Do your students a favor, teach your faculty how to teach

The Department of Systems Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York hosts majors in Systems Engineering, Engineering Management, Operations Research and Information Systems Engineering. The faculty is composed primarily of active duty army officers with Master´s Degrees and Ph.D.s who conduct both teaching and research for three years and are then transferred back to a standard Army assignment. This paper explores methods that are used in the department to teach these new faculty members how to teach during the summer prior to their first fall classes. The paper covers the reception and integration of new faculty members into an academic department, the conduct of a summer teaching workshop, and follow-up feedback for these instructors throughout the first year of teaching. The paper provides practical guidelines for implementing such a program in any engineering department to improve both faculty teaching performance and ultimately student learning.