CHAPTER 11
IN-SERVICE TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION: EARLY YEARS
Heidi A. Diefes-Dux
Purdue University
ABSTRACT
Elementary engineering is, on any kind of scale, a relatively new endeavor. While principles for effective teacher professional development (TPD) practices can be drawn on from previous research on TPD in other disciplines, specific guidelines for engineering education are scarce. So, little is known about the content and appropriate timing of that content for elementary engineering TPD. This chapter highlights decisions made about the content and timing of TPD based on research in various settings where TPD was provided and teachers implemented engineering activities in their classrooms. Four stages are evident as teachers launch into elementary engineering. In the first stage there is always some level of fear of engineering that needs to be overcome in order to even “see” engineering as a fit for the elementary classroom. In the second stage, teachers need to work within their school systems to get through the first implementation of one of more engineering activities. At the third stage, teachers are ready to think about what makes these activities engineering and how these engineering activities integrate with the rest of the grade-level curriculum. At the fourth stage, teachers are better able to integrate engineering into their curriculums and do more engineering lessons. How these stages manifest themselves and how TPD has been designed to address these stages is discussed. Recommendations for practitioners are included.
Two overarching goals for elementary engineering education emerge at the confluence of national documents such as Changing the Conversation (National Academy of Engineering [NAE], 2008) and Engineering in K-12 Education (Katehi, Pearson, & Feder, 2009) and experience with providing professional development to elementary teachers. One, students should be exposed to the nature and practice of engineering such that they can develop “an accurate, more positive impression of engineering” (NAE, 2008, p. 1) and its impacts on our communities and world. That is, elementary students should be able to identify and discuss engineering in their world. They should also come to understand how engineers do their work by developing engineering habits of mind through engagement in authentic engineering activities including design (Katehi, Pearson, & Feder, 2009). Two, engineering should serve as an integrator of existing and assessed subject matter, particularly science, technology, and mathematics (STM), as a means of giving these subjects, which are often taught in isolation of one another and out of context, authentic purpose. The hypothesis is that engineering in K–12 education could be used to stimulate interest and improve achievement in STEM (NAE, 2010). Students engaged in authentic engineering activities ought to experience the fluidity with which engineers learn and use domain knowledge.
From this author’s perspective, a vision for engineering in an elementary classroom is as follows:
It is very student-centered and teacher-guided. Learning through engineering is very flexible—the teacher can provide subject matter instruction on a need-to-know and student-demand basis. Lessons are highly connected to all subject matter: science, math, language arts, and other. When someone walks into a classroom, they would see students working in teams, asking thoughtful questions concerning their engineering work, manipulating materials, working in notebooks, creating artifacts, being highly reflective about their work, being persistent and engaged learners. They would see the teacher moving around—asking open-ended questions about students’ engineering work. There would be a lot of activity, but it would be focused on a goal derived from an ill-structured problem.
Engineering TPD for elementary settings should be designed with this vision and the two goals for K–12 engineering education in mind, as well as research on teacher learning of engineering and engineering education. In practice, what is needed is an understanding of the content and timing of TPD necessary to achieve the vision of engineering in elementary settings.
INSPIRE’S ELEMENTARY TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
What has been learned about in-service TPD with engineering for elementary grades and is presented here has been garnered from experiences providing TPD as part of the research efforts of the Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning (INSPIRE) at Purdue University. Immediately following INSPIRE’s establishment in 2006, a TPD program was developed as a means to
• facilitate successful implementation and integration of developmentally appropriate, standards-based engineering and science curricula;
• design developmentally appropriate and culturally sensitive, standards-based learning opportunities that (1) integrate standards-based science, mathematics, reading, and writing with engineering creativity and technological tool use and (2) integrate research-based engineering learning principles in curriculum development;
• create opportunities to test new learning models with student populations;
• develop and offer teacher professional development opportunities that nurture scientific and critical thinking, stimulate learning and innovation, and enhance technological fluency; and
• identify research questions, engage in research, and share research findings.
The TPD was initially offered on the Purdue campus and was called the INSPIRE Summer Academy (Lambert et al., 2007). From 2006 to 2011, this was a week-long intensive workshop offered once or twice each summer to introduce engineering and engineering education ideas to elementary teachers. Approximately, 290 teachers from 12 different states have attended 7 offerings of this on-campus academy.
As partnerships have been established, modified and advanced versions of the INSPIRE Summer Academy have been offered in on-school-site formats. Three such sites are a very large public school district in central Texas [pseudonym CTX], where TPD was provided to teachers of grades 2 to 4 spread across 15 buildings; a primary school (grades 1–2) and an elementary school (grades 3–5) in a small district in east-central Texas [pseudonym ETX]; and a single elementary school (K–5) in a small district in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan [pseudonym SDM]. Over a five-year period, from 2007 to 2012, 168 CTX teachers attended an introductory and advanced academy and taught engineering in their classrooms. Fifteen ETX teachers attended on-campus TPD; they and an additional 30 teachers also received on-school-site TPD. Twenty SDM teachers received on-school-site TPD.
In all cases, introductory TPD was delivered by INSPIRE staff. Advanced TPD was delivered by INSPIRE staff supported by participating teachers who had excelled in classroom teaching of engineering. The INSPIRE staff included faculty trained as engineers and educators engaged in engineering education research, professional staff with degrees in education, and graduate students pursuing their degrees in engineering, engineering education, or education.
There is something to be said about the attitudes of all INSPIRE teacher academy participants toward engineering and engineering education in K–12, as this impacts the way in which the TPD has been received and subsequently taken back to and enacted in classrooms and schools. A large number of the teachers INSPIRE has worked with have been “early adopters”—people who embrace and try out something new before most others and are community leaders (Rogers, 2003). This is because many of the teachers who have participated in INSPIRE TPD have been volunteers who sought out this opportunity. As we have worked with schools and districts such as CTX, ETX, and SDM who are adopting engineering as a theme for programs and buildings, teachers are increasingly required by their administrations to participate in INSPIRE TPD. As a result, an increasing number of INSPIRE TPD participants are better classified as “early majority” (community participants) and “late majority” (fairly conservative) adopters. We have not worked with many teachers who have been highly resistant to elementary engineering education.
