Discussions on Teaching - Bengtson

Embrace any feedback you get on your teaching because you usually don’t get much feedback.
Don’t teach just the best students. Teaching to the best students can be fun and makes you feel like a great teacher but your job is to teach everyone.
I’ve never received feedback that said you go too slow, this class is too easy. If you error you should error on the side of what you think is too easy.
My lecture format is to tell you what I’m going to do, do it, summarize and then ask a few “dumb questions” (very easy, big picture questions)
I use PowerPoint rather than writing on the board when I lecture because it allows me to look at the class. I need to look at students and make eye contact to see if they’re engaged, confused or bored. This helps me to teach everyone as does getting to know students and getting a feeling for how they think.
Saying the student’s name and making eye contact when you ask a question will make sure you get a response to your question.
For me a derivation or going through the math doesn’t really answer the original question so I always ask big picture, real world questions like how do we use this? how can we make money with this?
PowerPoint slides give me something to jog my memory about the main topics I want to cover in lecture. With PowerPoint slides I don’t need a separate sheet of notes when I lecture.
To me what’s important to take away from each class isn’t the math or the specifics, it’s the big picture. In Sensors I want you to understand in principle how we can measure something not the details of how to build the sensor.
A lot of my thoughts on teaching come out of conversations with Mel Oaks (retired UT physics prof.). The forum should invite him to come talk about how he taught his waves course. I often taught Modern Physics and students would usually come in confused and not quite prepared for the course but when Mel taught the preceding waves course there was no problem. His teaching really did make a difference and I saw it over and over.