What can we learn from our ‘best teachers’
Winners best teacher awards Mark Bentum and Reinoud Lavrijsen spill the beans on their educational 'weapons'.
The euphoria of winning prizes for their teaching, awarded during MomenTUm 2021, has now subsided a little for Mark Bentum and Reinoud Lavrijsen. Students chose Bentum of Electrical Engineering and Lavrijsen of Applied Physics as our university's best bachelor's and master's teachers. Interviews with these passionate teachers provide an insight into their success. Alongside, of course, thorough knowledge and a drive to master their discipline, further important attributes are humor and openness.
Mark Bentum: “Explaining to someone else is the highest form of learning”
Full Professor Mark Bentum's teaching commitments in the bachelor's phase Electrical Engineering include the required course Electromagnetics II. Which he teaches so well that during MomenTUm he was awarded the title Best Bachelor's Teacher. His trade secrets: use humor and get the students involved in the course from day one. “Hey ho, jump right in.”
His surprise at winning leaps out of the photo taken Saturday October 16th of the Best Bachelor's Teacher 2021-22. “I didn't see the pitches made by my fellow nominees (Jim Portegies, Bettina Speckmann and Hans Jeekel, ed.) and I had no idea whether I would win,” says Bentum. Cursor is speaking to him onscreen. Looking outside, he can see Dwingeloo's huge telescopes; he is seated in his office at the national astronomy institute ASTRON, where he currently works three days a week.
Read the interview with Mark Bentum here.
Reinoud Lavrijsen, “I want to train critical thinkers”
The TU/e Best Master's Teacher is not the first award Reinoud Lavrijsen has received, but it is the one he most enjoys. Among his other 'wins', the associate professor at Applied Physics (AP) can count the National Science Quiz in 2016, a Rubicon in 2011 that enabled his passage to Cambridge, and a Veni grant that brought him back to Eindhoven. But the prize he received during MomenTUm lies closest to his passion. “And that's teaching young people and letting them find their own way of 'owning' the material.”
For pedagogical methods used in the past on the Nanomagnetism course, Reinoud Lavrijsen has been recognized on several occasions by STOOR, AP's education committee, but having now made the course fully lockdown-proof, he has been recognized for his pedagogical prowess by the entire TU/e community. Of the pitches made by the three nominees, Lavrijsen, Wybo Houkes (IS) and Zümbül Atan (IE), it was his that the student council chose as the very best.
Read the complete interview with Reinoud Lavrijsen.
Deze interviews were published previously on the Cursor website.
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