Book Review: Teaching and Learning in STEM: A Practical Guide, second edition

Welcome to our department! You are ready to start your journey as a new Assistant Professor in a new city. If you are like many faculty in a STEM field, you made it through your undergraduate courses, sometimes taught by a seemingly uninterested faculty member who read slides for 50 minutes and occasionally worked out a problem on the board. You had a few labs with a grad student in charge. However, although it wasn’t ideal, you made it. This was followed by grad school, where you focused on research. With this much preparation, you must be ready to teach! Maybe you are a more “seasoned” veteran, preparing to teach Circuits I for the 18th time. As you contemplate whether or not you are a good teacher, you think: I end up with a normal distribution of grades, my annual review is fine, my course evaluations are usually above average; I must be a good teacher! However, are you asking: “Are my students learning effectively?” Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, second edition, by Dr. Richard Felder and Dr. Rebecca Brent begins with this observation: “Skilled professionals routinely receive training before being certified to practice independently. … It would be unthinkable to allow people to practice a skilled profession without first being trained for it, especially if their mistakes could cause harm to others – unless they are college faculty members.” Indeed, my sister recently started a job selling industrial acoustic panels and had about 4 weeks of training. While it could be difficult to argue that mistakes in the acoustic panel industry could cause harm to others, it makes sense to train a new hire. Academia has a long tradition of not teaching faculty to teach. What can we do about this?