NC State University Academy of Outstanding Teachers<\/h3> Recipients of the Outstanding Teacher Award become members of the Academy of Outstanding Teachers for as long as they remain a member of the NC State faculty.<\/p>
Learn more about the <\/span>Academy <\/span> Interview Transcipt<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Maria Gallardo-Williams:<\/strong> Welcome, Dr. Felder. It's so good to see you. We wanted to speak with you this week because we believe that you are truly an outstanding educator. So let's start with you telling us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? <\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder:<\/strong> Okay, I'd be happy to do that. Well, I have one small request. We've known each other and been friends for many, many years. If you insist on calling me Dr. Felder, I will have to call you Dr. Gallardo-Williams, and terribly formal. I wonder if we could be a little less formal. <\/p>\n\n\n\nMaria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>Of course we can. Rich, tell us a little bit about yourself. <\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>Okay. All right. I was born in, uh, New York City, I lived there and went to kindergarten in, in New York City, in the borough of Queens if anyone watching this is familiar with New York City. And then we moved upstate. My family and I moved upstate when I was about six years old to Buffalo, New York, where I got enough exposure to snow to last me for the rest of this lifetime and several beyond it. And I went to elementary school in Buffalo. That lasted me through the eighth grade. At that point, we moved to South Florida and I went to junior high school and high school in North Miami, Florida. That's where I got my high school education. That was my first exposure to a college campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn addition to taking courses in high school, I was on the track team, and we went to the State of Florida track meet one year, and it was on campus at the University of Florida in Gainesville. That was my first exposure to a college campus atmosphere, and it felt very comfortable to me. And I graduated from high school, and at that point we moved to New York City and I went to college at the City College of New York. I majored in chemical engineering, and that was a five-year curriculum. Following that, I did a year's postdoc in England at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, England, and did some engineering research there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After I graduated, I went to graduate school at Princeton University and got my doctorate in chemical engineering. Then went to England for a year on a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, England, about 15 miles from Oxford, another splendid university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We'd go to Oxford to do our laundry every week. Coming back from England, I spent two years at Brookhaven National Laboratory doing some engineering research in the Department of Nuclear Engineering. My doctorate was in an area of atomic physics. And my work at Brookhaven was really more nuclear engineering than chemical engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During that two years, I decided that, you know, chemical engineering, it was good - I was enjoying it. I did some work that got published in my graduate studies program. But, the engineering part of it was never all that exciting to me, and not much was going on in the employment at that time. And I decided that, since I really enjoyed my experiences in college and in graduate school, that possibly an academic setting would be better for me than the setting involving industrial chemical engineering research. And so I applied to several universities. I got an invitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Apparently my work had impressed people at North Carolina State University. I got an invitation from them to come down and visit. And I happily accepted that. I thought, the idea of, since I was a New Yorker, in my mind I'll always be a New Yorker, and the idea of moving to the South, North Carolina, I said, \"I'm not really sure how well that's going to work out.\" But, they had some interesting things to say to me about what it was like there and what they were working on. So I went down there. I was impressed by the people that I met. They were doing some really interesting work. One of the members of the faculty was another New Yorker, and he assured me that I would be able to find the things that I needed to survive happily in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, which is where North Carolina State is located.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so I decided, \"Okay, if they make me an offer, I'll accept it and come down. And if I don't like either the university or teaching chemical engineering, I'll spend a year there and then go somewhere else.\" And so I went down there, interviewed. They impressed me. I liked what I saw about the area, which is rich in colleges, the Triangle area of North Carolina. So I said, \"If they make me an offer, I will accept it.\" They made me an offer. I accepted it. I moved down to North Carolina. And since then, and that was about half a century ago, I have never once had any desire to move to a different part of the country. And when I started teaching for the first time, I got the same preparation for teaching that most college teachers get, which is none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The standard practice at universities is they welcome you to the college, they tell you how happy they are that you're going there. They tell you that, to progress at the university, you need to get very active in research and start research grants and publishing in really top journals. And by the way, you're also gonna need to teach courses, and that's the extent of the preparation I got for teaching, and that's still the standard preparation for teaching at most universities. Not all of them, but that's what I got. And when I went up to teach for the first time, they told me which course I was gonna teach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went in there, taught it, and within a few minutes of that first class, I realized, okay, this is what I think I'm here to do. I got more excitement out of teaching and enjoyment when teaching was going well. And I just decided this is my profession. I'm gonna do research. You have to in order to succeed in that profession, but I'm not gonna make that my entire life, and I'm going to be the best teacher I possibly can.And so began my long academic career, and that's probably an overlong answer to your question. