Graduate Student Experiences And Mentor Benefits Of The Preparing Future Faculty Program In Engineering

The University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Engineering offers a college-wide Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program to address the need for more qualified faculty in engineering programs and to improve the overall educational environment. The UC PFF program consists of three one-hour courses and a mentored teaching component. The first course, in the Winter Quarter, provides information on basic effective teaching techniques for engineering, including Kolb learning styles, and how to organize a course. In addition, cultural differences and diversity are discussed in the context of science and engineering classes. The advanced teaching class in Spring Quarter emphasizes advanced pedagogical techniques including Bloom's taxonomy, concept maps, project and team management for developing leadership skills, teaching evaluations, proposal writing, and mentoring and being mentored. ABET engineering criteria a-k are applied to syllabus development, and students hold a mock NSF review panel based on a proposed project in engineering education. The final course, in Autumn Quarter, explores the academic job search process and the range of academic careers available. Panel discussions with new faculty, hiring committees from teaching-oriented and research-oriented universities, and recently tenured faculty provide up-to-date information. This paper focuses on the experience of a PFF student participant during the 2006-2007 academic year, as well as the experiences of and benefits to his PFF program coordinator and academic research mentor. Overall, participating in the program helped the student to prepare for an academic career. Having two faculty mentors in the PFF program activities provided invaluable opportunities and feedback. The mentored teaching activities applied the concepts learned in the PFF courses. The individualized mentored teaching experience included teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, giving talks at research seminars, and mentoring senior projects and REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC. Various methods of active learning, motivating students, problem-based active laboratory learning, and peer tutoring were explored and applied to mentor students. The paper also includes feedback from the PFF program coordinator and the academic research mentor.