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PROFESSOR: I'm Sanjoy Mahajan.
This course is Teaching College-Level Science and
Engineering.
The course is intended for graduate students some towards
the end of their PhD who are intending to go onto academic
teaching careers.
But all graduate students are welcome, and even
undergraduates who have a strong interest in teaching.
The goal of the course is to give some preparation and
background into the principles of teaching, so graduate
students and in fact as undergraduates too, all get
the same for their specific research area.
For example, in physics, they'll learn the principles
of conservation of momentum and energy.
But in teaching, everyone is basically just thrown to the
wolves and figured, well, if you know your subject, you can
teach or given very little preparation.
So the idea is to actually show that teaching and
thinking about teaching is a very serious
intellectual activity.
And there's general ideas and principles that can be used to
make teaching much more successful.
And therefore, students learn much more and enjoy what
they're learning.
Many departments encourage their students who they know
are going on to teaching careers.
They say, well, you might actually find this course
interesting.
It's paired also with another new program at MIT, called the
TA certificate program, which is a non-credit option where
students do about six or seven seminars of an hour and a half
each and do work for each seminar.
Here, this is the sort of four-credit
cousin of that course.
And it's for students who want to do everything in one
semester and want something on their transcript as well.
So at the end of each lecture, I give out a short sheet that
has three questions on it.
One is what was most confusing today or what do you wonder
about most?
What example or teaching technique
worked well or not well?
And any other comments?
And so at the end of each session, the students have one
or two minutes to fill that out.
And at the end of the next session, I
answer all the questions.
I was just amazed at the thoughtfulness of the
questions and how right on they were and how many useful
suggestions I got for when I teach the class the next time.
Many students have told me they think everyone who
teaches should take it.
And some told me also that they wish some of their
professors had taken those classes, their professors from
when they were undergraduates.
But on the other hand, if it were required, then it
wouldn't be such a lively atmosphere as it is now, where
we have students who really are fascinated by teaching and
are therefore much more motivated to contribute.
But the theme that I got from many, many students was, wow,
this has really helped them thinking about their teaching
and said oh, finally, this may be the only preparation I get
in teaching and I'm really glad I had that.