RESEARCH AND INITIATIVES
While this chapter focuses on in-service TPD with engineering, teacher professional development is more typically defined as encompassing all of the learning and growth opportunities for teachers that occur during pre-service undergraduate studies and extend through in-service teaching to the end of the professional career. The goals of TPD are to increase teacher knowledge, change teacher practice, and ultimately improve student learning and achievement. At the time INSPIRE initially developed and implemented its TPD, national standards for mathematics (Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 1989), science (National Science Education Standards [NSES], National Research Council [NRC], 1996), and technology (Standards for Technology Literacy, International Technology Education Association [ITEA], 2007) were accompanied by guidelines or standards for professional development (NCTM, 1991; NRC, 1996; ITEA, 2003). These documents, in addition to research and policy documents, describe and make recommendations for effective TPD. Rogers et al. (2007) present seven recurring themes derived from the work of three distinct research groups (Guskey, 2003; Loucks-Horsley et al., 2003; Thompson & Zeuli, 1999):
• Teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogy knowledge must be enhanced.
• Sufficient time and resources must be provided to support teachers’ learning and continued professional growth.
• Collegiality and community must be established to support teachers’ learning and classroom implementation.
• An accounting for school-site context must occur; this is facilitated by close networking of TPD providers, teachers, and administrators.
• A clear vision for classroom teaching and learning must be established.
• Student learning and the assessment of student learning should be included as part of TPD.
• Sustained support must be provided after teachers return to their classrooms.
Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, and Yoon (2001) found that coherence (building on teachers’ prior knowledge, aligning to state and district standards and assessments, and encouraging community building) and a focus on content knowledge greatly influence the knowledge and skills obtained by teachers and the degree of change in teacher practice. To a lesser extent, TPD sustained over time and involving significant hours and the use of collective participation (e.g., teachers from the same school and grade) results in more active learning, leading to gains in knowledge and skills and change in teacher practice. TPD that includes information on how students learn subject matter also changes teacher practice. Providing teachers a way to use what they have learned and make connections to their existing curriculum materials leads to improved instruction and greater student learning (Hill & Cohen, 2005). Lawless and Pellegrino (2007) identified three characteristics of high-quality TPD that support teachers integrating technology: good TPD is of adequate length and provides opportunities for continued contact; it allows teachers to work together; and it is grounded in a “clearly articulated and common vision” of student achievement (p. 579).
The design and implementation of TPD with engineering and the subsequent teaching of engineering in classrooms, particularly at the elementary level, offers some unique challenges. First, engineering as a discipline has very little history in formal K–12 education, particularly in elementary classrooms. Our understanding of what students can and do learn about engineering and through engineering is limited. Similarly, teachers have traditionally not received pre- or in-service training with engineering, so little is known about what teachers can and will do with engineering in their classrooms. Inferences about student learning and teacher practice are often made from education research in other disciplines like math and science.
While Carr, Bennett, and Strobel (2012) found evidence of engineering in the K–12 standards of 41 states, few standards reach down to the elementary grades. Even in states where engineering related standards have been in place for a few years, such as Massachusetts (Foster, 2009), there is little to no state-level assessment taking place. For many teachers and administrators who were early implementers, there has been no state-standards incentive to bring engineering into classrooms, to seek TPD to support engineering teaching, or to sustain engineering in classrooms when TPD is provided. While the landscape for elementary engineering education could change with state adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2013), there are current realities that affect the extent to which engineering TPD is sought and sustained. When a school is in academic trouble, engineering may never get a foothold or may be pushed aside or out. Also, the lack of commitment to elementary engineering-related state standards and associated assessment may have funding implications for engineering activities in classrooms, making sustainability of engineering difficult (e.g., Pelletier, Heymans, Chanley, & Desjardins, 2010).
ELEMENTARY TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Examples of engineering TPD for elementary settings that go beyond training with one lesson are limited. Two well-documented examples are described here. The first is a national effort to disseminate an elementary curriculum. The second is a school-site effort to create an integrated curriculum.
First, Engineering is Elementary (EiE) is a research-based, standards-based, and classroom-tested elementary engineering curriculum developed by the Museum of Science (MoS) in Boston that integrates engineering and technology concepts with science topics, while connecting to language arts, social studies, and mathematics. The MoS provides TPD to enhance teachers understanding of engineering and pedagogy and has studied the impact of their TPD on both. TPD sessions help “educators enhance their understanding of engineering concepts, skills, and pedagogy”; they “not only introduce engineering and technology content, but also foster student-centered and inquiry-based learning” (http://www.eie.org/eie-curriculum/eie-workshops-professional-development). This is the largest effort to develop curriculum and provide engineering TPD for elementary setting.
A small (n = 24) pre-post study of the impact of TPD on summer or fall 2006 participants who attended TPD and taught one EiE unit was conducted (Carson & Campbell, 2007). This study revealed that teachers dramatically increased their inclusion of design, problem solving, and process/design process in their definitions of engineering, “teachers significantly increased their use of engineering in their teaching in both science and other content areas,” (Carson & Campbell, 2007, p.1) and “teachers significantly increased their use of problem-solving strategies not explicitly related to engineering in their teaching” (Carson & Campbell, 2007, p. 2). From pre to post TPD, teachers’ top three reasons for wanting to do engineering in their classrooms changed from ties to content areas, kids like it, and it is hands-on to ties to content areas, promotes problem solving, and relates to real-life topics. Similar results were found in a larger pre-post study of teachers who received training in 2008–09 or 2009–10 and implemented one EiE unit (Cunningham, Lachapelle, & Keenan, 2010). From pre to post, teachers’ definitions of engineering and technology were “closer to standards-based definitions” (p. 15); for example, teachers’ definitions of engineering were more likely to indicate that engineering involves problem solving and is a process, and less likely to say engineering is building or constructing things. It was found that while teachers did not change their math or science pedagogical practices, they did “make greater use of engineering concepts and examples” (p. 15). Cunningham (2008) describes lessons learned from offering 140 PD workshops to over 2,700 teachers in 21 states. Many of the MoS’s decisions around their development of TPD and lessons learned mirror our own; these will be indicated in the sections below.
