Investigating the Teaching Concerns of Engineering Educators

The teaching concerns of engineering educators offer one lens for thinking about how to support engineering educators' efforts to improve their teaching. In this study, we collected narrative accounts of teaching consultations between engineering educators and an instructional consultant. Transcripts of these accounts were coded for individual teaching concerns, which were then interpreted from the perspective of existing models and also aggregated into themes. We discuss our findings by using them to highlight ways in which engineering educators are already thinking effectively, to suggest how the adoption of innovation and professional problem-solving can serve as promising frameworks for thinking about teaching activity, and to suggest that additional research on engineering teaching take advantage of distributed cognition models to truly understand how our students are taught.

[1]  Jennifer Turns,et al.  Exploring The Teaching Challenges Of Engineering Faculty: What Do They Really Want To Know? , 2003 .

[2]  Frances F. Fuller.  Concerns of Teachers: A Developmental Conceptualization1 , 1969 .

[3]  R. Kazelskis,et al.  Concerns of Preservice and Inservice Teachers , 1985 .

[4]  G. Borich.  Educational Psychology: A Contemporary Approach , 1996 .

[5]  Karen Holtzblatt,et al.  Contextual design , 1997, INTR.

[6]  D. Bailey,et al.  Qualities of the Stages of Concern Questionnaire and Implications for Educational Innovations , 1992 .

[7]  Gerald H. Krockover,et al.  Concerns and Perceptions of Beginning Secondary Science and Mathematics Teachers. , 1997 .

[8]  Douglas E. Hirt,et al.  A Model Program for Promoting Effective Teaching in Colleges of Engineering , 1999 .

[9]  H. Bernard,et al.  Techniques to Identify Themes , 2003 .

[10]  Anje Ros,et al.  The Permanent Importance of the Subjective Reality of Teachers During Educational Innovation: A Concerns-Based Approach , 1999 .

[11]  Jennifer Turns,et al.  Empirically derived design principles for engineering educator resources , 2006 .

[12]  Colin Sharp.  Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (3rd ed.) , 2003 .

[13]  E. Guba,et al.  Naturalistic inquiry: Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1985, 416 pp., $25.00 (Cloth) , 1985 .

[14]  S. Anderson,et al.  Understanding Teacher Change: Revisiting the Concerns Based Adoption Model , 1997 .

[15]  Ronald N. Marso,et al.  A Seven Year Longitudinal Multi-Factor Assessment of Teaching Concerns Development through Preparation and Early Years of Teaching. , 1997 .

[16]  G. Ghaith,et al.  The relationship between perceptions of teaching concerns, teacher efficacy, and selected teacher characteristics , 1999 .

[17]  D. Schoen,et al.  The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action , 1985 .

[18]  Patricia L. Marshall.  Multicultural Teaching Concerns: New Dimensions in the Area of Teacher Concerns Research? , 1996 .