Start Out With The Right Foot...And Follow With The Left

Effective teaching involves more preparation than just lecture notes to be written on the board for students to copy. Effective teaching involves two-way interaction between the class and the instructor. The stage is set for this interaction on the first day of class, and so it is important to give thought to how that interaction is to proceed. Will you ask students questions during lecture? Should they bring their books and calculators? Will there be group learning activities? Will active learning be a large part of the class? While minor changes can be made based on the class character, the answers to these questions and more should be made prior to the start of the semester and discussed with the student during the first week of class. In most cases, the answer to all of these questions for chemical engineering students should be YES. Not only are active learning activities important for promoting student learning, recent results of profiling student learning preferences have indicated that the majority of chemical engineering students learn more effectively by working problems themselves. This paper provides suggestions for noncourse material activities for the first week activities, followed by a brief discussion of teaching and learning. One suggestion related to both topics is to profile student learning preferences using VARK catalyst. This inventory will be briefly discussed along with the implications and results obtained from classes in chemical engineering.