Second, in-house TPD has been developed and provided by schools adopting engineering themes. An example of this is the Douglas L. Jamerson, Jr., Elementary School in Florida (Little et al., 2007). This school elected to go the in-house route to provide breadth and depth needed for content integration and opportunities for continuous improvement that they felt would be difficult to achieve through adoption of commercially available products and training and NSF GK–12 programs, where graduate students develop engineering lessons and interface with teachers. Jamerson Elementary used local resources (i.e., the College of Engineering at the University of South Florida and Florida’s Regional Center for Advanced Technological Education) for guidance and assistance. The result was a three-level approach. Formal education was provided by the College of Engineering in a series of three graduate level courses focused on “engineering science and design components with considerable emphasis on the science and mathematics associated with the conservation laws” (p. 5). Just-in-time education was provided in the form of before and after school workshops. The before school workshops supported curriculum writing; time was spent reviewing math, science, and social impact content that an engineering lesson can provide in order to facilitate horizontal integration of engineering themes and vertical integration of math and science. The after school workshops provided in-depth engineering science instruction for the school’s leadership team. Grade-level learning communities interact with engineering professor advisors to develop and refine lessons.
STAGES OF ELEMENTARY TEACHER DEVELOPMENT WITH ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Stage 1. Overcoming the fear of engineering
Teachers, regardless of their attitude toward the adoption of engineering education, have some fear of engineering when they enter TPD focused on engineering. Like the general public (NAE, 2008), they have a rudimentary understanding of engineering and technology (Cunningham, Lachapelle, & Lindgren-Streicher, 2006) or how engineering affects their lives, even though many have friends who are engineers or are related and even married to an engineer. They do not have a sense of what these people do in their jobs. Further, they have never received any instruction on engineering. They know that engineering is “hard” and the math and science will be “over their heads.” They expect it will be “dry.” Yet, as many indicate in their application for INSPIRE academies, they want something more for their students, like opportunities to do hands-on authentic activities, learn to problem solve, and be creative. TPD for elementary teachers new to engineering needs to be designed to reduce teachers’ fear of engineering (Cunningham, 2008). It needs to keep teachers engaged and present achievable possibilities.
This fear has an interesting way of manifesting itself when engineers are delivering the TPD. Teachers tend to be respectful of but distant from the engineers. One might surmise this is because they worry about “looking dumb” in front of the engineers, or they regard the engineers as outsiders who do not know the teacher culture or the system into which they desire engineering to be wedged. This tentativeness needs to be understood and addressed early. It is helpful to acknowledge that teachers know their students and schools, and the TPD providers know engineering and are developing an understanding of how engineering fits in their setting. The expectation is that there will be mutual learning during TPD and subsequent interactions. Cunningham (2008) recommends reducing status differences by having the TPD providers dress like the participants, meaning that if participants are dressed casually, the TPD providers should also dress casually. Engineers who provide TPD, through their interactions with teachers, need to be open to learning classroom management strategies, such as elementary hand-clapping for getting attention.
INSPIRE’s overall TPD strategy for addressing fear is to carefully select activities, have the teachers complete the activities as if they were their students, and engage the teachers in a high level of reflection about the activities. The activities selected must be grade-level appropriate, have high potential for implementation back in the classroom, and enable discussion of engineering practice and engineering education in elementary classrooms. While engineering authenticity is sought in an activity, we are mindful of both material costs and time (for set-up and logistics) for us in the TPD setting and teachers back in the classroom. Adoption of an activity is more likely if the materials are low cost, common, and easy to use, and the time involved in set-up and use is minimal, or at least perceived to be commensurate with the learning value of the activity. Adoption of an activity is also more likely if the science, technology, mathematics, and other subject matter embedded in an activity matches the grade-level state standards for which teachers are accountable. As INSPIRE has not been in the business of creating curriculum, we have adopted, and in some cases modified, materials from Engineering is Elementary (EiE, 2014) and Design Squad (WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010a), and supplemented these with our own materials where we have found gaps, particularly with regard to embedded mathematics. We spend considerable time thinking with the teachers in TPD about practical implementation strategies and what students will or could, with modification, learn from an activity.
Confidence in teaching with engineering and evidence, gathered through personal experience, that elementary age students can engage in engineering activities in meaningful ways improves the likelihood that engineering will get from TPD to the classroom. In week-long academies, we always provide an opportunity for teachers to work in pairs to design an engineering lesson and teach it to a group of five to seven elementary students. Reeves, Ross, and Bayles (2010) also found that including a teaching element in engineering TPD (for high school teachers) “forced the teachers to test the limits of their understanding of the material while simultaneously helping to solidify what they have learned through repetition”; it gave the “teachers the confidence to teach the material with new pedagogical strategies and aimed to remove the stresses associated with the trying something new, making for a smoother implementation process” (p. 9).
INSPIRE has always advocated the use of engineering notebooks in TPD over the use of handouts. The use of notebooks requires the instructor to help students organize, represent, analyze, and reflect on their work, with the aim of shifting the burden to the students over time. Everything the teacher does or thinks during TPD goes into their notebooks. This exposes teachers to the idea of using notebooks in the classroom and enables them to create a tangible record of their engineering experiences in their own words. This notebook is brought out and added to during advanced TPD. Some teachers keep track of their classroom experiences with engineering in their notebooks.
The learning objectives for the week-long INSPIRE Summer Academy are such that teachers will be able to
• convey a broad perspective of the nature and practice of engineering;
• develop a level of comfort in discussing what engineers do and how engineers solve problems with elementary student;
• articulate the differences and similarities between engineering and science thinking; and
• use problem-solving processes (i.e., science inquiry, model development, and design processes) to engage their students in complex open-ended problem solving.
