Award-winning teachers in the College of Engineering share their teaching philosophies, along with personal tips and tactics for connecting with students.

By Peggy Haine

Internationally recognized for cutting-edge research, Cornell Engineering can also point to award-winning teaching that has helped to place it among the top undergraduate engineering programs in the world. Each year the college selects its best teachers to be honored with awards for excellence in teaching and advising. The university also recognizes good teaching with the annual Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowships. Thirty percent of that elite Cornell group are members of the Engineering faculty.

From left: Gries, Duncan, Pollock, Williamson, Huttenlocher, Kelley, and Sass.

The Weiss Fellowships were established by the Cornell Board of Trustees in 1993 in recognition of the importance of undergraduate teaching at the university. The awards—$5,000 a year for five years for each faculty member—are named for Stephen H. Weiss ’57, emeritus chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees, who endowed the program.

The awardees, nominated by faculty, academic staff, and students, and selected by a presidential committee of Weiss Fellows, other faculty members, and undergraduates, are chosen based on their sustained record of effective, inspiring, and distinguished teaching of undergraduate students and contributions to undergraduate education.

At a meeting in Duffield Hall’s Young Colloquium Room, seven of the college’s Weiss Presidential Fellows—T. Michael Duncan, David Gries, Daniel Huttenlocher, Michael Kelley, Clifford Pollock, Stephen Sass, and Charles Williamson—gathered to talk about teaching, what makes it work for them and their students, and how they balance teaching and research responsibilities.

Moderator: How did you feel when you heard that you’d been nominated by your students and colleagues and selected for this honor?

Sass: I was surprised, but also pleased, primarily because the students had major input into this. There are lots of awards with faculty input—that’s one thing—but having students who are willing to say apparently nice things about me and some of my colleagues, that made me feel very good.

Pollock: I feel the same way. When I got the message that Hunter Rawlings wanted to talk to me, I thought, "Oh no! What did I do?" I was kind of terrified for a day, but then when he told me what it was, I was really thrilled.

Kelley: It’s a real grassroots sort of process we all appreciate. You know, you can get your awards for your scholarship and so forth, and those are great. But this was something different. I don’t know if they still do it now, but I felt like a rock star at the presentation!

Gries: It’s also a nice recognition from your colleagues. The department had a lot to do with putting forth the nominations.

Huttenlocher: Perhaps I can add perspective from the side of the selection committee. What the students have to say about the faculty, about their commitment to their students, and the students’ appreciation of that, affected me more than the award itself.

Duncan: I, too, was perplexed when I was told the president would call me at a certain time. I was afraid I was going to be tapped for some university committee. I was surprised—I didn’t know that the nomination had gone in and I was really taken aback. I was, of course, very flattered, mostly from the recognition that my department chose to submit a nomination.

Williamson: I heard that the president had been trying to get hold of me for two days, before I owned a cell phone—1999—and so actually did not get the message until I arrived home at 4 a.m. in the wee hours of a Monday morning, having driven in from a U.S. national sailing championship. I immediately guessed what the message was about and was totally thrilled. The recognition from students, colleagues, and the university is one thing, but to be part of a group with other professors whom I so respected already as my total heroes was another.

Moderator: You’ve all been recognized as good teachers, and you’re all clearly very different kinds of teachers. What do you think makes a good teacher?

Pollock: Well, I think it’s many things, but in general a good teacher is someone who’s really gone out of the way to engage a student or help them or give them an experience they wouldn’t have gotten. It’s someone who has real passion that’s palpable, an enthusiasm for what they’re doing. They enjoy what they’re doing, and the students enjoy participating.

Kelley: At Cornell, at least, I think students really appreciate it when they come to see you and you actually talk to them. You don’t say, "Come back tomorrow," or meet them in the hall and say "I’ve got to go." I think that means a lot. I think there’s something right at that instant—whatever’s on their mind—that’s the most important thing.

Sass: This is a research university. The students come here because of that. But what’s special, I suspect, is that people who are good researchers generally have great drive to do an excellent job of teaching. We’re good at giving students personal attention, getting them started in research in their freshman year. I always liked the research and I did pretty well teaching. But I didn’t take teaching really seriously until my son was a freshman here and one of his friends was in my class, and I suddenly thought, "What if he tells my son, ‘Your dad’s a loser’?" These are someone’s kids. I want to do well by them.

