Workshop on Effective Teaching

Instructor: Pankaj Jalote, Professor Dept of CSE, IITD, and Director IIIT-Delhi

Intended Audience: Faculty members, particularly junior faculty, in Engineering, Science, Maths, etc. Senior PhD students who want to join academia can also join.

 

Workshop Desription

A good portion of an academician’s life and work is teaching. Indeed, teaching is one of the main goals of a University. Most faculty members would like to motivate and inspire students to learn deeply in their courses. Still, as is well known, some teachers are more effective than others. This workshop is about becoming a more effective teacher.

It should be first stated clearly that one cannot be an effective teacher for a subject without having a decent understanding and knowledge of that subject. However, even with understanding of the subject, one may not be an effective teacher. The aim of this workshop is to help faculty, or aspiring faculty, who have a decent understanding of the subject matter to become effective teachers. 

There is a vast body of literature on Teaching and Learning (T&L) and pedagogy at the college level, and there are journals and conferences on Engineering Education. This workshop will discuss a few key concepts and practices which are now widely accepted and recognized as being effective in improving the teaching and learning process.

The workshop sessions will employ a mixture of presentation and the flipped class room approach. A reading will be given for each session, and after a short presentation on the topic, we will discuss the reading and various aspects of the topic and its applicability in our circumstances. In some sessions, we will take course descriptions of some of our courses and analyze them. It is hoped that participants will apply some of the techniques discussed in the workshop in their own teaching and share the experience with the class. All faculty members attending the workshop will be given a copy of “What best college teachers do” by ken Bain.

Workshop Schedule Plan

The workshop will have 6 sessions spread over 3 weeks. The sessions will be in the afternoon (4 – 6 pm), as this is likely to be more convenient for faculty.

Dates: Feb 22, 23 (Mon, Tue); Feb 29, March 1 (Mon, Tue); March 7, 8 (Mon, Tue). All sessions 4-6 pm.  

Place: Rm 501, Bharti Bldg.

Topics for each session:

  1. Teaching and Learning. Scope of this workshop, Teaching and learning process, concepts related to learning, different approaches and styles of students’ learning, what facilitates/hampers learning.
  2. Establishing learning outcomes.  Bloom’s taxonomy and its extension; using these to establish learning objectives for a course, as well as revieweing the learning outcomes.
  3. Integrated Course Planning. How to plan the course to deliver the learning outcomes. Planning including lecturing and activities in lectures, teaching and learning activities outside the lectures, and asssessments (including quizes, assignments, term papers, exams) and feedback.
  4. Active Learning during Lectures.   Active learning techniques to make lectures more effective; think-pair-sharee approach; other approaches like flipped classrom.   
  5. Student Motivation and engagement. Student motivation and what can be done to improve it; first day of class; etc.
  6. Experience Sharing by IIT Faculty.   Instructors from IIT who have been recognized as good instructors to discuss their approaches to teaching; experience of workshop participants. T&L, etc. 

Resources/Text

There are many books on effective teaching, and a lot of literature on various aspects of it. One or two carefully chosen reports/chapters will be distributed for each topic and will form the main resource for the course. Reference list will be provided for those who want to explore more.

Register for the Workshop

Registration is closed.

About the Instructor

Pankaj Jalote is Professor in the Department of CSE. He is also the Director of IIIT-Delhi. He has been a faculty member at University of Maryland College Park, IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi, and IIIT-Delhi. He has also been Vice President at Infosys for 2 years, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft in Redmond for 1 year, and Interim Vice Chancellor of Delhi Technological University (DTU) for six months.  He has a B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur, MS from Pennsylvania State University, and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of five books, some of which have been translated in Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc, and the Indian edition of his text on Software Engineering was adjudged the bestselling book by the publisher. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and INAE.

In 2008 he organized an Indo-US workshop on Teaching and Learning (T&L) at College Level. This workshop opened his eyes to the body of knowledge that exists in T&L, and the importance attached by universities across the world on this topic – many universities in US (including the top ones) and UK have T&L centres.  Later, he taught a course on Effective Teaching for MTech and PhD students in IIIT-Delhi who want to take up teaching as a career. He believes that even good teachers can become more effective by paying more attention to T&L processes, and that anyone (who has subject matter expertise) can become an effective teacher by applying sound pedagogic principles.