Getting into Teaching Welding - Overview

Blog rant for today has to do with welding and the teaching of welding in a public school. This is my take on teaching high school welding and I draw on some of my thoughts and experiences having come from industry as a welding engineer and CWI to teaching high school welding. I guess we can call it my manifesto of best practices and things that worked and others that didn’t work so well.

First off I don’t teach vocational agricultural welding, not my game - my classes and students don’t build gates or BBQ pits. I teach my students to weld as if they are going to be going to go take an iron-worker structural welding test after leaving my class. I follow this approach in training high school students to weld because I cut my teeth as an engineer working with pipe-fitters, iron workers, sheet metal workers and boilermakers. Having worked with those trades and having friends in those trades I have a pretty good idea of the skills they are going to need to be successful. 

So like every other inhabitant on this ball of mud we call Earth, my history and background have shaped my worldview and what I think that welders should know, thus what high school students should be taught in regard to welding. 

That being said there are a zillion different ways to skin a cat and there are also a number of different teaching philosophies on what welders should know and the sequence of what processes they should be taught and how they should be taught. My teaching philosophy comes from asking the question - What do welders need to know to find a job and stay employed? They need to 1) know how to weld and they need to 2) have an understanding of construction math, layout, general welding theory, blueprint reading, weld defects, and some basic metallurgy.

So how do we get there? How do we get the students to the point where they can learn some of these important job skills and retain some of this knowledge? How do we teach construction math, layout, general welding theory, blueprint reading, weld defects, and some basic metallurgy?

The direction that I went while teaching high school welding was to stress the importance of the classroom while not diminishing the need for hands on skills. I went with two days a week in the classroom lecturing followed by an assignment and three days in the shop welding. The high school career center where I teach welding had two hour blocks for the career and technical education courses. So I had students for about two hours everyday and this seemed to be a good balance. 

Monday and Wednesday were lecture days, where I would cover the academic side of welding, building vocabulary and introducing them to concepts and vocabulary that they might not get elsewhere. Tuesday Thursday and Friday were the shop days where we were in the booths burning rod. The two days a week that I lecture, I lecture from PowerPoint presentations. Some of the PowerPoint presentations which I have built are from other sources like text book authors.  

I am a firm believer in making students take notes - There have been studies done on taking notes, taking notes is important for two main reasons: it helps a person concentrate during the lecture, and taking notes helps deepen your understanding of the subject matter. I lecture and have the students take notes and then make the notebook an - “other type” grade - Which is 15% of their grade, take some notes and get some points.

Another reason for the notebooks is I try to teach welding like teaching a language. If you look at welding there is so much vocabulary that you use that is not in the lexicon of the average English speaking person. Think of all the vocabulary that is pretty much only used in welding . Like pipe schedule, low hydrogen, fluxes complete joint penetration etc. The list goes on and on, and this is why I don’t teach welding like one would teach world history. 

"Okay class last week we talked about the Greeks now on to the Romans and we are never going to discuss the Greeks ever again." 

Think about how messy it would be if we taught welding like that. So I have approached teaching welding as if welding were a language. Over the course of the three years of the welding program I start teaching welding with a basic group of words and concepts and just keep building on that vocabulary and adding more words and concepts to what the student already knows, and after two or three years in the welding program the students will hopefully head off into the world with a skill set and a body of knowledge that will help them find and keep a job. 

This vocabulary is also crucial because vocabulary and the use of the welding language is what a prospective employee or welder is going to be judged on when they are in a job interview. 

This seems like a good stopping point for this rant. I will get into more depth with some of the items I mentioned above in the next blog episode.