Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

       ABSTRACT

      Each one of us has views about education, how discipline should function, how individuals learn, how they should be motivated, what intelligence is, and the structures (content and subjects) of the curriculum. Perhaps the most important beliefs that (beginning) teachers bring with them are their notions about what constitutes “good teaching”. The scholarship of teaching requires that (beginning) teachers should examine (evaluate) these views in the light of knowledge currently available about the curriculum and instruction, and decide their future actions on the basis of that analysis. Such evaluations are best undertaken when classrooms are treated as laboratories of inquiry (research) where teachers establish what works best for them.

      Two instructor centred and two learner centred philosophies of knowledge, curriculum and instruction are used to discern the fundamental (basic) questions that engineering educators should answer in respect of their own beliefs and practice. They point to a series of classroom activities that will enable them to challenge their own beliefs, and at the same time affirm, develop, or change their philosophies of knowledge, curriculum and instruction.

       KEYWORDS

      accountability, action research, active learning, advanced organiser, affective, animation, answerability, assessment, attitudes, beginning engineering educators, code of ethics, cognitive dissonance, communication, community, competence, complexity, cognitive organisation, curriculum (design, paradigms, process), concept (cartoons, clusters, inventories, key, maps, learning), content (syllabus), convergent, creativity, critical thinking, debates, decision making, design, diagnosis, discipline (s) (of knowledge), discovery, divergent, educational connoisseurship, evaluation, examinations (tests), examples, experts, expository instruction, instructional design, expressive activities, grading, heuristic(s), guided design, inquiry based learning, instructor centred, intellectual development, intelligence (applied, emotional, practical, academic), interdisciplinary, kinesthetic activities, knowledge (fields of, forms of, prior procedural, tacit, knowing), laboratory work, language(s), learner, learner centred, learning (active, independent, modes of, perceptual, surface, deep, styles of), lesson planning, lectures, listening, mediating response, memory, mind maps, misperception, mock trials, motivation, negotiate(ion), novice(s), objectives (behavioral/focussing), originality, outcomes, principles, professionalism (restricted/extended), reflection, Reflective Judgment Interview, peer teaching/review, personality types, philosophies related to engineering education, Polya, practical reflection, qualitative thinking, questions, questioning, scholar academic ideology, scholarship of teaching, social efficiency ideology, social reconstruction ideology, stages of development, taxonomies, teaching as research, tests, testing

       Contents

       Foreword

       Preface and Introduction

       Acknowledgments

       1 Accountable to Whom? Learning from Beginning Schoolteachers 1

       1.1 Introduction

       1.2 Accountability in Higher and Engineering Education

       1.3 Accountability and Evaluation in Schools

       1.4 Accountability and Professionalism

       Notes and References

       2 “Oh that we the gift of God to see ourselves as others see us,” Learning from Beginning Teachers 2

       2.1 Introduction

       2.2 Recording One’s Class

       2.3 Perceptual Learning in the Classroom

       2.4 Elliot Eisner’s Concept of Educational Connoisseurship

       Notes and References

       2.5 Appendix

       3 Toward a Scholarship of Teaching. Teaching as Research

       3.1 Introduction

       3.2 The Scholarship of Teaching

       3.3 Teaching and Design

       3.4 Teaching as Research–An Approach to Scholarship

       Notes and References

       3.5 Appendix

       4 Objectives and Outcomes

       4.1 The Social Efficiency Ideology

       4.2 The Objectives Movement

       4.3 The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

       4.4 Eisner’s Objections to the Objectives Approach

       4.5 Instructional Planning

       4.6 Questioning, Questions, and Classroom Management

       4.7 Reconciliation: A Conclusion

       Notes and References

       5 Problem Solving, Its Teaching, and the Curriculum Process

       5.1 Introduction

       5.2 Definitions and Approaches to Teaching Problem Solving

       5.3 Types of Problem, Difficulty, and Complexity

       5.4 Assessment, Instruction, and Objectives–The Curriculum Process

       5.5 Difficulty in, and Time for Learning

       Notes and References

       6 Critical Thinking, Decision Making, and Problem Solving

       6.1 Introduction

       6.2 Teaching a Decision Making Heuristic

       6.3 Qualitative Strategies