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Engineering
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| "Participating
in this program made me more aware of the student perspective and reminded
me of why I decided to become a professor." Jennifer T. Bernhard |
Keeping the Student Perspective |
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To faculty who think they are too busy to participate in the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3) Teaching College, Jennifer T. Bernhard offers some advice: "Make the time," she said. "It’s well worth it." An assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bernhard arrived on campus with four years of university classroom teaching experience and awards for teaching. Even so, she looked to the AE3 program to help her settle into her new career, meet faculty members with similar career concerns, and work more effectively. "This program offered training in how to be a well-rounded faculty member," said Bernhard, whose area of interest is electromagnetics for wireless communication and reconfigurable active and passive antennas. "Teaching is important, and it affects every other aspect of what we do," she said, "but it was also helpful to have seminars that addressed how we advise graduate students, conduct research, write proposals, interact with other colleagues, manage time–the whole nine yards." Bernhard already was applying many of the recommended learning techniques and philosophies in her classes, but she benefited from discussions on how to extend some of the principles to graduate students in her research group. For instance, she now asks each student to create an outline of their thesis before beginning their research. The outcomes-based approach helps them stay focused, work more independently, and have more control of the process. This strategy also helps make the group of 10 more manageable and interactions more meaningful and fun, she noted. "There’s a lot of discussion in the Teaching College about helping students be more active participants in learning, with the implication that they can apply what they learn to the rest of their activities and eventually, their careers," she said. "That’s such an important idea. Participating in this program made me more aware of the student perspective and reminded me of why I decided to become a professor." –TMP |
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