My current teaching load in the Engineering School at the University
of Virginia includes four preparations a year. In the fall, I
teach a course on Scientific and Technological Thinking to first-year
honors students, and a required fourth-year course on The Engineer
in Society. In the spring, I teach an upper-level elective course
on Invention and Design to third and fourth year students from
engineering and psychology, and a fourth-year required course
on Western Technology and Society. I also supervise four graduate
students, one Ph.D. and three Masters. I have created two of these
courses, modified the other two extensively, and invented the
graduate mission. To understand how a Ph.D. in psychology ended
up in this situation. it is important to go briefly through my
teaching background and goals.
I began my teaching career as a graduate student in a psychology
department, where I taught introductory, statistics and social
psychology. These were lecture courses, punctuated by occasional
discussions and films. I underwent a teaching practicum, offered
by my psychology department, in which my peers and I met weekly,
talked but our teaching efforts, and were guided by a mentor.
Topics included syllabus design, how to assess whether a lecture
is working, test design--especially use of multiple choice--and
how to use writing in psychology classes.
In my first job at an engineering school in northern Michigan
(aka 'Tundra Tech'), one of my tasks was to teach introductory
psychology to sections of over 100 students. I did mostly lecture
and multiple-choice. One student in my introductory psyche course
compared me with David Letterman, and gave me a 7 on a 1 to 5
scale.
But I also asked each student to write a short paper, applying
the perspectives I had taught in class to analyzing a case: Sylvia
Plath's The Bell Jar and Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express.
These were a bear to grade, but I wanted students to go beyond
memorization to application and synthesis, working them up higher
on Bloom's taxonomy. I also experimented with using poetry in
my introductory psychology course, to try to jar students into
a different way of thinking (Gorman, 1986, Appendix A).
I also took advanced courses in writing in graduate school, and Donald M. Murray, one of the premier writing teachers in the world, served on my Ph.D. committee. Hence my emphasis on writing as a learning tool in all of my classes. My first job at Michigan Technological University included teaching writing courses to engineering students, especially in their first year, and helping a Humanities Department evaluate a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum grant. When I moved to the University of Virginia, I continued to teach writing as part of a Humanities Division (now Technology, Culture & communications was also asked to teach upper-level courses, including Utopian Thought and Technology, Peace and Aggression. I also taught a required fourth-year sequence in which students wrote a technical thesis while doing readings about technology, culture and ethics. I had to act as a kind of writing coach on the thesis, helping them write their proposals, prepare and give presentations and find sources.
Note that throughout my teaching career, I have had a heavy load
of required courses--roughly the equivalent of five 3-credit courses
a year, not counting all the overload courses I taught to small
groups of students to accommodate their needs.
Adapting Mortimer Adler's Paideia Proposal (Adler, 1982), I would
argue that educators seek outcomes in three areas:
1) Knowledge: (What) Every class involves some kind of
informational content, for example, diagnostic categories used
in abnormal psychology, the difference between utilitarian and
respect-for-persons ethical frameworks and the story of how the
telephone was invented.
The assessment of knowledge is straightforward. A multiple-choice
test will tell us whether engineering students can list facts
about each of several ethical theories and whether they know the
codes of their professions.
2) Skills: (How) Students will also need to know how to
write, present, make a coherent argument and engage in moral reasoning.
Adler says teaching skills requires coaching, in small groups
or one-on-one.
3) Wisdom: (When and Why) Students have to know when to
apply a particular skill. When is it appropriate to adopt a utilitarian
ethical stance? When do you need to adopt an inductive writing
style?
The deepest part of education is making students able to reflect
on why they are doing what they are doing. Here we can give them
no answers, because they must find this out for themselves.
In the end, my goal is to turn students into virtuous practitioners,
capable of solving a wide range of problems related to their professions
creatively and ethically. I also hope to make them intelligent
consumers of new information, armed with good 'crap-detectors',
to borrow Neil Postman's felicitous phrase. Finally, I want them
to be able to integrate the larger demands of good citizenship
and compassion for others with their professions, so they can
never use the Eichmann excuse of saying that they were just following
orders and someone else was responsible.