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>No, that is a wonderful answer. I could listen to you talk about that all day. Let me ask you a question. Can you think of an educator that inspired you, and how did they influence you and your teaching practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>Yes. That's a very good and pertinent question. As I mentioned, I had discovered that I really liked teaching. I could say I loved teaching, and I got a great deal of satisfaction out of teaching when it was working well, and I could see light bulbs going on over students' heads as they suddenly understood something that they had been struggling to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd I decided that I really want to put a lot of energy into this profession, into teaching, and not just do the research and teach because it's part of my job description. I really want to do as well about this as I possibly can. But I have to focus on research as well because that's the nature of the academic profession. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I started going to conferences of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and, at those conferences, there were some sessions devoted to education and teaching chemical engineering. And I sat in on some of those and watched some of chemical engineering professors, the tops in the country, presenting on what they were doing and, and presenting in specific on their teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How they were teaching, what problems they were encountering, what techniques they had been discovering that made teaching work better than the traditional I talk and you listen and then repeat what I told you, which is the standard teaching model. And there were two professors in particular whom I encountered in my journey along those lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of them was Jim Stice of the University of Texas Chemical Engineering, and the other was Donald Woods in the Chemical Engineering department at McMaster University in Canada. And these were two fellows who clearly had made teaching the focus of their entire careers. You know, they had done some engineering research, but most of their research and essentially all of their publication was devoted to education pedagogy, how to teach effectively, what mistakes teachers make, how to avoid the mistakes, and I was absolutely fascinated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody had ever told me any of those things. I didn't even know they existed until I heard these two who had made that their career direction talking about what they were doing, and my reaction was, \"Oh, can you really do that?\" You know? \"Can you really make teaching the focus of your career if, if you're at a research university?\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which they were. Jim Stice was at the University of Texas, and Don Woods was at McMaster University. And I started thinking, \"If those two could do it, possibly I can too.\" And so that was a major influence in my career. I started learning as much about teaching as I possibly could. I started reading books about pedagogy, and there were some good ones out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don Woods had done a tremendous amount of writing about effective teaching methods, and I read everything he wrote. Jim Stice taught me a great deal. I read all of his papers, and that changed the course of my career. I continued doing research for the first decade or so of my academic career because, again, you had to. If I wanted to get tenure at a research university, I had to go out, write proposals, get grants, publish papers in good journals. But at the same time, I could and did make room for learning more and more about teaching and incorporating some of the things that I was learning into what I was doing in my classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And somewhat to my astonishment because it was all new to me, none of my teachers had ever done any of those things. They were just, I think every teacher I ever had in high school, in college, and in graduate school was teaching the traditional model, getting up and lecturing, and I listen and take notes and try to memorize as much as I can about what they were telling me, and then repeat it on the exams. And now, when I started doing some of these other things that Jim and Don were teaching me about and finding out that they were having a serious impact on the students. For example, instead of just lecturing for 50-minute or 75-minute stretches in my classes, I stopped my lecturing periodically and gave the students something to do with what I had been talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ask a question, gave them a problem to solve, and then sometimes I had them work on it individually for a brief period of time, and sometimes I had them get into groups and do that, and that's active learning. And I started to find that when I was doing those things and other things I was learning from Jim Stice and Don Woods, and other things I had been reading, the students were responding and learning in a way that I had never seen them before when all I was doing was lecturing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I was seeing learning of a caliber that I really never experienced in my own classes when I was a student, just listening to lectures for 50 and 75-minute stretches. And that and other things I learned from my reading and from Jim and Don and other model teachers influenced the way that I've taught in the 50 years that has elapsed since then, the things that I learned and some things that I then later developed by myself became the basis for my writings about teaching, papers that I was writing. And, ultimately, the textbook that I wrote in chemical engineering incorporated some of those techniques and the book that I subsequently wrote with my then wife and current wife, Rebecca Brent, who was an education major and an education professor, and I started learning a great deal from her too. And all of those things ended up being incorporated in the things that I've written in the remainder of my career until now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>I have one question for you. If you could go back and give yourself advice about teaching and working in higher education, what words of wisdom would you share with young Rich?