Welcome to Project ExCEED, a joint research project between the University of North Dakota's Colleges of Education and Engineering & Mines, in collaboration with the ND Northeast Education Services Cooperative. In this video, we share some of our work to build teacher capacity and self-efficacy in developing and implementing engineering design tasks in the classroom that align with their existing curricula and authentic community interests.

At the center of our work is a culturally relevant engineering design framework that guides both our teacher professional development and teachers' lesson planning.  By incorporating principles from the North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings, culturally relevant pedagogy, and the engineering design process the framework helps teachers connect engineering design to the community and cultures of their students. As we finish up the first year of our project we have already seen increased teacher confidence and high levels of student engagement. We are excited to continue this important work and to hear from you.  Please reach out with questions, comments, or feedback!

Such an exciting project. I really appreciate the engineering design framework. Thanks for making it available.

Can you share more about how you've seen this project impact students and teachers outside of the STEM classroom? I know it's anecdotal, but it's always exciting to learning about indirect impacts and shifts in instruction and relationships.

Really interesting. The framework goes by in the video pretty fast (good thing we can pause), but I like the way you define culturally relevant engineering around community-based needs and then describe the need (systems thinking!) and generate solutions. That seems like a powerful but workable structure for classroom engineering projects that are personally and culturally relevant.

What would you say is the most challenging aspect for teachers to adopt this approach?

Teachers mentoring each other is a great idea! What types of community-based projects have the teachers developed so far for example? Connecting to the community is so important! Check out our COMPASS2 video at https://stemforall2022.videohall.com/presentations/2631 

Thank you for sharing this great project and video. You mentioned that you have already seen increased teacher confidence and high levels of student engagement. Were these observations measured in some way or are they more informal observations? How did you, or will you more formally measure/evaluate such changes and other impacts of your program? Thanks much!

We're using the TESS survey to measure teacher self-efficacy and saw growth for before and after last summer's professional development.  Teachers will be taking the TESS again soon.  Based on what we've seen and what teachers' have expressed in debrief interviews after implementing their engineering design tasks we expect to see even more growth.  Teachers have also reported high levels of student engagement, but that isn't something that we are directly measuring as part of this project. 

We are also using a couple other surveys to measure teacher use of and confidence with culturally responsive teaching methods. And analyzing classroom videos, teacher interviews, and lesson plans to understand changes in teacher practice and pedagogy. As this school year ends we will have a full year of data and pre/post survey results that will allow us to better measure what changes have occurred.

How might you suggest take your findings and techniques and use them at the high school level?

Great project! I was wondering if the mentor teachers are inservice teachers working with preservice teachers or are they mentoring based on need or interest. Such a great way to get teachers working with teachers in such a powerful way!

Great Project! We are doing similar work, but pairing preservice teachers with engineering students to teach culturally responsive engineering lessons to elementary school students. We are also measuring PSTs' self-efficacy, and have had positive results. However, we are finding that the bridge between pre-service and inservice can be challenging to traverse and we are not sure our PSTs are going on to teach engineering in their classrooms once they graduate, although we are working on ways to support this. How are you incentivizing teachers to teach the engineering lessons? What role do engineers play in your project? I love the community focus of your project- obviously so critical to your success. Congratulations on a great project! 

This sounds amazing, Jennifer! Thank you for sharing about your project. I love the idea of involving pre-service teachers and the direct connection with engineering students. Is there any way you will be able to stay in contact with your PST once they are in classrooms to see the longitudinal impact of your project? We have two engineering professors, Frank and Beth, on our research team who are essential for supporting the development of teachers' understanding and implementation of the design process in their tasks. We are providing stipends, materials, resources, and a great deal of on-going support for our teachers as incentives, but we have also found that their investment in the work is inspiring participation from their colleagues as well, as we bring a new cohort into our project this year! 

Great video, all! Julie, you know I'm a fan of this work. One thing I have noticed is that explicit considerations of ethics are so often missing from engineering education design principles (I have an as-yet-unpublished paper about this). How are you leveraging cultural relevance and community resources/needs to support students (and teachers?) thinking about the ethics of engineering work?

And on a side note, there are several excellent videos in this year's showcase highlighting work in empathy and engineering. While empathy isn't necessarily a focus of this work, there may be some interesting overlaps between projects. So, I wanted to make sure you all were aware of the following:

• Using Narratives to Support Empathy and Engineering
• Engineering and Empathy in PreK and K
• Empathy at the Heart of Design