Awardee of 2022 UGC Teaching Award – Professor Anthony Man-cho SO

Guiding Principles

I strongly believe that every student has his or her own potential, and my mission as a teacher is to help my students discover and unleash this potential. During my decade-long teaching career at the University, I have been constantly challenging myself on how this can be better accomplished. This has led me to consider the following:

• (Teacher–student) How do I deliver lectures and design learning activities so that students not only gain the knowledge taught in class but are also inspired to make their own discoveries?
• (Student–student) How do I foster cooperative relationships between students to promote peer learning?
• (Student–broader community) How do I train my students to be effective communicators so that they are better able to pass on their knowledge and contribute to society?
• (Teacher–teacher) How can teachers work together to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning?

The first three questions have motivated me to approach my teaching with the notion of TACTIC: Think, Act, Communicate, Test and Investigate, and Connect. The elements of TACTIC cover the five characteristics of learner-centered teaching: (i) explicit skill instruction, (ii) fostering collaboration among students, (iii) engaging students in the work of learning, (iv) encouraging reflection on learning, and (v) giving students control over the learning process, all with the aim of achieving student agency. The fourth question has motivated my initiatives to build a community of teachers.

TACTIC for Teaching and Learning

Over the past couple years, I have been mainly teaching the undergraduate-level course ENGG2440/ESTR2004: Discrete Mathematics for Engineers and the postgraduate-level course ENGG5501: Foundations of Optimization. These courses cover different topics in mathematics that are fundamental to various branches of engineering studies. The two main challenges in teaching courses of this nature are as follows:

• When faced with abstract technical concepts, logical reasoning, and mathematical derivations, students can easily feel overwhelmed and/or lose interest in learning. How can I keep my students engaged and continue to arouse their interest?
• Various studies suggest that students’ self-efficacy in mathematics is more tied to their perceived ability to do specific tasks compared with other subjects. How can I build up my students’ confidence and enable them to apply the knowledge they learned to new settings?

Thus, I now elaborate on how I apply the elements of TACTIC to tackle these challenges.

1) Think. In my experience, when students are presented with the solution to a mathematical problem, they do not necessarily find it difficult to understand the mathematical derivations, but they are often at a loss as to how to come up with the solution in the first place. Therefore, I find it fruitful to take my students through the thinking process and show them how new concepts and solution strategies can be discovered by drawing on the knowledge that they have already acquired (perhaps through previous courses). For example, when studying the problem of how many shuffles are needed to mix up a deck of cards in a lecture on probability, I offer guiding questions such as “What does it mean for the deck to be mixed up?” and “How can one describe a shuffling process mathematically?” The students can then see how the problem is broken down into manageable pieces. I even show my students a card trick to illustrate what happens if the deck is not well-shuffled, which makes the lecture more fun. Once the students realize that they have the ability to find their own paths to discovery, they become more engaged and confident. The aforementioned scaffolding approach also enhances the retention of knowledge among students and encourages them to view the courses they have taken as an integrated whole rather than as individual unrelated modules.

2) Act. Working through problems allows students to act on their knowledge and is an integral part of learning mathematics. However, problems that are routine in nature are neither enlightening nor helping students develop the ability to generalize the knowledge that they have acquired to different settings. Therefore, I design homework problems with the aim of training students to (i) consolidate the knowledge they have learned in lectures and explore extensions of this knowledge on their own and (ii) apply the techniques to tackle problem settings and practical scenarios that they have not seen before. As the problems are meant to be challenging, I encourage my students to work together, thus promoting peer learning. Through this learning activity, students are able to sharpen their problem-solving skills and build up their self-efficacy through mastery and vicarious experiences. My students’ feedback indicates that they appreciate this inquiry-based learning approach. As one undergraduate student from my graduate-level course ENGG5501 commented:

“ENGG5501 is so magical: the course content is deeper than all the undergrad courses
I have taken, but I feel that I am able to think through them during lectures. Assignment questions enable me to understand the concepts better…I feel the assignment problem sets are amazing.”

3) Communicate. Traditionally, engineering education places a great deal of emphasis on developing students’ technical skills, but little on developing their communication skills, particularly their writing skills. In fact, most engineering students are resistant to writing. However, writing is recognized as a primary method through which scientific knowledge is advanced and communicated, and students’ success in their future engineering-related careers will depend greatly on their ability to write. To bridge this gap, I have introduced two learning activities in my courses.