<\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>I would say start going to those conferences immediately and find people who have made that the focus of their careers, like Jim Stice and Don Woods, and learn from them as much as you possibly can. And as long as you're going to be teaching in addition to doing research, and you wanna do it well, start finding out about how it needs to be done, because they're not going to teach you how to do it as part of your preparation.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI didn't have any workshops on teaching before I became a professor and started creating my own workshops, and I didn't read anything and I didn't get any lectures on pedagogy and how people learn and how the brain works and what conditions foster learning and what hinder learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to learning about the research areas that you're going into, start learning as much as you possibly can about how to teach. There's a lot of good knowledge out there, and the sooner you learn it and start putting it into practice, the happier you're going to be in this career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>Well, having been the recipient of the wisdom that you share in your workshops, I have to say that I count myself very fortunate that early in my career my new faculty orientation workshop was taught by you and Rebecca. So I feel like I got a good head start. So let me ask you about your teaching, your engineering teaching resources. You have a great website with lots of things. You have many published papers. I would like to talk about your book, Teaching and Learning STEM, that you co-authored with Rebecca. It is such a valuable source of information for STEM instructors all over the world. How did that project get started, and how did it grow?<\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>Sure. When Rebecca and I got married, I almost immediately started learning things about teaching from her, in addition to the work that I had been learning from my mentors, Jim and Don and other excellent engineering professors. We would talk about teaching, and she would be te- telling me things that she had learned in her studies of teaching and in her teaching practice. She taught in elementary school early in her career after she got her doctorate in education, and then she subsequently got a faculty position in a school of education and taught others how to teach. And so I could learn a tremendous amount from her, and Engineering was far out of her field.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHer studies had been in education and in liberal arts and so on, and she had never gotten anywhere near engineering. But teaching is teaching, and the same skills and techniques that work to teach literature and poetry and history and geography and so on, exactly the same techniques and the same conditions in the brain apply to STEM: science, engineering, mathematics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so despite the fact that she didn't have a background in science and engineering, her deep background in teaching enabled her to give me all sorts of valuable tips on, \"Here's how you do this.\" I had started writing about some of the techniques that I had been developing and adapting from things I'd learned from others, and I had started giving workshops on teaching, first to faculty colleagues at North Carolina State, where I was, and I started writing about the things I was developing and getting invitations to go to other places, other campuses in the United States, and then I started getting them from overseas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so even before I met Rebecca, I had been giving workshops on effective teaching at universities that invited me based on the papers that they had read. And not terribly long after Rebecca and I met and got married, I realized that this is a treasure trove of expertise I'm married to here, and I asked her if she would have any interest in coming in with me and giving the workshops jointly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that would also give us nice opportunities to travel together to some very, very nice places, which we got to do. And so we started giving workshops together and joint invitations to give workshops. At one point, I co-created with Jim Stice the National Effective Teaching Institute which was a workshop given to engineering faculty from campuses all around the United States, and ultimately coming from elsewhere in the world. And that went very well for a number of years. But then Jim, who was considerably older than me, retired, and I invited Rebecca to come in and co-direct the National Effective Teaching Institute, which would attract hundreds of faculty members from all over the place every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She agreed, and so we started giving that on a regular basis, in addition to traveling to give our workshops. And we ended up making a joint career in teaching other people how to teach. And at some point we said that, you know, \"We've assembled a lot of material. Why don't we put this in a book? It might interest people at other universities in using it in their own teacher training programs.