Mechanical engineering professor James Forbes regularly attracts glowing reviews from his students, but he says he’ll never forget one negative student evaluation he received early in his teaching career. It changed the way he approaches teaching.
Much of his research has focused on aerospace and robotics systems, and Forbes, a William Dawson Scholar, tended to give students examples from those industries during the classes he taught. “But in one course evaluation, a student said, ‘I don’t know why I have to take this course. It’s only applicable to aerospace and robotics.’”
Forbes describes that evaluation, which he received about 10 years ago, as a turning point. “I thought, ‘I’ve totally failed the students.’” From then on, he made sure to use a wider variety of examples to make it plain that the principles he was discussing weren’t just relevant to a few specialized areas.
Forbes recently became the first recipient of the Faculty of Engineering’s new Donald L. Mordell EUS Teaching Excellence Award. The $16,000 prize will shine a spotlight each year on a professor, faculty lecturer, or course lecturer who has made an extraordinary contribution to teaching in engineering, architecture, or urban planning.
The award was created thanks to the generosity of Don Nilson, and named for Mordell, Nilson’s late father-in-law. Mordell, an expert on combustion, aeronautics and gas turbines, served as McGill’s dean of engineering from 1957 to 1968.
Professor Donald Mordell in 1958 during his deanship
Nilson, the co-founder and president of the wealth management firm AFT Trivest, is himself no stranger to teaching. He taught accounting at the University of British Columbia for 37 years. During a short speech at the Mordell prize ceremony, he emphasized the commitments that both teachers and students make at the beginning of each course. “When you each enter a classroom, you make an unwritten, unspoken contract with each other. One to teaching excellence and the other to learning excellence.”
This isn’t the first teaching award that Nilson has helped found. He was also the driving force behind a teaching prize at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. In both cases, Nilson wanted students to have a large say in determining the winners of the prize. The award sub-committee for the Mordell prize includes student representatives from the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) executive.
Dean of Engineering Viviane Yargeau spoke at the Mordell prize ceremony and thanked Nilson for his generosity. “We are profoundly grateful for this extraordinary gift,” she said. “Outstanding teaching is what enables our students to grow, to explore, to imagine, and to push boundaries,” Yargeau added.
While working as a TA during his graduate studies at the University of Toronto, Forbes began to see how he could help “clear the fog” and make a difference for students through his teaching.
He regularly focuses on real-world applications in his classes – in one course, he had his students design a control system to cool car brakes, a task inspired by similar work already done by the McGill Formula Electric team (and using data supplied by the team).
Student assessments of Forbes these days tend to be overwhelmingly positive.
One student wrote, “My classmates and I spent three hours in [Forbes’] office the day before the midterm, and he never made us feel like we were wasting his time. He really wanted us to understand these critical concepts.”
Forbes says his favourite classes are the ones where students are asking questions, looking at the big picture and applying earlier lessons. “Learning is not passive, learning is active.”
Forbes was one of seven nominees for the inaugural Mordell prize. Laurent Mydlarski, Daniele Malomo, Caroline Wagner, Fiona Zhao, Philippe Ouzilleau and Sherif Kamel were the other finalists.
While Forbes says he is honoured to have won, he gives props to the other nominees. “I’ve sat on awards committees and it’s infuriating because all the nominees are so good. The reality is all the others are great instructors, too.”
He was recently contacted by a former student who congratulated him on the Mordell prize. The student had begun work in a research position and told his former teacher that he was using the tools Forbes had taught in his course for the project he was involved with.
Forbes told the student that while he appreciated the good wishes for the Mordell prize, he was delighted to hear that his teaching had made a difference for the student. “I said, ‘For me, the prize really is hearing how you’re using the tools from that class to solve a real world problem.’”