First, I give out practice exercises in class and ask my students to share their answers on the online learning management system Piazza. Although these exercises are not graded and participation is optional, students have previously been active in posting not just their solution approaches but also comments on others’ works. However, although they had no difficulty solving the exercises, they often struggled to express themselves clearly in the posts.

Consequently, they often had to go back and forth to discuss and make clarifications. I would then intervene and show them how to write up their ideas properly. The activity provides my students with opportunities to practice communicating technical ideas in writing and fosters collaboration and peer learning. As one student from ESTR2004commented:

“(The) Professor has excellent skills in teaching and encouraging discussion and interaction among students.”

Second, I designed a writing component for my course ESTR2004, which requires students to write an expository essay in the style of a chapter in an introductory textbook on a theorem in discrete mathematics. This exercise is aimed at training students not only to learn to write but also to write to learn, which is the core of the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) pedagogy. It provides an opportunity for them to reflect on and take control over their own learning, to actively construct knowledge, and to practice some features of discourse in the discipline—aspects that complement those taught in university English courses. As it is likely to be the first time my students have written such an essay, I developed two supporting activities to ensure that they have a meaningful learning experience. (i) I have developed a homework assignment that asks them to supply the details of the proof of the theorem and guides them on how to prepare the essay, and I also set out the grading criteria so that they know how their essays will be assessed. (ii) I invite students to submit a draft, which will not be graded, before submitting their final version so that I can give them suggestions for improvement. This writing component is the first of its kind in any engineering course at CUHK, and it provides students with much-needed training on technical writing.

4) Test and Investigate. Standard texts on engineering mathematics tend to present technical developments in a streamlined manner. However, they leave no room for students to explore less direct but more natural/insightful approaches or to salvage seemingly unworkable ideas. This stifles students’ creativity and goes against the way most scientific discoveries are made, which is through multiple rounds of trial and error. Therefore, whenever appropriate, I guide my students to test out intuitive but not necessarily workable ideas for solving a problem and investigate ways to make these ideas work. Through this discovery learning approach, students are able to remain creative and are empowered to conduct their own explorations.

5) Connect. Discoveries in engineering have led to exciting advances in multiple disciplines, but they also pose pressing challenges to society. To deepen my students’ learning experience, I connect the subject knowledge of my courses to some of these advances and challenges. This interdisciplinary approach allows students not only to think critically about what they have learned but also to appreciate the human aspects of engineering. For example, in my course ENGG5501, I show students how optimization methods can be applied to a host of problems from various disciplines. When I teach the topic linear programming, I tell the story of how the mathematics and algorithms it is based on helped the Western allies break the Soviet blockade on West Berlin in 1949 and shaped the struggles between the East and West during the Cold War. Students from outside my discipline are often able to apply what they have learned in this course to their research. Some have even collaborated with me on interdisciplinary projects and have become my co-authors in research publications.

TACTIC for Research Supervision

The core aim of TACTIC is to achieve student agency. Thus, I have also applied the approach in my research supervision of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. My experience shows that through this approach, undergraduates can be as capable as postgraduates in taking ownership of learning and making impactful discoveries.

Leadership in Teaching and Learning

I have been actively leading efforts in curriculum/program design and building a community of teachers, which addresses the fourth question I posed. When teachers collaborate, more students can benefit from good teaching and learning practices, while the teachers have the opportunity to reflect on their own teaching and can be more innovative in the classroom. Below are some highlights illustrating this approach.

The Faculty launched the Engineering Leadership, Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (ELITE) Stream in 2014, which aims to nurture outstanding students to become well-rounded engineers. As its founding director, I followed TACTIC to set up the standard for the Stream and regularly communicate this standard to both teachers and students. I also regularly organize information sessions for teachers to share their good practices in teaching ELITE Stream courses. Based on these sessions, some of my colleagues have adopted WID components in their courses.

In 2017-18, I led the revamp of the engineering mathematics curriculum in my capacity as the Convener of the Engineering Mathematics Subject Panel. In this exercise, I introduced six newly designed foundation engineering mathematics courses after consulting stakeholders in the Faculty and benchmarking with similar courses in peer institutions. The new courses provide more coherent coverage and give students more room to think and act. Since then, I have been holding meetings with the teachers of each of these six courses before the start of each term to share good teaching and learning practices, discuss assessment arrangements, and provide support to new teachers.