\" And that's how Teaching and Learning STEM was born. It went very well. A number of people knew about us from our papers and our workshops, and so we had some natural promotion of the book going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As you discovered it, knowing about our work previously to that, and more and more people have discovered it and its second edition came out in 2024, and it just keeps rolling along. It truly is a wonderful resource. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>So I have one last question for you. Let's say that you meet somebody who is new to teaching, maybe will start teaching this new academic year. What, what is one resource or one tip maybe that you could suggest to them? <\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>Okay. Um, can I ask you to allow me two? <\/p>\n\n\n\nMaria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>I will ask you to do as many as you want. <\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>Well, I could go on all day, but I won't, since you can't go on all day. This interview is finite. <\/p>\n\n\n\nBut there are two in particular, and when we give our workshops, we always emphasize these. We say that we're giving you 175 different suggestions about how to improve your teaching here, and you can't possibly implement all of them at the same time in every course you teach. And so if there were only two things we would propose that you take away from our workshop and limit what you do in your teaching to these two, it would make a dramatic improvement in your teaching if you're not already using those techniques. And so what are those two techniques? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first one has to do with learning objectives. A learning objective - which could mean a lot of different things - but what it means in the sense that we use it and that most professional educators use it in. A learning objective for a teacher is a clear, concise statement of what the students should be able to do if they have learned what the teacher is trying to teach them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know, if the teacher can pass on the knowledge, the facts, the relationships, and the attitudes that make teaching good, then once they know what it is they're going to do, they define, what is it that I want my students to learn? What facts do I want my students to learn? What problem-solving techniques do I want them to learn?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What kind of personal techniques like teamwork, right, like creativity, creative thinking, like critical thinking, what do I want them to develop and how will they demonstrate to me how, whether and how well they've developed it? What am I gonna ask them to do on assignments and tests to show me that they have learned the theory of this course, they've learned the definitions of important terms, they've learned how to make judgments about what the best way of approaching a problem is of a certain type, the best way to communicate to others how to do this or that and so forth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And if you make those learning objectives clear and concise, they need to be clear to the students, and most important, they need to be observable to you. For example, there are certain words that all teachers use. I want my students to be able to do this and that. All right? And one of those words, for example, is understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018I want my students to understand Newton's three laws of motion.\u2019 But understand is not a verb you wanna use for a learning objective because the question then comes back, \"Well, good, of course you want them to understand it. How will you know whether or not they do?\" And then your answer to that question is, \"Well, I'll ask them to explain it in terms that a fellow student could understand, or I'll ask them to use this law or this principle, this theory, to solve a real world problem.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All right? So they need to solve the problem. They need to derive the equation. They need to explain to somebody else this concept, and so forth. And then I turn around and say, \"Good, those words you just used, derive, explain, those are your learning objectives.\" The students will be able to explain the Newton's second law of motion to somebody who doesn't understand it, to another student in this course, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That's observable because I can see them explaining this to a student, to another student, and I can say, \"Yes, they understand it,\" all right, because they can explain it to somebody else. Explain is the observable part. You can't observe somebody understanding something unless they do something visible to observe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so my first general tip is write good learning objectives for everything you wanna teach your students. Use those objectives as the basis for designing your assignments and examinations, and share those objectives with the students. Give the students a study guide for your exam that contains your learning objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the student is gonna do well on this exam, the student will be able to derive this, calculate that, explain such and such, and so forth. That's your collection of learning objectives associated with your goal of understanding. So my tip to my junior colleagues whom I'm giving this advice to, is write learning objectives, make them observable to you, and make them clear to the students, and use them as the basis for everything you put into that course, and share them with the students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Second general principle tip that I would give my junior colleagues whom I'm training to be teachers is active learning. Okay? What's active learning? Active learning is not just telling students what you want them to know, not just giving them lectures on it or having them watch lectures on recorded videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Active learning is getting them to do the things you want them to be able to do in class. So instead of just lecturing for 50 or 75 minutes, periodically you lecture, you present some information, and then you stop the lecture, and you give the students something to do that has them use what you just lectured them on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Give them an equation to derive, or an equation to solve, or a concept to explain, or whatever the learning objective is. All right? And in your class, after you've stopped the lecture, you give them that something to do, and you may have them do it, and you give them a short period of time to do it. You don't say, \"Take 20 minutes and solve this problem,\" because those who don't know how to solve the problem are just about to waste 20 minutes of class time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead of doing that, I say, \"Okay, here's the problem that we're going to solve together.