Broad Perspective. For a teacher to convey the broad perspective of the nature and practice of engineering, they need to be able to recognize and talk about the things in our world that engineers have designed. In a photo journal activity (Oware, Diefes-Dux, & Adams, 2007; Duncan, Diefes-Dux, & Gentry, 2011), we discovered that teachers, like the general public, see engineering in vehicles, buildings, power lines, airplanes, computers, and other high-tech devices. Teacher’ ability to recognize engineering in the world around them is limited. This learning objective is about helping teachers see engineering in a wider variety of everyday objects. Like in any EiE unit prep lesson, we guide the teachers to definitions of technology and engineering. To establish a definition of technology, we have each teacher look at one picture that occurs in nature or is something created by humans. The teachers are given time to interact with each other to determine whether their picture represents technology or not, and why or why not. Through a whole-group discussion, elements of their reasoning are teased out to establish a definition of technology that has three components: technology (1) is human-made, (2) is an object, process, or system, and (3) solves a problem or fulfils a need.
To reinforce the definition of technology and link it to a definition of engineering, we use the EiE Technology Around Us activity. Teachers, working in pairs, are given a common object (e.g., bandage, hairbrush, pencil sharpener) to consider. They answer these questions:
• What is your object? Sketch your object. Label the parts.
• What does your object do? What problem does it solve?
• What needed to be considered when this object was designed?
• What material(s) is your object made of? Why?
A debrief of teachers’ explorations of their objects leads to the development of a definition of engineering that includes four elements: engineering (1) uses math and science and other subject matter (2) creatively (3) to solve problems (4) and often results in improving the quality of life.
We culminate the discussion of technology and engineering with a walk through of an elementary-friendly image about engineering (Figure 11.1). This image relates engineering to technology and provides a bigger picture of engineering—its drivers, constraints, and use of knowledge from other fields.
Throughout the remainder of our introductory engineering TPD, we wanted to de-emphasize specific types of engineering and instead emphasize the aspects of engineering that are common to all fields (i.e., processes and skills). As a result, we have elected to not include a lesson specifically on the different types of engineers. Our opinion is that to offer a sound-bite on each type of engineer does no justice to either the richness of each field of engineering or the interconnectedness of the fields in practice. We do however provide opportunities for the teachers to learn about three or four types of engineers through a number of activities. Understanding one type of engineer is part of each EiE unit that we have adopted in our TPD. Teachers learn about mechanical, environmental, and industrial engineering in a typical introductory on-campus TPD. Further, we invite practicing engineers and/or engineering students to a meal with our teachers, at which the engineers also serve on a panel or participate in a speed networking session (imagine speed dating). These events provide teachers time to talk with engineers to learn about their training, career paths, and work experiences. During downtimes, we also show video clips, like those from Engineering Your Life (http://www.engineeryourlife.org/cms/6167.aspx), that provide a wide variety of engineering possibilities. And, in the end, we provide the teachers with a few reference handouts about the different types of engineers and where to learn more.
Engineer Thinking. To be able to discuss what engineers do and how they solve problems, teachers must engage in activities that get them thinking and working like engineers. To start, we want teachers to see the problems that engineers have to consider when developing a technology. The EiE Technology Around Us activity continues with these questions:
• What material(s) is your object made of? Why?
• What needed to be considered when this object was designed?
These questions begin to get teachers thinking about the complexity of design, materials selection in the design of a technology, and systems (how parts of a technology fit or work together).
We also want teachers engaged in design. We are careful to select a set of activities that include the design of objects and processes. This reinforces the idea that technology encompasses more than objects. The types of activities that we use are goal-driven design and mathematical model-eliciting activities (MEA). The design of an assembly line process (EiE’s Marvelous Machines: Making Work Easier, Lesson 2), improvements to a recipe (EiE’s A Work in Process: Designing a Play Dough Process, Lesson 4), or the design of a process to determine how many stickers of varying shape may be cut from various sized stock paper (INSIRE-developed Sticker MEA) are examples of processes that could be designed by an engineer.
We want teachers to understand that engineers solve problems for other people. We have become very particular about how problems are presented to teachers and students. Through studies using the Draw-an-Engineer Test, in which students draw their idea of an engineer doing engineering work (e.g., Capobianco, Diefes-Dux, Mena, & Weller, 2011; Diefes-Dux & Capobianco, 2011), we have seen examples of drawings of an engineer building a table or chair like a carpenter after they have participated in related design activity. We believe that this is because design challenges are often presented devoid of any context concerning the users of the design; the emphasis is often more on only the design criteria and constraints. So, no matter whether we are using EiE units or other materials, all design or modeling problems are presented in a context. Take for instance Paper Table from Design Squad (WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010b). In the original activity, the challenge is to “Design and build a table out of newspaper tubes. Make it at least eight inches tall and strong enough to hold a heavy book.” The materials are one 8 ½ by 11 inch cardboard piece, 8 sheets of newspaper, and a heavy book. That is all the instructions provided with this design challenge. We take this challenge and set it in a story set in El Salvador where rainforests have been reduced to 2% of what they were in the 1500s, 0.9 pounds of paper waste are produced per employee each day, and 77% of households are headed and sustained by women in the poorest regions of the country. The story continues be describing how some women have banded to together to form a furniture cooperative that makes furniture out of recycled materials—this is their way of making money to support their families. They want the student teams to design a prototype of a small study table for students. The prototype must be 10-inches tall and support a heavy book for 30 seconds.
Such contexts allow us to introduce some engineering vocabulary. The client is the person(s) asking the team to solve a problem and produce a deliverable (goal) in the form of a prototype. The users are the ones who will use the final product. The criteria (for success) is the standard upon which the deliverable will be judged and tested. The constraints are the materials available to build the deliverable and the allowable build time. The users are critical in these contexts as they help teachers (and their students) realize that engineers solve problems for other people, not themselves or their immediate friends and family. The client and prototype are important, too—teachers and students need to realize that engineers work for companies that will eventually want to mass produce the designs. Their deliverable is not a one-off finished product; it is a prototype.
