Influence of High Impact Teaching Skills on the Teaching - Learning Process in Engineering Education

Abstract

Teaching in higher education institutions is becoming more and more critical and intricate with each new generation of students entering the portals of higher education. Academic Staff College at VIT University, from time to time, has been organizing a range of training programmes and faculty empowerment workshops for its faculty, newly recruited and faculty who are already serving. During the training sessions, it has been observed that there are some specific soft skills desired to be possessed by engineering teachers, in addition to their disciplinary knowledge and subject matter expertise. These skills are: creating a positive impression, simplifying complex information, use of analogies, communicating with greater impact, responding to difficult class room situations and inspiring peers and students to embrace change. In addition, generic communication skills such as use of appropriate body language and gestures, confidence, presentation of information in a logical and methodical manner, showing empathy and concern and listening skills are also required for engineering teachers. The authors have designed and implemented a model in a training environment to impart these soft skills and training in a comprehensive manner. The training methodology adopted, analysis of the observations made, the key learnings and the challenges that lie ahead for the successful development of soft skills amongst the engineering educators and teacher trainers are presented in this paper.

Keywords: engineering education, training, soft skills, communication skills, using analogies, class room situations, inspiring to embrace change.