ABSTRACT
For the novice teacher looking for advice, or the experienced teacher hoping to do something new, there is certainly no shortage of suggestions on how to improve one’s teaching practice, or novel ideas to apply in one’s course. There are more conferences, books, societies, magazines and articles on the web than even a team of people could hope to ingest in a lifetime. Indeed, this very book contains an excellent collection of current and useful exemplars of innovative practice. What is, possibly, less written about is the very common experience of finding out that things don’t work out quite as one has planned. Although there are often very positive initial student responses to a new and different thing happening in their course, with time it might often become apparent that the dramatic planned for change in student learning is somewhat elusive, at least for part of the class. The present chapter explores student responses to a second-year chemical engineering course where the lecturer had adopted a range of innovative teaching practices with the intention of promoting better learning. In particular, a closer look is taken at instances where student learning outcomes did not match the lecturer’s intentions, with the hope that this might provide useful insights for engineering educators who are, themselves, embarking upon change in their classroom practice.