We also want teachers to experience the need for teamwork skills and written and oral communication skills, as well as math and science knowledge and process skills, in engineering work. Here is where we connect engineering to STM and other subject matter, while emphasizing some things that engineering uniquely brings to elementary education. We have used the design activities with a process deliverable in the introductory TPD to demonstrate the need for good written communication skills by engaging the teachers in peer review of each others’ deliverables. They try to follow their peers’ processes and then provide feedback on their success and on the deliverable itself.
Finally, we want teachers to understand that failure is an expected and educational part of engineering. The activities included in TPD need to have enough challenge that even teachers fail to successfully meet the criteria for success. Luckily, adults often fail the first time they work an engineering activity that is elementary age-level appropriate. This occurs for various reasons: adults are out of practice building things or writing for detail, they overthink their solutions, or they have misconceptions. Failure creates an opportunity to discuss the reasons for failure, identify ways to overcome failure, and try again. This is an important nonthreatening way of conveying that engineering requires persistence. Teachers, in fact, love the educational value of failure. They recognize that most school learning is packaged such that teachers assess problems as right or wrong and then they move on. There is little time to think about the degree of right or wrong and how to improve, so students rarely learn to deal with failure in appropriate ways. Engineering affords this.
Engineering and Science Thinking. TPD should help teachers differentiate engineering and science. It is a muddled affair, though, as engineering is not science, but engineers do science. Teachers to some degree recognize this. In coding teachers’ responses to “What are some similarities and differences between science and engineering?,” Cunningham, Lachapelle, and Lindgren-Streicher (2006) found that the most common response was that engineering is applied science. Many responded that science and engineering have different goals and employ different methods, though some responded that they use similar methods and engineering as a discipline is subsumed under science.
In the design of TPD for elementary teachers, it is a mistake to assume that teachers have experience with and expertise at teaching science inquiry. It seems intuitive in the design of TPD to play off teachers’ knowledge of science inquiry when introducing the engineering design process. However, in-service elementary teachers often have had little formal science education in their background and little training with science inquiry. While teachers may teach science, it may not be in a form to which a TPD provider can draw comparisons. Engineering TPD really has to lay the foundation for both, without becoming overwhelming.
We place emphasis on the types things scientists do (e.g., investigate hypotheses), the things engineers do (e.g., solve problems related to technology), and the types of products each delivers—scientists create knowledge; engineers develop technology. Then we look at the processes each employs and the steps involved, drawing comparisons as to their purpose. Finally, we look at how engineers use science in their design work and how science can be driven by the needs of engineering. We have used the Learning by Design Cycle (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/projects/lbd/cycle.html) to facilitate this discussion.
Problem-Solving Processes. Ultimately, we want teachers to be comfortable using an engineering design process supported by scientific inquiry. We introduce the EiE five-step engineering design process (Cunningham, 2009), and talk about and show that, while engineers use a variety of processes, they all have similar embedded strategies. These include (1) problem identification and formulation, (2) solution generation, modeling, and analysis, (3) solution evaluation and communication, and (4) iteration. The EiE steps that parallel these strategies are labeled (1) ask, (2) imagine, plan, create, and (3, 4) improve. During each design activity executed in TPD, the EiE step teachers are currently engaged in is clearly indicated so that teachers know what each step looks like in practice. Teachers are familiar with and tend to focus their attention on the create, step where building occurs—this is where they have the most fun and where there is the most classroom activity. Most of the learning, however, happens during the other steps with which the teachers are less familiar. In the introductory engineering TPD, we spend considerable time on the ask step, while highlighting the essence of the remaining steps as teachers experience them.
In the ask step, the problem needs to be clearly identified. Teachers first need to sort out the problem using the terms goal, client, user, criteria for success, and constraints. There is initially confusion between client and user and between criteria and constraints that needs to be attended to.
The ask step also includes information gathering to support design decisions. When EiE units are used, the knowledge needed is generated by a scientific investigation. INSPIRE has used the EiE unit Catching the Wind: Designing Windmills to emphasize the link between engineering and science and the need for good experimental designs. In this unit, one needs to know what material will “best catch the wind”; this information is used in the design of a prototype windmill blade. The investigation involves testing the materials in the form of boat sails by measuring distance sailed in wind generated using a fan operated at a predefined setting and location (distance sailed is representative of work done). After an unfettered free-for-all build and test phase from which we can draw no solid conclusions, we come to the conclusion there are three variables at play: material type, material size, and shape of the sail. We stress the importance of holding two variables constant to investigate hypotheses around the third. Following this discussion, teachers construct a hypothesis-driven experiment to investigate one variable. They might hypothesize that “of all the materials allowed, aluminum foil sails will travel the farthest.” This is tested by constructing sails all of the same shape and size using different sail materials and measuring the distance traveled, given the force supplied by wind generated by a fan.
One challenge for teachers is understanding how data and evidence from these sorts of experiments link to design decisions. Clear conclusions need to be drawn from experiments. Then data, evidence, and conclusions need to be saved in a way that can be posted throughout the design process and referred to in later design steps.
Pre-post assessments of introductory TPD indicate that teachers do have a greater recognition of engineering in the world around them. In their responses to “What is engineering? What do engineers do?,” teachers were more likely to include ideas about teamwork, clients, and engineering as a process (Lambert et al., 2007). Duncan, Diefes-Dux, and Gentry (2011) found significant change in teachers’ ability to recognize and understand engineering in their world, as evidenced by their photo journal entries. Teachers demonstrated a slight difference in their design process knowledge (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2010). Testing, creating, and time spent on different parts of the engineering design process were more frequently mentioned in teachers’ post examination of a students’ design process.