\" Right now, what I want you to do, sometimes individually and sometimes I have them get into small groups of two or three where they're sitting and I say, \"I'm gonna give you two minutes. Start this problem solution.\" Right? \"See how far you can get in two minutes or three minutes, but not 20 minutes.\" Short period of time, just a couple of minutes. I let them go, in groups if I've told them to, individually if I've told them to do that. Then I say, \"Okay, everybody, stop.\" And then I call on some individuals to report on what they come up- came up with, or some groups to have somebody in the group explain what did they do. \"Okay, Joan, what did your team do?\" And Joan tells me how they got started, and I may write it up on the board. And then, you know, \"Harold, what about your group? What did you do?\" And I'll get several responses from them. And then it may be that after I get finished with that, the next part of the problem is totally straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Simple algebra. It's something I know they all know how to do, and I'll just quickly go through that in a lecture format. I don't want to waste time having them get in groups and taking two or three minutes to do something I know they all know how to do. I just quickly do it in 10 seconds on the board, and then I get to the next difficult, challenging part of the problem, and I throw it back at them. \"Okay, now here's where we are in the problem. Here's what the next thing that we are trying to do. Back in your groups. Take three minutes for this one and see how far you can get. Go.\" And I do it. And then while they're working, I'm circulating around, and as I circulate around, I'll generally see raised hands. \"Professor, could you explain this a little more? We're all confused.\" And I do that. And then I stop them after the allotted time, call on a few of them. Quickly lecture through the next simple parts, then another activity, and that's how I teach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that's how I teach everything I teach, and that's how I tell my junior colleagues, \"You're not gonna feel comfortable doing this the first time you ever try it. It's gonna be awkward. You're gonna be afraid students are not paying attention, students don't wanna do this, and so on. You're gonna have to get over that, but you will in a short period of time, and then it's gonna start working.\" Will it work for all students? No, not necessarily, but nothing else does either. Will all students like it? No. Some students want you to tell them everything they need to know and nothing more, and they don't wanna do any work. So you may get some grumbling. However, what you're going to see, if you keep on doing this, is learning like you have never seen before in courses that you've taught traditionally with lectures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that's another infinitely long answer to your short question. The two things I would tell my students, in my teacher training course are, one, write and use learning objectives. Two, use active learning in your class. Don't just lecture, get the students actively involved, and it will make a difference in your teaching if you've never done this before, like you wouldn't dream possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>Thank you so much, Rich. I wanna thank you for your time. This has been a wonderful interview, and it's great to see you, and thank you for joining us. <\/p>\n\n\n\nRich Felder: <\/strong>Okay, thank you, and hopefully we can get together over a cup of coffee or something sometime in the future. It's been a long time. <\/p>\n\n\n\nMaria Gallardo-Williams: <\/strong>That would be so nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\nLet's put that on our calendars. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Credits<\/h3>\n\n\n\n The SPARK Team 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nMaria Gallardo-Williams, Producer\/Writer<\/li>\n\n\n\n Janet Del Pinal, Promotion\/Graphic Designer\/Announcer <\/li>\n\n\n\n Kyle Miskell, Audio Engineer<\/li>\n\n\n\n Kassidy Wood, Social Media Promotion<\/li>\n\n\n\n Jopsy Bayog, Music <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n"},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Introduction Welcome to Igniting Outstanding Teaching, a four-part professional development series created by the Office for Faculty Excellence at NC State University. This is the 2026 offering of the award-winning SPARK…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"source":"","ncst_custom_author":"Diane Chapman","ncst_show_custom_author":true,"ncst_dynamicHeaderBlockName":"ncst\/default-post-header","ncst_dynamicHeaderData":"{\"displayCategoryID\":4,\"showAuthor\":false,\"showDate\":true,\"showFeaturedVideo\":false}","ncst_content_audit_freq":"","ncst_content_audit_date":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-ofefacultyforum"],"displayCategory":{"term_id":4,"name":"Blog","slug":"blog","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":4,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":47,"filter":"raw"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33214"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33230,"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33214\/revisions\/33230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/provost.ncsu.edu\/ofe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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