Here, then, is our top ten list of questions frequently asked at teaching workshops. I have a lot of material to get through in a semester. I teach a class of 175 students in a fixed-seat auditorium. I'm teaching a course by distance education. I tried putting students to work in groups, but some of them hated it and one complained to my department head.
Engineers constantly have to face deadlines.
My department head says that we can't count teaching too much in promotion and tenure decisions because we don't know how to evaluate teaching. The people who go to teaching workshops are mostly excellent teachers the ones who most need to change wouldn't go to a teaching workshop at gunpoint. The workshop participants who ask these questions are doing what they have been trained to do as scientists and engineers and educated people, which is to ask for hard evidence before changing the way they've always done things. We applaud them for asking. In this column we'll offer an answer to the first question, and subsequent columns will deal with the others.