Stage 2. First-year implementation—The reality and practicality
When teachers leave TPD, they are excited about doing engineering with their students, but, in the year following the introductory TPD, the success with which they bring engineering into their classrooms varies considerably. For most teachers, the first year is all about “just getting through the logistics”—meaning, finding the time to do engineering lessons and managing the first implementation. The result of such a focus on logistics is that the lessons are not well connected to other content areas and engineering, and the work of engineers is poorly conveyed to the students. Classroom activities tend to focus only on create and are not well integrated into the curriculum (Capobianco, Diefes-Dux, & Mena, 2011). Curiously, teachers can be so consumed by classroom activity that they fail to talk about engineering at all! In this section, I discuss the barriers to achieving the vision that we have seen when newly trained teachers get back into school mode and the realities and practicalities of bringing engineering into their classrooms need to be addressed. We have seen that the things that vie for teachers’ time, their work relationships within their schools, their level of comfort teaching with open-endedness, their beliefs about students and student learning, and their beliefs about engineering’s place in the curriculum affect the quality and quantity of engineering implementation in classrooms. Some of these barriers persist after the first year; others, we are able to address in advanced TPD with engineering.
Time Available for Engineering. Upon returning to classes, teachers need to figure out when they can prepare for and teach the engineering lessons that they learned. This seems to happen regardless of any academic-year planning done in TPD to mitigate ease of implementation; there are often just too many unknowns going into each academic year. Of course, consideration needs to be given to the fit of engineering activities around local benchmarking, state testing, and existing school and grade-level events. But changes in school practice occur each year. We have run into last-minute reassignment of teachers to different grades, the start-up of intensive programs like Response to Intervention (RTI; http://www.rti4success.org/), the adoption of a new subject matter curricula, the realignment of curriculum (which becomes available to teachers just weeks before it is to be implemented), and preparation for new state assessments—all of which require considerable teacher time and effort in and out of class. The result is that engineering activities are fit into the school year as soon as a spot is available; there is no long-term horizon for planning. This limits the ability to integrate engineering into the curriculum.
Once teachers have found a fit, then they need time to review and tailor each activity to their students’, school’s, and state’s needs. If months have passed since TPD, poor recall of their experiences makes preparation a daunting task. Teachers also have to deal with the logistics of gathering and preparing materials for each activity. By the time engineering instruction actually starts, time available may be rather limited or time may be available in odd chunks. This leads to activities being compressed and not integrated into the curriculum, thus losing learning value.
Work Relationships. An issue that is highly related to the time available for engineering is the nature of work relationships between trained teachers and their team unit (e.g., all the teachers at a grade level) and administrators (usually principals, sometimes curriculum specialists). The level or awareness and support for engineering at a school greatly affects engineering-trained teachers’ decisions about teaching engineering. If only one or a few teachers in a team unit are trying to teach engineering, those teachers trained in engineering have to negotiate at some level with the untrained teachers to find time for engineering. A variety of things happen. Some teachers go it alone to teach engineering, with their students on a different schedule some or much of the year. Others acting alone try to keep their students on schedule with the rest of the grade level. Others take on the responsibility of teaching engineering to multiple classes and even their entire grade level. Still others train their colleagues so all students at a grade level receive exposure to engineering.
Principals have an incredible impact on the culture of a school. They set school priorities; depending on their management style, this is done with their teachers or for their teachers. We have seen principals who allow the teaching of engineering to occur, but are relatively unaware of how it is going. Others hesitantly support engineering education but may favor competing priorities. Others encourage its growth over time, monitoring its impact on students and other teachers. Still others drive engineering—determining that it will be a theme for their building. The perspective of a principal greatly affects a teacher’s success or failure to bring engineering into their classroom.
Comfort Teaching with Open-Endedness. Engineering instruction in K–12 is intended to be more student-centered than teacher-centered. That is, students should be actively engaged with each other in learning and allowed the freedom to explore their own ideas and be creative. While this sort of learning environment is more common in primary than secondary settings, some teachers enter engineering TPD with little experience guiding students through open-ended problems where the outcome is somewhat uncertain. For some teachers, engineering education is asking them to teach in ways that may be less familiar. Their perceived ability to manage the chaos of students working in teams all doing somewhat different things, to monitor and respond to students’ needs, and to guide learning in productive directions affects their perception of the success of an activity and their desire to try engineering again.
For many teachers, working with student teams is new. The development of teaming skills is encouraged, as it is an engineering habit of mind (Katehi, Pearson, & Feder, 2009). Some teachers experience considerable difficulty in managing and monitoring student teams. There are instances to contend with of team members fighting for control, not participating, not listening, and so on. Part of the difficulty stems from teachers not establishing norms for team behavior. Most teachers establish expectations for individual behavior in their classrooms; these might even extend to schoolwide adopted expectations that are physically posted in every room and corridor. But teachers do not tend to revisit these expected behaviors in the context of team work. Another part of the difficulty stems from team size and its mismatch to the social development of the students and the complexity of the task. If students are not developmentally ready to work with one or more other students, teaming will not be productive. Also, if the task is not complex enough to keep all members of the team engaged, some will drift off and others will fight for something to do.
Beliefs about Students and Student Learning. Teachers struggle to integrate the math and science content that they would normally teach into appropriate engineering lessons. For instance, the science concept of “work” could be introduced for the first time within the EiE unit Catching the Wind: Designing Windmills when finding a means of measuring the ability of a material to “catch the wind” becomes an issue. Teachers’ beliefs about students’ preparation for engagement in these engineering activities hinders this integration. Most believe that students need to know everything that is necessary for success at an activity before entering the activity, rather than letting the problem drive the need to know and understand. This perspective delays the implementation of engineering until sometime after all subject matter content is taught.
Teachers may believe that their students lack the preparation necessary to engage in engineering. This is particularly true when teachers are assigned a class of students who are lower in ability or have more behavior problems than the norm. Teachers may hesitate to start engineering early in the year, may reduce the learning value of a lesson, or may avoid engineering all together.
Engineering’s Place in the Curriculum. Teachers are not accountable for teaching engineering; it is currently not mandated by states and therefore is not tested. So engineering is viewed as something extra. This often translates to engineering is for fun. For this reason, in the first year of implementation, it is not uncommon for students’ work and participation in engineering to go unassessed. This is not likely to change in subsequent years of implementation if engineering is not integrated with components of the curriculum for which teachers are accountable—like writing.
