Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

       Preface and Introduction

      At the 2016 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) Professor Arnold Pears of Uppsala University in Sweden organized and led a one day workshop on teaching and assessment for beginning engineering educators and experienced engineering educators beginning to take an interest in teaching. I was privileged to lead the discussion on assessment. I noticed that several of the participants were experiencing the same difficulties that beginning school teachers experienced, and drafted some notes that I thought might be used in any future courses of this kind. Dr Mani Mina of Iowa State University with whom I had collaborated in presenting a blended on line course on, “The Human Side of Engineering” attended the workshop, and as a result of my notes it was decided that he would organize a professional development course on teaching and learning for his colleagues in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industrial Design. It would use the format of the previous course. In the event 16 lectures each of approximately 20 minutes duration were recorded, and followed four days later by hour long discussion seminars on the prior recorded topic. A print version was also made available. This book records the sixteen lectures with the associated notes which are of equal importance.

      The first three journeys are constructed around the issue of accountability. To whom am I accountable, and for what? Many engineering educators experience a conflict between the demands of research and the requirements for teaching. Looked at from the perspective of professionalism, a person who enters engineering education acquires a dual responsibility for research and teaching. Irrespective of the demands for and recognition achieved by research, there is an obligation to be as effective as possible at teaching. By accepting the role of engineering educator an individual accepts that teaching is a professional activity, and has to choose between being a “restricted” or an “extended” professional. Professionals accept personal responsibility for the effectiveness of their teaching. How individuals can judge the effectiveness of their teaching is the subject of journeys and two and three. Journey 2 focuses on Eisner’s technique of educational connoisseurship, and Journey 3 considers what the scholarship of teaching is, and argues that it is accomplished by treating the classroom as a laboratory for research and development. Effective teaching can only be sustained if that becomes the case. This requires an acknowledgement and understanding of that body of knowledge called “education.” This book is one way of introducing that body of knowledge.

      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 belief that beginning teachers bring with them are their beliefs about what constitutes “good teaching”. The scholarship of teaching requires that beginning teachers should examine these views in the light of knowledge currently available about the curriculum and instruction.

      Since there is no single theory of the curriculum or instruction various attempts have been made to classify the different ideologies that represent the diversity of views among engineering educators.. In Britain John Eggleston distinguished between “received”, “reflexive”, and “restructuring” paradigms of the curriculum. In the United States Michael Schiro distinguished between four ideologies that he called “Scholar Academic”, “Social Efficiency”, “Centred”, and “Social reconstruction”. The philosophies that support these ideologies also support different approaches to teaching. Michael Schiro reports one research that shows that teachers change their beliefs during their teaching careers.

      Journey 4 begins with the social efficiency ideology for the reason that it is this ideology that governs much educational thinking at the present time, and in engineering in particular. It begins with a brief account of the “objectives” movement leading to a discussion of the “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives”, and objections to the objectives approach by Eisner. The role of objectives in planning and instruction is considered. The journey ends with an attempt to reconcile the behavioral objectives approach with that of its opponents.

      The fifth Journey considers the problem of problem solving. Should it be taught as a separate skill or simply learnt by total immersion in the subject? Those who hold the former view are representative of the social efficiency ideology. A distinction may be made between those who believe problem solving should be taught within normal course structures, and those who believe it should be taught in separate courses. The best known example of the latter is the Problem Based Learning approach developed by Don Woods at McMaster University. There are many examples of the former where teachers use a simple problem solving heuristic like that suggested by Polya as part of their instructional approach. It is with this approach that Journey 5 is primarily concerned. It shows just how difficult the curriculum process is, and how “time” is required for learning.

      Journey 6 is a continuation of Journey 5 and looks at problem solving heuristics in more detail, and in particular at Wales, Stager and Nardi’s “Guided Design” model. Studies of expert and novice behavior reported in Journey 5 and this journey, showed there was something more to problem solving in engineering than the learning of a range of heuristics, and that there was a need for qualitative as well as quantitative understanding. Engineers have to learn a number of languages if they are to successfully engage in engineering problem solving. It is concluded that there is a case for a separate category of problem solving in any statement of objectives.

      These three Journeys (4, 5, 6) highlighted the importance of assessment on learning. They showed how changing the conditions of learning impact on the role of the teacher. They also pointed to questions about students. What should instructors know about their students? How do teacher beliefs impact on what they do? For many teachers these beliefs may be described as belonging to the scholar academic ideology, or Eggleston’s received curriculum.

      Journey 7 introduces the scholar academic ideology. In a received curriculum knowledge is received and accepted as given. It is non-negotiable, non-dialectic, and consensual. It is the basis of the “disciplines” view of the curriculum. It is about the enculturation of individuals into civilization’s accumulated knowledge and ways of knowing. But, each discipline seeks to mould students in its own image and likeness. Many academics including engineering educators would associate themselves with this ideology. It is teacher centred. Jerome Bruner who is associated with this ideology is of particular interest because of his promotion of discovery (now often called