One cannot do all of this in a class, or even in four years. What
I am talking about is spurring life-long learning. I want students
to be drawing on their classroom experiences for the rest of their
lives.
Finally, I expect my students to teach me as well. This requires
that I remain open to the wisdom they bring to certain situations.
Pursuing these goals has pushed me to create new learning opportunities
for students.
In my first job, I started creating learning opportunities right away, ones that went beyond my normal teaching responsibilities. I developed independent studies for those students who wanted advanced psychology courses--there were none in the catalogue. Some of the engineering students helped me on my research--this was fun!--and at least one had her name on a publication with my wife and myself.
I tried to create courses out of some of these, including hybrids that fit the menu of required courses. For example, I invented a course on Abnormal Psychology and Literature that I was particularly proud of: students learned major approaches to understanding psychological problems and also diagnostic frameworks, and applied them to works of literature and other narrative case studies.
Our Division had never taught third-year courses. I developed
two. The first was a course on Scientific and Technological Thinking.
I managed to get it cross-listed in psychology and taught it for
several years to a combined audience. Evaluations were very positive,
even though only a handful of students could really follow the
difficult original readings.
I had been working with W. Bernard Carlson on the invention of
the telephone and became interested in applying our findings to
the classroom in a course on invention and design. So I created
one, obtaining funding from the Leadership Opportunities in Science
and Humanities program. I remember wondering at the time if this
was too much of a distraction from my research--it is very difficult
to put multi-disciplinary teams together and try to fund them.
But I went ahead, and the result was a course that has served
as an experimental laboratory for new ideas--sometimes a great
joy to teach , other times a frustration, always a surprise. I
am now using it as a springboard for student invention projects,
helping them obtain funding from the Lemelson Foundation.
Because of the heavy load of required courses I had to substitute
this course for my Scientific and Technological Thinking offering
at the University of Virginia. I again managed to get it cross-listed
in psychology, creating an interesting mix of students when we
advertised across grounds. To keep the Scientific and Technological
Thinking course alive, I taught it occasionally during the summers.
I managed to permute this Scientific and Technological Thinking course into a special first year course for Rodman scholars. These 'gifted' students pose special challenges. I first tried using a book I had published, then, when that didn't work, started drafting a new book which I am now using in this course with greater success. Basically, the problem with my first book was that it focused too heavily on one approach--experimental studies of scientific readings. Therefore, most of the student projects were experiments. I wanted students to get a broader view--and they did, too. They complained about the over-emphasis on experiment. The problem now is that my new book says so much less about this that almost none of the students do experiments for their projects--so I am adding more material about experiments to my new book. I hope to make this book
accessible to a wide audience that includes scholars, students,
managers, inventors and others.
I adapted my old Abnormal Psychology and Literature course to
the first-year writing mission, developing an innovative syllabus
that was used as a model by some of my colleagues in the Division
of Technology, Culture & Communication at the University of
Virginia.
Another challenge I faced at the University of Virginia was the sequence of two fourth-year courses that included both an undergraduate engineering thesis and a large set of diverse readings on humanities, science and technology. It was hard to make sense of this complicated mission, and at first, I just adjusted the traditional course to fit my style, selecting readings I was more familiar with and joining a committee of faculty that judged the best theses that were presented at a symposium each year to figure out what ought to go into such a thesis. It seemed to me that these documents included no content which suggested they had taken any of the courses in Technology, Culture & Communications. I thought such content would be desirable; I saw the technical and social as intimately bound together, and wanted the students to see that as well.
Four or five years later, I volunteered to chair the committee
that decides what to do in this course--a job I knew would be
difficult and time-consuming, and would force me to stretch my
expertise into new areas like engineering ethics. My initial goal
was to 'let a hundred flowers bloom' and permit faculty to experiment.