There are some teachers in introductory engineering TPD who are more comfortable with active-learning strategies and curriculum integration. These are extraordinarily talented individuals who strive to bring the vision for engineering in an elementary classroom to life. These teachers can see where engineering fits and can identify more needs and opportunities than they have training with lessons. They seek out additional activities, reworking lessons they have to look like engineering, and adopting lessons they find online or from other resources. The teachers do an admirable job of overlaying the engineering design process on “build” activities. However, we have come to understand that teachers are not aware of the features a problem needs to have to ensure engineering authenticity and maximize potential for science and mathematics learning.
At the end of the first year of implementation, teachers typically find that students’ enthusiasm for engineering and their new beliefs about its learning potential (Carson & Campbell, 2007) outweigh their struggles to bring engineering into the classroom. This seems to be what motivates teachers to try engineering again and seek additional TPD.
Stage 3. Making it engineering
Once teachers are through the logistics of implementing engineering activities for the first time, they are more ready to think about the “engineering-ness” of these activities and how these activities fit with the rest of their curriculum. Second-year engineering TPD for elementary teachers is, therefore, designed to enable teachers to strengthen the quality of learning about engineers and engineering, better connect engineering learning with other content areas, and teach additional engineering activities. The learning objectives are such that teachers will be able to
• identify opportunities to augment science or mathematics learning through engineering,
• comfortably discuss what engineers do and describe select types of engineering,
• assess student learning across multiple dimensions through engineering activities, and
• use engineering design process and model development process to engage elementary students in complex open-ended problem solving (reprise, with emphasis on brainstorming, documenting, and improving).
Augmenting Science and Mathematics Learning. TPD activities need to provide teachers with experiences with engineering activities that demonstrate how science and mathematics learning can be embedded in an engineering design process. Teachers also need guidance in differentiating engineering activities from science experiments and craft activities. Since we were seeing teachers attempting to adopt existing lessons (either their own or ones they found) to look like engineering to create more engineering lessons for their students, we decided to show, through two activities, how science and math opportunities need to be present and exploitable to develop solid engineering activities. This also gave us an opportunity to highlight the features of an activity necessary to ensure engineering authenticity. An authentic engineering activity includes the following ten features:
1 The problem is set in a context.
2. The technology prototype being designed solves a problem for many users. It is not just a one-time solution for personal use.
3. The design activity can be framed in terms of a clear goal with user(s) and possibly a client in a setting.
4. The design criteria and constraints can be clearly stated.
5. Multiple solutions (designs of the technology) are possible.
6. Creativity is encouraged.
7. Teamwork is possible.
8. Mathematics, science, social studies, and reading/writing concepts are inherently present and can be explored through the activity
9. The engineering design process is employed explicitly.
10. Improvements to the designed technology are made based on evidence.
For example, Pop-Up Cards was a craft activity that two of our teachers re-constructed as an engineering design activity. In their version of the problem, third- and fourth-grade students were asked to design a winter holiday card that included pop-ups for delivery to a senior citizens home. This activity provided ample opportunity to integrate mathematics and demonstrate the features necessary to make it more authentic. This activity was reset in an engineering context; a story was developed around a card company’s need for having the students design a prototype for a pop-up Engineering Night invitation card that contains two pop-ups (one in the foreground and one in the background), completely contains the pop-ups when the card is folded, and fits into a 9 × 12-inch envelope. This story established a design goal, a client that needs engineers to work on a new technology, user(s) for the technology, and criteria for success. Constraints are established by limiting materials to the teachers’ paper and card stock supply and setting the maximum build time. The ask phase of this activity was expanded to explore the mathematics embedded in constructing a basic pop-up. Using a reworking of V. Mohan Ram’s (n.d.) version of this activity, teachers measured the length and width of a series of 2-D cuts for basic pop-ups and made predictions about the 3-D shape that would result (its length, width, and height, and its 3-D shape). The teachers then made the cuts, folded-out the 3-D shape, identified the shape, and measured its dimensions, noting where their predictions did not match the outcome. The teachers were then asked to use their acquired knowledge of the basic pop-up to replicate two more-complex pop-ups. Mathematics was revisited during the create phase, when teacher were asked to construct a blueprint for their final Engineering Night invitation card prototype.
In a second activity, called Crash Bags (Tomecek, 2006), teachers conducted a science experiment in context to understand Newton’s first law of motion—a body in motion stays in motion unless an outside force acts on it. In this activity, teachers explore the use of no protection and plastic bags filled with air (representing car air bags) to protect an egg in an accident. This activity is traditional in the sense that students are stepped through the experiment so that conclusions about air bags can be drawn. The teachers were then asked to work in teams to take the science concept and embed it in an engineering design activity appropriate for their students. Thus, they have to develop the features that would make it an engineering activity listed on page XX. They must construct the story around the need for a technology that would use these science concepts. They also plan what students would do at each step of the engineering process.
Within the topic of augmenting the science and mathematics, teachers also need to revisit the idea that evidence drives engineering decisions. Teachers acknowledge that their students tend to focus on the aesthetics of their prototypes during the improve step. Part of the issue is underdeveloped criteria for success and criteria that are not being tested or not being tested in a scientific manner. During a debriefing of activities implemented in year one, particularly EiE units that embed a strong testing phase, we revisit teachers’ experiences with establishing the criteria for designed technologies, linking the criteria to the tests, and using results as evidence to drive the improve step.
Engineering Thinking. Teachers need more exposure to engineering in their world and the work of particular types of engineers, especially those represented in the activities they have chosen to implement in their classrooms. We have sought to get teachers to be more inquisitive about the technologies that surround them so that they start to think about the many design decisions that go into everyday objects. We do this by having them brainstorm about the decisions engineers must make in the design of everyday objects. In a modified version of Technology Around Us, teachers explore two objects that solve the same problem. One may historically predate the other (e.g., candle and flashlight), one may solve the problem more simply than the other (e.g., basic toothbrush versus an ergonomic vibrating toothbrush), or one may represent a different way of solving the problem (e.g., shoelace and Velcro). Teachers answer these questions to truly engage in thinking about the design of an object the way an engineer must:
• What are the objects? What is their purpose?
• What do they do? How do they do it?
• Who is(are) the user(s) of the objects?
