Utilizing The Best Practices Of The Exceed Teaching Methodology In A Bioengineering Curriculum.

The ExCEEd (Excellence in Civil Engineering Education) teaching workshops are an annual week long workshop sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to help professors throughout civil engineering down the path to becoming “Complete Exemplars” in Joseph Lowman’s 2-D model of exemplary teaching [Joseph Lowman, 1995, Mastering the Techniques of Teaching, 2nd Edition, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass]; in other words developing teachers who develop high intellectual excitement in their classrooms while maintaining excellent interpersonal rapport with the students. The workshop focuses on developing skills and techniques that the participants are encouraged to practice during the course of the workshop, then try to implement these skills in their own classes at their home institutions. To date, over 400 faculty members have attended an ExCEEd teaching workshop, and most participants will agree that these workshops have helped them become better teachers. Although it is sponsored by ASCE, and presented as “excellence in civil engineering education”, the techniques and principles presented by the ExCEEd program are universal to best practices of teaching, regardless of the subject matter being presented. In this paper, we will present several of the best practices from the ExCEEd teaching methodology and show how they’ve been integrated into a junior-level biomaterials class offered for the first time at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU). Since our students have been exposed to this methodology previously in core engineering curriculum courses at FGCU (both Engineering Mechanics and Mechanics of Materials), the techniques and practices we’ve integrated into the biomaterials course are not new to them; nonetheless we’ll also share the student’s assessment into how successful the ExCEEd methodology is in helping them learn.