The course had been fairly standard before; now faculty began
to make permutations consistent with the overall mission.
I was one of those who had been using cases, because engineering
students seemed to learn best when confronted with a concrete
situation. But I was dissatisfied with the cases I was using;
they focused too much on managers and too little on engineers.
So I wrote a pre-proposal to the Ethics and Values Studies Program
of the NSF to create a case based on an inventor of a solar water
heater. The program officer, Rachelle Hollander, wrote back and
said it was a good idea, but I needed someone with a stronger
background in ethics. Thus began my collaboration with Pat Werhane,
of the Darden School. She and I eventually got two NSF grants
(the second very recently) and created a set of cases I hoped
would be useful in the 401-2 class, as well as others like the
Rodman class and Invention and Design (see http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/ethics/)..
I have now used these cases three times in the 401/2 sequence.
Initially, they lowered my numerical ratings. I am still trying
to figure out why, but I think part of it is that they challenge
the engineering students more--they show that it is possible to
integrate ethics and design, and therefore engineers have a responsibility
to act as autonomous moral agents when they are designing.
It was a team-taught course that led to my move to Virginia. The
chair of the Social Sciences department at Michigan Technological
University invited a colleague named Bernie Carlson and I to team-teach
a course on Innovation & Invention in Science and Technology.
This is a case of teaching leading to research: in the course
of teaching together, Bernie and I laid the foundations for a
grant proposal, which in turn led to six years of research on
the invention of the telephone, in the course of which he moved
to University of Virginia and brought me after.
The Invention and Design course I developed involved a team of
five faculty and one graduate student, supported by the grant.
Three have stayed on with me, teaching the course for four years,
attending every session.
Similarly, I have created a team to develop these new ethics cases,
including three faculty and four graduate students. We do not
team teach in the same class, but we are doing team creation.
Throughout my career, I have been involved in creating new curricular
materials like these ethics cases--intended not just for my use,
but for wide dissemination. Other examples include writing assignments
in psychology classes and active learning modules for use in engineering
and psychology classes. (An active learning module involves the
students in an open-ended, creative activity, like designing a
new technology to benefit the environment--see Gorman, Plucker
& Callahan, In Press, Appendix A). As a Fellow of the Teaching
Technology Initiative here on grounds, I am also pioneering the
use of multimedia materials in my classes--all of my current syllabi
and assignments are on the Web, along with examples of previous
student work (see Appendix B for examples).
My teaching and research are inextricably intertwined. For example,
I used my work on the invention of the telephone to create a new
course that takes advantage of these materials. I used my first
book in a class, and when it didn't work as well as I expected,
used the problems as a springboard for the next book. If you teach
psychology to students outside the discipline, they will ask the
basic and obvious questions that psychologists often dismiss because
these questions cannot be studied with current methods. I take
these questions seriously; they drive me back into further research.
My work in ethics was motivated by the fact that I had to teach
it, and wisdom was one of my central teaching goals. As I read
and thought, I discovered interesting research problems with classroom
applications. Developing ethics cases is forcing me to do deep,
fine-grained research on the ethical dilemmas faced by engineers.
Again, student questions and needs spur further work in this area.
For example, for reasons that have to do with scheduling, my recent
fourth year classes have contained a disproportionate number of
computer science majors. This is forcing me to search for good
ethics case materials in the computer science area.
First and foremost, I am an experimenter. I like to develop new
courses and new teaching approaches. I rarely teach a course the
same way more than twice. I'm not sure why I will take a perfectly
good course and blow it up--except that the more I teach, the
more I can see how much more students could be learning, how much
more they need to learn. For example, I thought I was doing a
pretty good job of teaching engineering students until I realized
the extent to which they had compartmentalized their knowledge
about humanities and engineering. Ethics are at the heart of design,
not something to worry about when you are already in trouble.