Gries: I had the same thing with my son in my class. There were 300 students in my class, and I stayed away from his exams and so on. But it still gives you a certain feeling. Any one of those students could be your child, and you should treat them properly.

Moderator: Do you think there is a certain "thinking outside the box" that you feel you need to do in order to teach well?

Huttenlocher: I’m in this field because I’m excited about it, and it’s important to me to convey that excitement to students. I was one of the people who, as a student, blew off a lot of my lectures, so I think I’ve always felt very motivated to try to convey some of what excites me about a topic in the classroom. You have to draw on examples from your own experience to supplement the often unexciting text and let them know why you think the material is exciting.

Pollock: I think that’s exactly the issue. You have to go in and be really, sincerely enthusiastic. You’re up there and you’re having a good time, and you’re conveying "This stuff is so cool—look at it!"

Williamson: For my class, I have tried to bring the subject to life with in-class demos, mostly desktop, and with even simple props to reinforce fundamental book work and to spice up the engagement with the students. Humor, which is not generally found in textbooks, also helps. But these demos must have a serious basis pedagogically, of course, and are sometimes subtle and often quite involved.

Duncan: I’ve found that the greatest demand on my creativity is formulating exercises. I have a certain number of concepts or goals I want to get across in the lectures. For my recitations I prepare a set of exercises that the students work together. We share the answers and discuss them. I find the students learn best by doing the exercises, so they’ve got to be designed to start easy and grow in difficulty. I feel they don’t get a lot out of the lectures because they’re mostly passive—they’re stenographers. In most of my lectures, they aren’t taking notes—they’re watching what I’m doing. And then they go and do it themselves in recitation and homework.

Kelley: Something I’ve been doing for about 10 years now is organizing recitation sections in small groups where they actually teach each other. In addition, I try to bring in undergrad seniors to work with the students, and that’s an area where I think we’re certainly underfunded. We have graders and we have TAs, but there’s not much opportunity for Cornell undergrads to get involved in teaching. I think there’s a big untapped resource there, and it’s important training. When you have student TAs, you spend a lot of time in teaching how to teach. I keep telling my TAs that they’re going to be teaching somebody something for the rest of their lives, either a technician who’s doing things for them, or a CEO who’s approving some hundred-million dollar plant or something, and you need to reach these people to teach them.

Moderator: How can you tell when you’re getting through to your students—or when you’re not getting through to them?

Sass: Well, I guess you can tell if they’re staying awake.

Gries: You know when you’re connecting just by looking at the body language.

Sass: I remember years ago, it was April, and it was getting warm out, and I was at a boring point in the lecture, and you could see the students desperately trying to hold on. put my notes aside and started telling anecdotes, stories that we find from our own experiences. It’s useful to have sense of humor and to be able to make fun of yourself. I talk about things that happened 2,000 or 50,000 years ago and make it relevant in today’s world. I always joke that I’m kind of parental about this, or worried about that. Making it personal is really what counts, I think. It’s harder for a young faculty member to do that because they may not have the background, the experience, the stories.

Duncan: You have to do something every twelve or fifteen minutes to re-set their attention clock. You can break from the normal story with, And now a word from our sponsor," a commercial interruption. You do something else, and they stop and think and listen to this, and then you say, "And now back to our story." It  helps to take them away from what they were doing and then bring them back, re-set their attention clock for another ten minutes.

 Moderator: Do you feel that you teach differently if you’re in front of a large class, as opposed to a seminar?

Huttenlocher: For me big lecture classes are primarily about performance at some level. Even the  question-and-answer in large lecture course is a caricature of a real question-and-answer because the students that speak up in a large class are usually not the ones who don’t know what’s going And it’s not that this doesn’t have value. just that it’s very different from a small setting, say office hours, or a seminar, where students are less afraid to look stupid because just you or a couple of other students.

Duncan: The goal is to get the students a large class to feel they’re in a small class. And you can tell when you’ve lost a big class because it’s as if they’re watching TV—they’re passive and they’ll be probing various body orifices, as they’d be doing in front of a TV and not be doing they knew you were talking to them one-on-one. You’re looking at them, you know if they’re there or not, and there things to do to get them to feel you’re talking directly to them. It helps if you know their names.

Kelley: I’ve experimented with having a few short-answer things I ask them to do together. By breaking up the class, you lose a few minutes, but they’ve actually learned something. The room buzzes awhile, but they settle down and you can go on just as well.

Gries: Once in awhile I try to give them a question where the answer is not so obvious. There may be several ways a problem might be done, and you encourage them to look for three, four, or five different answers and give reasons for each.

Sass: I taught history of science classes for students in the Arts College and what I was amazed about was how differently they interact in the class than engineering students do. I had humanists, linguists, art historians in this class, and I asked a rhetorical question. I turned to a blackboard to answer because I assumed that, as in engineering, no one would answer. And as soon as I asked it they began throwing answers at me. People in Arts and Sciences are very used to interacting and discussing. For people in Engineering, there’s a right answer and there’s a wrong answer. They don’t want to look foolish. So what I’ve learned from that is to wait. You know if you ask a rhetorical question you wait and wait—you don’t just give up.

Huttenlocher: Yes, knowing to pause long enough is an incredibly important device. I can’t bring myself to sit there and count to five or ten slowly enough, so the device I use is to pace all the way across the front of the lecture hall because I know that takes me about five seconds to pace back.

Duncan: I use a cup of coffee. They know you’re not going to stop the clock, as long as you’ve got the cup to your face, and if you take a good sip and then swallow, they know they still have time to answer.

Related Stories: 2005 Weiss Winner List of Winners

Moderator: How do you balance this very wonderful teaching with your research and administrative responsibilities? Do you find that one suffers as a result of the other?

Kelley: Well, I think we’re pretty blessed at Cornell in terms of relative time that we put into teaching—we have pretty reasonable teaching loads most of the time.

Sass: My wife taught writing at a local college and taught three or four courses a semester, and if I ever complained [about my teaching load], the discussion ended in a hurry. Mike’s right—we’re very fortunate.

Huttenlocher: Teaching is a contributor; it pushes your research forward. You start thinking, when you’re teaching a class, how it relates to your research and how to break some of these ideas down into the curriculum. You get a better understanding. I think it’s important not to lose track of the fact that these aren’t purely things that trade off against each other.

Williamson: Getting undergrads involved in research—real research—is great. Students hear what you’re doing through your class, and they want to work with you.

Pollock: This is kind of ironic, but I get more done when teaching starts, become better organized. It’s more than synergy—it’s stimulating. It’s refreshing.

Moderator: Do you think winning a teaching award is the kiss of death for young faculty members?

Williamson: I think that this very special award is so totally not the kiss of death; it is veritably the "kiss of life"! There is no one who has been awarded this fellowship who is not also accomplished in research, with a long track record in both research and teaching, and usually merging to some extent the two passions.

Huttenlocher: I think the reality of it is that to succeed at Cornell you absolutely have to be a researcher and that’s the way it is and the way it should be. And sometimes if people are weak in one thing and strong in another they’ll be recognized for the thing they’re strong in. So just because someone’s gotten a teaching award, to me it’s not an argument that they should be tenured at Cornell. They have to be a researcher of the right quality too. And that’s why I feel like these Weiss awards are probably better, because they are oriented more toward senior faculty. I think [junior faculty] should be mentored by their departments and see, through role models, that the senior faculty in that department take both teaching and research seriously.

Pollock: I find that the award winners are not just strictly outstanding teachers.

Huttenlocher: I agree. They’re awarded to someone who’s had an impact on the field, the university, and society, as well as in the classroom. I can’t think of any Weiss fellow who’s not also an outstanding researcher.

Pollock: To me, one thing about being a good teacher is not just to be a popular teacher, and I think that’s a delicate but important line. If you can be popular and good, that’s great. But there are ways in which you can pander to students to increase your popularity, and I think the way the Weiss is structured, it doesn’t tend to select that kind of person. And it looks at the broader role within the university. I think one thing that research universities that pay attention to teaching have to offer is that people who are interested in and able to really put effort into their teaching, when their research is still a primary piece of their career, can really challenge their students.

Moderator: What advice do you have for new teachers?

Pollock: I would say just be enthusiastic.

Williamson: And of course really knowing your stuff, and being yourself instead of trying to be somebody else—that comes across.

Gries: And don’t worry if it doesn’t go right the first time.

Williamson: But be worried enough to get it right the second time.

Sass: But life’s an experiment and not every experiment works. And maybe when you teach it the second time, you get it right.