• What materials are the objects made out of? Why?
• What are similarities between the two versions? What are differences?
• What changes were made? Why were changes made?
• What needed to be considered when the objects were designed?
• How does it work? How do the parts work together?
• How are the parts kept together?
• How long should the object last? How could it break? What keeps it from being broken?
• What other versions of these objects exist? How are they the same or different?
• What could be improved about the objects?
• What questions do you have about the objects?
When thinking about what could be improved about the objects, teachers often focus on improvements that are aesthetic in nature (e.g., color options for the object). Redirection back to the problem that is being solved by the technology and the degree to which the two technologies in front of the teachers are able to solve the problem is where the teachers should be focused. This yields ideas for more technical improvements.
Teachers express that they do not know much about the different types of engineers and this prevents them discussing the types that link to the activities they are doing or answer students’ questions about types. While we have not been concerned about whether teachers can recite the different types and we would rather they focus on engineering thinking more generally, this knowledge seems to provide an anchor that makes the teachers more comfortable with teaching engineering. Our approach to this need voiced by the teachers is to help them help themselves. We provide a weblink to a video about a type of engineer; we look for videos in which engineers describe their jobs and the types of technologies they work on and how they work on these things. Then we ask the teachers to use this and additional resources, which we provide and they add to, to construct a document (e.g., poster) that they can share with their students about the type of engineering. The objective is to provide time for teachers to explore online resources for learning more about engineers and engineering.
Bolstering teachers’ understanding of engineering thinking is also about taking another look at the engineering design process. Two steps tend to be underplayed when teachers guide their students through an engineering design activity: imagine and plan. Teachers find that their students cannot generate a lot of ideas on their own, but then they don’t give them the time or encouragement to do it either. We emphasize the importance of setting a bar for idea generation (e.g., 10 uses for a pop-up in your card) that is an age- and activity- appropriate challenge to achieve. This not only supports the development of creative thinking skills, but minimizes fixation on the first and only idea. The first idea generated is not necessarily the best or most interesting idea. The generation of multiple ideas yields a wide variety from which to select when going into the plan phase. Crazy ideas should be encouraged, and students should be taught to withhold judgment, as from the crazy ideas emerge unique yet workable solutions. Techniques for stimulating idea generation can provide teachers with mechanisms to get their students past a block.
About the plan step, teachers will describe how their students want to change their plan midway through the create step. Sometimes what we see is that students did not think through their plans very well in the first place. During the second year of TPD, we emphasize again how students’ plans are the ticket to build their ideas. The teacher needs to set an expectation for the level of detail that should be included in the plan. Plans could include drawings, text descriptions for assembly, measurements, lists of materials needed, and an estimated cost. Students should be able to justify their design decisions from knowledge gained during ask and ideas generated during imagine. We acknowledge that our youngest students have considerable difficulty making a plan. One approach we discuss with teachers is to have students do the best they can, then create a plan after they build and describe how their original plan needed to be changed. The aim is that, through this reflection, students become better planners in the future.
Assessing Student Learning. Most teachers are resistant to assessment of any kind around engineering, and this has been most difficult for us to address, even in second-year TPD. One reason is that teachers feel that students are over-assessed and engineering is their break from all that. A second reason is that they are not sure what to assess—students’ final designs, their intermediate design work, their engagement in the design process, their participation on teams, or their learning of science or math concepts. Certainly, all of these things hold potential for assessment. For each activity implemented in TPD, a discussion about learning objectives and opportunities for assessment were imbedded. For instance, the improve step is a natural place to include a number of different types of writing prompts. Students could write personal narratives about their personal and team behaviors that were and were not successful, their use of the engineering design process, or their learning of math or science through the activity. Students could write a persuasive piece to advertise their design. They could also write an analytical piece in which they describe their design, test results, and ideas for improvement.
Stage 4. Second-year implementation—More of everything
While the trajectory of change for second-year implementation of engineering can be tempered by school- and state-level changes that affect teachers in and out of class time, we do see progress. Teachers attempt more engineering activities. They connect the engineering activities to the curriculum to a greater extent; science and math connections are stronger. There is also more discussion about engineers and their work. Overall, there is movement toward the vision of engineering in elementary education.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRACTITIONERS
Practitioners are defined to be TPD providers of elementary engineering education. This may be anyone providing training to elementary teachers to bring engineering into their classrooms. This includes, but is not limited to, university engineering education researchers and engineering educators, professional TPD providers, K–12 curriculum specialists, and practicing engineers.
1. Particularly for engineers, recognize and value that educators and engineers are different.
Teachers’ and engineers’ knowledge, problem-solving strategies, and work environments are different. TPD providers need to be prepared to develop a common language and set of expectation for engineering in elementary settings over time.
2. Expect elementary teachers to experience the four stages of development with engineering education.
Ross and Bayles (2010) noted that their teachers went through a cycle of “enthusiasm, crisis and then self-assurance with the curriculum” (p. 2). We see elementary teachers experience similar stages over a two-year period: initial fear of engineering, quickly followed by excitement over the potential, first-year implementation struggles, and second-year confidence building with engineering and integration. TPD providers need to be responsive to these stages.
3. Develop strategies to lower the barriers to implementation.
TPD with engineering is the easy part. TPD providers need to be prepared to offer ongoing assistance to teachers as they implement engineering in their classrooms. TPD providers also need to raise administrators’ awareness of the goals and vision of elementary engineering education, the training teachers are receiving, and the efforts their teachers are making. A network of TPD providers, teachers, and administrators need to consider means for supporting the teachers’ efforts to bring engineering into their classrooms.
4. Engineers and engineering educators are necessary to enable reflection on practice to increase and sustain engineering authenticity of activities and curriculum.
Teachers are typically unfamiliar with engineering practice. So, they often do not know what makes an activity representative of engineering. As engineering activities and curricula are developed, adopted, and implemented, those with engineering backgrounds are needed to authenticate the contexts for the activities, provide assistance in exposing science and mathematics connections, and identify ways to engage students in developing engineering habits of mind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation (GSE 0734091, DLR 0822261). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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