When I taught my large psychology sections, I was a lecturer/entertainer,
although I did try to incorporate some writing. When I teach writing,
I use peer critiques of papers and individual conferences with
students. Most of my current courses are seminars, in which I
try to stimulate discussion and even argument. I am also frequently
in a one-on-one mentoring situation. Of the three, I find the
mentoring comes most easily, the lecture second and the seminar
leader is the hardest--perhaps because engineering students are
not used to seminar situations and need more guidance than I am
comfortable with giving.
Some of my best teaching occurs out of the classroom. For example,
I have helped five student groups obtain funding from the Lemelson
Foundation to pursue invention projects. The students might get
the initial idea in my invention and design class, but I have
to work with them long after the class to shape it. For example,
I am still supervising a student from my Invention and Design
class two years ago; he has developed a technology for aerating
anaerobic soils, and expects to commercialize it. I have a long
tradition of getting students involved with my research, first
undergraduates and now a group of graduate students. Again, this
kind of mentoring may begin in a class, but extends far beyond
it.
For students that want predictable learning situations and absolutely
clear monitors of progress toward a grade, my tendency to experiment
and my reliance on individual conferences can be very frustrating--especially
since I teach courses where there are too many students to conference
effectively. I think I give plenty of scaffolding in my classes--lots
of guidance in terms of what is expected--but many students don't
agree. They want an algorithm for an A, and I won't give it to
them--I want them to be responsible for their learning. Students
that see learning as something that goes on in a class and then
stops as soon as it is over do not find it easy to work with me.
Given the goals I listed above, I feel I have to design classroom
environments that encourage active learning. The lecture mode
and some kinds of multimedia instruction tend to encourage passive
assimilation of information--which is good, and important, but
it is my job to turn students into responsible, creative professionals.
If the primary goal of my courses were the transmission of information,
I would rely more on lecture, complemented by good quizzes, homework
and even a dose of old-fashioned programmed instruction.
In addition to lectures and films, I rely heavily on:
.Open-ended project assignments that require students to make
decisions. An example is the telephone module in the invention
and design class: students have to build and patent an improvement
on Bell's original telephone patent, using similar materials.
Another example is the final project in the Rodman course, where
I let students choose a topic within the area of scientific and
technological thinking.
.Group work, both team projects and peer critiques. I use the
latter in writing classes; I use the former in project classes,
sometimes as a requirement that students work in assigned teams,
sometimes--as in the Rodman course--as an option.
.Writing as a tool for learning, as well as communication: students
keep notebooks of ideas and logs of readings, do reflection papers,
and also do essays, proposals and technical reports.
.Web & e-mail: I make heavy use of these--indeed, much of
the supplementary information in my portfolio will consist of
Web pages (see Appendix B, list of teaching-related Web materials).
I put all my current syllabi on the Web, with lots of information
on assignments and also with copies of student projects from previous
classes. I use e-mail to communicate changes and provide more
information, and invite students to ask me questions. I only ran
an e-mail discussion option once--no one used it.
Because my research and my teaching are both so intertwined, each
fuels the other--this helps me keep up with the knowledge needed
to talk about ethics, psychology of science and other topics.
I attended workshops on teaching writing when I taught at Michigan
Technological University, including a special two-day Writing
Across the Curriculum workshop sponsored by General Motors. I
also led a major workshop on teaching general education courses
which was presented to twenty faculty from social sciences, humanities
and education. I invited David Wright from Michigan State and
David Leary from the University of New Hampshire to work with
these faculty. Response was enthusiastic.
I have attended four or five teaching workshops here, including
two of the fall beginning-of-the-semester workshops. I remember
being very impressed with Education professor Mabel Kinzie's demonstration
of how the Web could be used to create detailed case-studies for
discussion in teacher-training classes. I hope to add some of
the interactive features of her cases to the Web versions of my
ethics cases. The main thing I get out of the Teaching Resource
Center workshops is the sense of community with other educators
that are committed to continuous improvement in their teaching
methods.
