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Teaching project
Julian Koch
D-CHAB
Function Materials Laboratory
Submission date:
Note: In your own teaching project, please erase all explanatory text in orange.
a) Goal
Your goal is to adapt generic concepts and ideas that resonated with you in the Learning to
Teach course with a view to benefiting learning and teaching in your particular subject at ETH.
b) Approach
The Learning to Teach course proposes four generic teaching strategies for teaching in higher
education. These provide starting point of and orientation for your project:
Learning is an active process on the students’ side. The I establish a culture of cooperation in the classroom
most helpful question for teaching is: What do I want by communicating what students will be able to do by
TS 1 that students are able to DO by the end of a course, a TS 3 the end of the course and how I recommend they will
lesson, an exercise? develop these competences throughout the course.
I find out if students are able to do what I want them My teaching needs to provide opportunities for
to do at the end of an exercise (lesson, class) and to students to practice doing what I want that they are
TS 2 TS 4
support their progress towards these objectives. able to do by the end of an exercise, a lesson or a
course.
Your teaching project allows you to develop expertise as you select and adapt generic
teaching strategies so that they become suitable tools for encouraging students’ learning in
your subject. You thus become experts for your own teaching context. In this way, you
contribute to didactic expertise among doctoral TAs at ETH.
c) Procedure
(1) At the very beginning of your Learning to Teach course, you define a question that intrigues
you about teaching. (2) Throughout the course, you collect resources (ideas, concepts) that are
relevant for your question. (3) After the end of the classroom phase, you plan a small project in
your own teaching context that helps you alleviate the concern you address in your question
with the resources you collected. (4) You describe your teaching project on between two to
four pages.
d) Publication
Please complete the following steps to publish your project:
1) Submit your project for peer review in your Moodle course. Submission date: 1 month
after the course)
2) Peer review other submissions (Submission date: 2 months after the course)
3) Implement advice from the peer review phase.
4) Publish your teaching project on the Learning to Teach community page 3 months after
your course.
Your Moodle course will provide the exact submission dates.
Table of Contents
Abstract 3
1. Introduction 4
2. Analyse your teaching challenge 4
2.1. Context analysis 4
2.2. Resource analysis 4
3. Implement your plan 5
4. Evaluate your plan 5
5. Appendix 6
Abstract
The goal of this project is to identify optimal conditions for students in Control theory classes to
be able to independently solve challenging sets of problems outside of class. The time of
contact between teacher and learner is limited and this project should help improve the learning
experience and efficiency. The course is given to 5. Semester students in Chemical Engineering
in 2 hours of lecture and 1 hour of exercise and comprises usually around 25 students. Two
aspects are focused on in this analysis, namely how instructions are given to students and what
can be learned from the cognitive perspective of learning.
1. Introduction
This project revolves around asking the following question: “What are the optimal conditions for
students to be able to solve a challenging problem independently?” The assistant of the course
has the opportunity to guide the learning process in the Control Theory course for about 45 min
per week, while directly conversing with students and getting feedback.
The experience of teaching and following exercise sessions at both Swiss Federal Institutes of
technology in Switzerland (Zürich and Lausanne) showed me that in most cases, exercise
sessions are meant to give a basis of how to be able to solve problems, rather than being able
to solve all problems during the session. As a teacher, I want to be able to give students a
strong foundation of transferable knowledge, which can then be applied in homework exercises
and giving the student a sense of accomplishment.
The fourth LT teaching strategy is providing a guideline for approaching the aforementioned
challenge. Providing students with opportunities for learning involves many aspects such as
giving clear instructions or making use of the cognitive aspects of learning. At the end of this
project, I want to give an analysis of techniques for giving optimal learning conditions out of
class. The goal is to identify the cornerstones of giving the student an optimal self-learning
opportunity.
The assistant’s duties are providing guidelines, correcting problem sets and give corrective
feedback to the students. Feedback flow is therefore guaranteed in both ways. However,
resources are limited, as there are around 25 students, 45 minutes contact time and 1 assistant.
Learning requirements differ between students and the amount of guideline providing a
nurturing basis for independent learning is highly individual. Compared to tutoring with 5
students per assistant, the assistant of this course cannot individualize too much his teaching
approach.
The exercise feedback for the students will be given 2 weeks after receiving the instructions and
at least one week after handing in the problem set. The time lag between solving and getting
feedback can be positive for learning activities, as the content is processed and reactivated.
However this might also nurture despair in students, concerning exercises where they are
blocked. Also the efficiency of feedback might decrease over time as the student does not have
the issues fresh in mind.
resource that you are planning to apply in your teaching with the goal of addressing your
question and alleviating the challenge you described earlier. Your goal is to adapt generic
concepts and ideas that resonated with you in the Learning to Teach course with a view to
benefiting learning and teaching in your particular subject at ETH. Outline your implementation
plan to illustrate how you are planning to put your teaching principles into practice by describing
in detail your personal approach to using the specific resource(s) you selected in your own
teaching context.
5. Appendix
Provide here the artefacts that you want to enclose to illustrate how you are planning to
implement your teaching project plan in your teaching.