Principles

The speaker discusses two principles of good teaching: weekly and monthly review, and independent practice. They currently apply these principles in their math class and believe they can easily implement them in their engineering class. They emphasize the importance of practice in subjects like math and engineering, and suggest assigning small CAD projects and drawings for independent practice. However, they are unsure about how to ask a large number of questions while students are working on computers. They mention a resource called Solid Professor, which generates questions about CAD software and can be used for grading. They have heard of another school using it successfully and believe it could be beneficial in their engineering class as well. From this week's reading, I felt like two of the basic principles for good teaching that I knew really well was completing a review weekly and monthly and then requiring and monitoring independent practice. For review weekly and monthly, this is something that we do in my math classes for standard space grading. Each week, students have the opportunity to show that they have learned or mastered a previous concept through our different activities that we do. Sometimes it will just be like a one-question quiz. Sometimes it will be a small activity or a project where students, again, can show their abilities that they've learned. I feel like, again, I can carry this over to the engineering class with ease because it's something that I'm really confident in and something that should be easy to do in the engineering realm as far as just asking the students to show each week, hey, can you model this skill for me? Can you show me different ways to do these different things so that way I can see that you've learned these different skills along the way? And making small little projects and small little tasks for them to do kind of each week shouldn't be hard. And then, again, more monthly would kind of be probably larger tasks, larger CAD projects or 3D printing projects or drawings kind of could be the monthly things. For the second strategy, again, I felt like I feel pretty confident in requiring a modeling independent practice. Again, coming from a math background, I tell my students that math is not a spectator sport, meaning that, again, you can't just watch it and be good at it. It's something that requires practice. Same thing for engineering and from the CAD aspect. You can't just watch someone do CAD and then all of a sudden you're a great CAD modeler. Sometimes it takes practice to understand whether you're using the additive or subtractive method and how you want to best model whatever it is that you're trying to create. So requiring independent practice each night via small CAD projects or small CAD designs and small drawings and multi-view drawings and requiring dimensioning is something that I think would be, again, an easy carryover from what I do in my math class to carry over to engineering. So that way, again, students are practicing and building those skills because engineering is very similar to math. It's not a spectator sport. You get better at those skills from CAD and drawings and dimensioning through practice. The one skill that I felt a little less confident about in carrying over into the new subject area, into engineering, would be asking a large number of questions. I feel like this can be tough because, again, they're learning something that I'm also kind of learning, again, with CAD and things like that. So asking a high volume of questions while they're sitting there looking at computers might be tough. So the one thing that I kind of look to kind of find a resource that might help me be able to ask a lot of questions in a format that would allow students to be able to, again, stay focused on the computer screen and not have to, like, again, be looking up at my screen and looking back because I think sometimes they lose it in there, is Solid Professor. It seems like it is a platform that generates a lot of different questions about a lot of different topics on the different CAD software that you use, and that would make it easy for me to be able to grade as far as, again, it's tracked through that online application. I know another school in the district uses it for their manufacturing classes, and they've had a lot of success with it. So I believe that I could go ahead and carry it over into my engineering class, and it would allow me to ask a large volume number of questions about the CAD software to ensure that students are understanding and building mastery of the software.