I am also an Associate of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Educational
Design, and a Fellow of the Teaching Technology Initiative; both
of these give me access to seminars and conversations on educational
innovations. For example, Chemistry professor Charlie Grisham
gave a great talk to the Teaching Technology Initiative on using
Java to create multimedia applications that really contributed
to student learning. His example has inspired me to create a very
different kind of Java application that has the same goal.
To keep up with the latest pedagogical methods, I present papers
at educational conferences like Frontiers in Education and the
annual meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education.
I have been invited to present two workshops to the National Collegiate
Innovators and Inventors Alliance; this group lists over thirty
universities as members, all of them dedicated to trying to turn
students into professionals.
Like all instructors at this University, I rely on end-of-course
evaluations, although I do not think the standard form used by
the engineering school is very helpful. For example, it asks student
to evaluate the instructor and the textbook, when in many of my
courses, there is more than one instructor and book. I have modified
this form recently to supply much more details of this sort (see
Appendix C for a sample set of evaluations from TCC401 using this
form), and, in my Invention and Design course, put it on the Web
so students can fill it out right on the computer and the results
will be put into an Excel spreadsheet.
I use the Teaching Assessment Poll (TAP) to get a sense of how
I am doing at mid-semester. Jude Reagan in the Teaching Resource
Center at the University of Virginia has come into four of my
classes, and I was able to use her feedback to make mid-course
corrections, for example, spending more time on the thesis in
my fourth-year course. Unfortunately, this formative feedback
does not always anticipate the sorts of concerns that are on the
final summative evaluation. I think the TAP is probably a better
measure of what is going on in the classroom, and that I need
to work on better end-of-semester evaluation forms. I think both
the engineering school and the university are ready for major
changes in this area.
I have also experimented with other evaluation and management
techniques, including my colleague Ed Russell's suggestion that
I try Classroom Management Teams. I put together such a team in
my first semester fourth year course, and they did identify and
help solve some critical problems. For example, they found out
that students did not like to have their journals graded--instead,
they helped me developed a check-off system. But overall, I felt
that the classroom management sessions took much more time than
a TAP and did not yield feedback that was as useful.
My graduate students and I also have tried handing-out surveys
after we do our experimental assignments in class. We did a special
set of evaluations in the Invention and Design class, and described
them in an article (Gorman, Richards, Scherer, & Kagiwada,
1995, Appendix A). We are also experimenting with different forms
of evaluations to be administered right after our engineering
ethics cases.
I also conduct occasional fine-grained studies of student learning. I wrote an article (Gorman & Robinson, In Press, Appendix A) which contains an example of what one group learned by doing the telephone active learning module in an invention and design class, including all the steps in their process. The second author is one of the students in this group, so he was able to add details that did not appear in any of the group's written documents.
.
For years, I have been asking students to put together ought portfolios
of their work for a final examination in most of my classes. These
largely serve as a way of checking their grades and filling in
any gaps in my records. But I would like to make it more like
this assignment. As Zan Welker, a colleague in TCC, said in one
of the portfolio workshops, this would both provide the students
with a learning experience and me with samples of student progress
(or the lack thereof) to use in future portfolios. (For samples
of final projects from a recent class, see http://cti.itc.Virginia.EDU/~meg3c/classes/tcc313_inuse/Resources/scitechproj.html).
Gorman, M. E. (1986). Poetic writing in psychology. In A. Young
& T. Fulwiler (Eds.), Writing across the disciplines: Research
into practice . Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook.Gorman, M. E.,
Plucker, J. A., & Callahan, C. M. (In Press). Turning Students
into Inventors:Active Learning Modules for Secondary Students.
Phi Delta Kappan.Gorman, M. E., Richards, L. G., Scherer, W. T.,
& Kagiwada, J. K. (1995). Teaching invention and design: Multi-disciplinary
learning modules. The Journal of Engineering Education, 84(2),
175-186.Gorman, M. E., & Robinson, J. K. (In Press). Using
History to Teach Invention and Design: The Case of the Telephone.
Science and Education.