Teacher Training for Higher Education Professors
Can Mines please provide teacher training for its higher education professors? Apparently teacher training is not required for higher education professors and it is a detriment to the students. It seems like some of the more established professors have become so expert in their fields that they are unable to empathize with fledgling scientists/engineers/students, and have forgotten that the process of learning for the human brain requires review, revisiting fundamentals, and structuring the class and class assignments to develop good study/learning habits.
For example, it is not an effective teaching approach to assign bulk portions of a textbook for reading without assigning a complementary reading assignment. Reading assignments that students are accountable for turning in force them to get in the habit of doing the reading consistently, and ensure that they are understanding the key portions of the textbook.
An effective approach to teaching is to allow for the first 5 minutes of every lecture to be a review of previously presented course material. This allows the class to develop the habit of reviewing, and the more that tricky concepts are reviewed, the greater the grasp the student has on them.
But it takes a person who is thinking like a TEACHER to think about how a student absorbs information, and unfortunately, too many higher education professors are thinking like engineers/scientists. Teacher training for these professors would train them to think like teachers.
Technology advancements increase exponentially, and human beings' IQs are also steadily increasing over time, but likely not at the same exponential rate. As technology advances, so does the more we understand about math/science, which means there is more to learn and more to study. We should be improving teaching methods and information conveyance at a comparable rate to technology advancements.