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GENERALIZATION AND APPLICATIONS TO OTHER DISCIPLINES

The writing component I designed for the course ESTR2004 is motivated by the Writing in the Disciplinespedagogy, which aims to teach students to write to learn the subject knowledge and to learn to write in the discipline-specific discourse. Thus, it can naturally be transferred to other STEM disciplines. Even in disciplines that already require a substantial amount of writing (e.g., humanities), students can still benefit if (i) the writing assignments require them to reflect on their learning and make their thinking visible, so that their learning can be assessed, and (ii) feedback is provided not only on the content but also on the history, conventions, and terminology of the discipline. Depending on the class size and the amount of feedback required, one can implement the writing component as either short reflective reports or a long essay with proper scaffolding.

Teaching is an evolving process, in which students’ learning needs and the approaches that can effectively address them change over time. This motivates me to engage in continuous professional development, which is crucial to my objective of achieving student agency.

STUDENT LEARNING EXPERIENCES

Supporting students with special education needs (SEN)

To provide better pastoral care and academic advice to SEN students and to support their teachers, I attended the following workshops:

• Managing Lectures with Students of Diverse Learning Needs (ASD and/or ADHD). Wellness and Counselling Centre, Office of Student Affairs, CUHK and Heep Hong Society (04/2022).
• Challenges for Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Tertiary Education. Heep Hong Society (04/2021).

In addition, I served as the Faculty representative (and the only academic staff member) on the organizing committee and on the judging panel of the following campus-wide competition, which aims to raise awareness of the challenges faced by SEN students and to provide students from all disciplines with an opportunity to showcase and realize their innovative ideas for the benefits of SEN students.

• “Turn Imaginations to Everyday Life”: Barrier-Free Campus Design Competition. Wellness and Counselling Centre, Office of Student Affairs (organizer) and Faculty of Engineering (co-organizer), CUHK (03/2021 – 06/2022).

Global Grand Challenges Summit and creating modules on technology and human values

I attended the 2019 Global Grand Challenges Summit, the 4th biennial event hosted jointly by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The Summit included workshops and roundtable discussions on student mentoring from a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspective and on the need to incorporate elements of collaboration, diversity, and global responsibility in engineering education. The Summit inspired me to develop the following two modules for a general audience. These highlight the need for multi-disciplinary efforts (including in the humanities) in the development of future technologies.

• Ethical Dilemmas in Artificial Intelligence
  • Guest lecture, CUHK Morningside College general education course GEMC1001: Current Dilemmas and Their Histories (11/2019, 11/2020, 11/2021, 10/2022).
  • Invited talk, St. Paul’s Convent School (05/2020).
• AI with Human Values?
  • Invited talk, TED × CUHK (04/2021).

Academic advisory system sharing session

These sessions are held annually by the Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning. I attended three of the sessions (10/2019, 10/2020, 02/2022) and shared our Faculty’s academic advisory experience and practices with other Faculty representatives. I also shared the good practices of other Faculties with our Faculty’s academic advisers and guided them in implementing the practices.

CURRICULUM AND PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT

ELITE Stream

As the Director of ELITE Stream since its inception in 08/2014 until 07/2022, I was responsible for (i) setting up policies and requirements of the Stream for students and providing guidance on course design to teachers by benchmarking against engineering honors programs in other institutions, (ii) developing and implementing assessment policies for courses in the Stream, and (iii) mentoring and advising students in the Stream.

Subject Panel for Engineering Mathematics Courses

I served as the Convener of this subject panel from 08/2014 to 07/2022. I was responsible for (i) restructuring the Faculty foundation mathematics courses, streamlining their syllabi, and benchmarking them against similar courses in other institutions; (ii) providing guidance on teaching and assessment to teachers; and (iii) overseeing the teaching, learning, and assessment of Faculty foundation mathematics courses.

TEACHER COLLABORATION, DISSEMINATION OF TEACHING PRACTICES

Students’ learning and teachers’ self-efficacy improve when teachers work together. This has motivated me to engage in the following activities:

• I shared my pedagogical approaches through micro-modules in a CUHK Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant project titled “An E-Learning Platform for Junior Teachers and Teaching Assistants in the Faculty of Engineering.” The project received the Silver Prize—Pedagogical Innovation and People’s Poster Prize at the CUHK Teaching and Learning Innovation Expo 2021.
• As the Director of ELITE Stream, I organized the Faculty-wide “Teaching ELITE Stream Courses: Information and Sharing Session” in 09/2015, 08/2016, 08/2017, and 08/2018, in which I shared with teachers the philosophy behind the Stream, the course and assessment component design, and student mentoring. I also invited teachers of ELITE Stream courses to share their experiences and good practices.
• I gave a talk on “Doing Pedagogical Research in Classroom” in 04/2016 in the Faculty of Engineering Teaching and Learning Enrichment Sharing Lunch Seminar Series.