Teaching to Master’s Degree Students: Stop Teaching, Start Leading

For the last 5 years, I have been teaching dynamic thermal simulation of buildings and how to use it for optimal building design and management. I am an invited teacher for a building energy efficiency Master’s degree: each year, I teach to students in the last weeks of their initial education at the university. I am, of course, far from having the experience a full-time teacher would have.

From the beginning, I wanted to have student engagement: I learned what I teach by doing, then I should not make it a one-way course that I would just deliver to students.

It was hard to make all the content fit in 15 hours, final test included. I had already found a way to make practical sessions and evaluations more engaging for all of them: it strongly relied on supervised group work, and even more on my absence as an authority for providing the answers.

Group work as a teaching tool? Yeah, sure. But with clear goals and leadership.

This method was quite simple. Have 2 × n students or groups, n parameter sets for the problem, one whiteboard. Every group writes its key results on the whiteboard.

It creates reactions and discussions. Students find different results. Some start by asking me why they get different results than the other group.

Don’t give answers; give pointers when asked

They want me to tell the result they should get. The only answer is that I don’t have it. I didn’t make the computation. If they get different results, one of the two groups might be right. I encourage them to compare their methods with the other group to understand where they differ, which may let them find mistakes. The nature of the problem is so that the results from each set of parameters can be compared with a minimum of good sense.

It always succeeded in making the group active, with the side effect that it stimulates groups who see that they will be late if they don’t act.

It was actually a way for me to hack the mandatory evaluation into more teaching time.

Education is what’s left when the contents have been forgotten

The whole course still didn’t satisfy me: the whole content plus the pre-requisites was still much more than what could fit in 12 hours in a way that would leave useful traces in their minds.

I struggled with three main problems:

• I handled my students an existing building simulation library, but getting to know it well would be much longer than the course itself. And I am not sure that they would have to use this same tool as engineers some months later.
• Absenteeism. Every year, some students showed up at the last session, for evaluation.
• Inability to use their knowledge out of their initial context. I call it the embarrassing line equation problem.

How I dropped everything from my previous teaching material

I dropped everything and started something completely different.

I had an idea of the whole class setup. The idea was very simple: make larger groups than before, 5 students for example, and ask them to work as project teams, every student being assigned a specific role:

• Research
• Development
• Quality
• Communication
• Project Management

I took the final result of the previous course : a whole building model, and broke it in as many parts as needed. Every group had to rebuild each part from some equations and/or literature I gave them, and I granted them a total freedom to come up with anything they would find on the Internet if it did the job. The conditions were: at the end, you must provide one deliverable containing all information needed for any group to use your work confidently, one slide deck, and the implementation of the model. The last session would then be the time when each group presents its work to the others so that every group can rebuild the whole thing.

One of the key features of this setup was: they are not working for me any more. Their clients are the other groups. I thought it would work and provide a much more vertuous motivation. Furthermore, it was closely inspired from many projects you may face as an engineer, and it was probably the best moment in their studies to make them face such a situation.

To start over from scratch using this course concept would take me some time to rethink some content, but the most important part was to convince my students.

So I showed up on the first morning and gave them the choice. I had my usual course ready to be served identically with no more work, and its final exam. Or there was this new course setup, fully built from scratch but based on my time and knowledge of my domain. I would provide any needed content at any point, but they would make the most of the course, and deliver a professional result, packaged in a way that was very close to what would be expected from them few weeks after.

They didn’t even hesitate and unanimously chose the new course.

I kept a first session to give them pre-requisites they had forgotten, mainly about the programming language they would have to use. Then they had to split themselves in groups and distribute roles depending on the strengths of each of them.

Project Managers were responsible for building complete teams and if needed exchange students before the projects started. In the rest of the course, any student could of course ask me questions, but for every official information or milestone, I called the PMs.

The main drawback of this new setup was for me: I had to provide new, qualitative inputs for each group so that they could build their work upon it.

But the result of the course was great. The greatest moment was seeing all groups applauding when all the components they implemented could be plugged together and it built a working whole building simulation.

Bonus 1: it solved the embarrassing line equation problem

One part of the course is related to the tuning of a PID controller using a simple method. It involves computing the equation of a line which is tangent to a curve at a specified point. Every student at this level should know how to do it by heart, without even thinking. The differences with the problem as presented in their younger years are, it is not labelled as a line-equation-finding with the usual variable names, and they have to implement the computation of the line slope and y-intercept using a programming language they are expected to master.

Believe me, for years I have seen students struggling in front of this problem. And at the moment I stopped guiding them, they achieved it easily. Simply because they had no other easier choice.

Bonus 2: it solved student absenteeism

The usual class agenda meant four 3-hour sessions followed by one 3-hour evaluated practical work. Some students showed up only for evaluation, and even if they could manage to work with others and get decent marks, the course was of no use for them.

Working in groups changed things. First things first: the evaluated part now represented 4/5 of the course, after the introduction session students tend to attend, be it just from curiosity. Group work made the rest: you are responsible for one part of the job that will impact the marks of the whole group. If you didn’t show up to work with the others, you should report to them, not to me.

In short: the teacher is the structure

In short: my students have done the best work when they were in charge of their results in front of the other students, with my presence only as a guidance for setting the goals and finding the answers quickly but by themselves.

What is your experience?