin