You have to tell the students what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you don’t, then they jump to one of two assumptions. Either they assume you’re playing some kind of game with them—and engineering students in particular don’t like that. Or they assume you are running some sort of research study with them as the guinea pigs, and they’re not too thrilled about that either. So at the beginning of class, I always tell them, “Here’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be doing team activities in class, problem solving and so forth, and you’re going to be doing most of your homework in teams, and this isn’t a game or a research study. I don’t need to do a research study on it, because it has been done and here is what the research shows.” I don’t give them a whole seminar in cooperative learning, but I talk enough about the proof and benefits of it to them to make it clear that I’m not doing this for my own good. I’m doing it because there is something in it for them, and a lot of them may not like it—a lot of them don’t like it—but as long as they think that I have some purpose with them in mind, they’re willing to sit still for it, long enough to see the benefit for themselves.
                             

                                                       BACK