2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is substantial evidence that most K-12 teachers who want to incorporate engineering design into their courses learn their skills independently or through an extracurricular professional development (PD) program. Regardless of the value of these PD programs, rookie teachers are frequently required to make personal sacrifices (e.g., time, money, and stress) to participate and thus hindering their long-term progress. To offer an alternative, four Teacher Leaders Engineering Network (TaLENt) fellows from primary and secondary schools served as change agents for novice engineering teachers for one academic year to promote the integration of engineering design in their classrooms. This research aimed to understand how school-based teacher leaders can support peer educators in authentically integrating engineering design within their core subjects. Our research questions were: 1) To what extent was the High-Quality Engineering Guidebook used within each TaLENt fellow's Project? 2) How did the TaLENt fellows characterize their values while collaborating with their novice peers?
Employing a qualitative method, we used constant comparative analysis and triangulation to understand our collected datasets: TaLENt fellow narratives (N = 4 autobiographical texts), teacher project artifacts, and focus group transcripts. We found that TaLENt engineering PD increased peer collaboration, instructional risk-taking, and connections to cross-curricular subjects for novice teachers. Moreover, the action-based research approach paired with the High-Quality Engineering framework allowed inexperienced educators a say in their education, which helped reduce common misunderstandings about content alignment with engineering (such as the extent to which it applies to fields like physics or biology) and subsided anxiety about the processes of incorporating engineering in the classroom. The significance of this study is to highlight the value of teachers as in-school leaders. As states continue to adopt Next Generation Science Standards or incorporate engineering processes into their state-level curriculum, novice teachers will rely on their peers to strengthen their teaching practices within the subject, all while supporting the cultural needs of students. Our research shows the importance of in-school engineering PD facilitated by teacher leaders, especially for new and inexperienced engineering teachers; therefore, we recommend more investigation into implementing this type of PD. This change in professional development will make planning engineering lessons less stressful for novice teachers due to a reduced sense of isolation.