Reinforced Concrete Design is one of the major design subjects in Civil Engineering. There are many textbooks available out there. But students learned more by solving different problems for a subject included in the board examination. The problem with referring to many textbooks is it gives many formulas to be able to solve a certain type of problem.
As instructor, I choose to refer to books on problem and show the students that we can solve the problem in an alternative approach using the formulas based on core principles. One of which is the stress strain diagram. Using the theory of stress strain diagram, one can derive formula for balanced steel ratio and distance to neutral axis. In this method, I believe student can appreciate more the derivation of formulas rather than memorizing the formulas to pass the subject.
First topic in concrete design is Singly reinforced design. Here, I emphasized that the stress strain diagram is so important that this can be used also in finding the actual stresses of steel in columns. in that way, student will better appreciate the diagram because they now have the hint that this is reused in the chapters ahead and understanding that will better equip them for concrete column analysis.