Thanks for the great questions. Teachers are always reluctant to try engineering initially in their classrooms, particularly due to the amount of extra time they perceive it will take for students to complete an engineering challenge. Our teachers are in CEEMS for two years. Over two summers, they take 20 credit hours of coursework, participate in professional development, and receive coaching from educators and engineers who help them develop 2-3 units featuring engineering design and challenge-based learning that they will implement in their math and/or science classrooms the following school year. The teachers get to choose which standards in their curriculum will be addressed in the units and come up with unique engineering challenges with the help of their coaches. The coaches continue to provide support as teachers implement the units in their classrooms. Since they are implementing at least 5 engineering design units over two years, they become much more proficient at implementing successful units by the end of their time with us. The most successful teachers integrate multiple standards into one engineering unit, which justifies devoting more instructional time to the units.

As a requirement of participation, teachers do disseminate what they have learned in a variety of avenues: staff/team meetings in their own school, PD in schools and districts outside of their own, and at conferences. Some teacher work one-on-one with another teacher to share their unit and coach that teacher through the process of implementing it. All teachers present at a regional STEM Conference offered annually at the University of Cincinnati, which attracts approximately 300 teachers each year.

The biggest challenge has been finding ways to quantify our impact. Currently, we collect pre and post-assessment data on students before and after each engineering unit is implemented. This year, we were able to find “comparison teachers” for some of our CEEMS teachers, who agreed to give their students the same pre and post assessment tests but taught the same content in a more traditional manner. We are hoping this will yield some interesting discoveries. We also collect data on teachers’ instructional practices prior to entering the program, at the program’s mid-point, and at the end of the program. However, this data is mostly self-report. This year, we also added teacher/student observations during the implementation of CEEMS units and during times when instruction is more traditional. Again, we are hoping this will help inform our project even more. I would be interested in learning about how other projects have added more rigor to their evaluations.

This is a really interesting example. Thanks for sharing.

Can you talk a bit more about the exercises that lead students to choose the challenge?

Katie, thanks for the good question. Every teacher goes through the process a little bit differently, but I will try to describe it as generally as I can. First, the teacher introduces a relevant big idea to the students, which could be anything from reducing one’s carbon footprint to school lockers that are too small. The big idea is introduced through a hook, such as short video, a short article, a class discussion, a guest speaker, or a mini design challenge that gets students interested and engaged in the big idea. Students then work individually and in teams to brainstorm some essential questions related to the big idea, which the teacher shares with the class. Next, the teacher asks for feedback and ideas about a challenge the class could work on in teams related to the essential question. The teacher will collect ideas and promise to get back to the students the next day with the chosen challenge for all his/her classes, based on student input and the content that needs to be covered. Often, the teacher returns to the students the next day to suggest the same challenge he or she originally envisioned. However, if the correct hook was chosen and the teacher carefully guides the selection of the essential question, at least a few students would have suggested the same challenge the teacher had already designed.

For example, a middle school math teacher has the class skype with his cousin, who is a disabled, wheelchair bound veteran. The vet talks about how hard it is to access places without a wheel chair ramp. That naturally leads the class to think about how they could help veterans by designing a wheel chair ramp using their knowledge of slope.

If interested, we have a video that shows one example of a teacher leading the students through the process of introducing the big idea to choosing a challenge: https://sites.google.com/site/ceemscbl/.

Evan, we have had the most success in schools where several teachers have participated in CEEMS. It helps when they can collaborate with others right in their buildings. A few of our participating middle schools practice team teaching, which means that the same group of students have the same language arts, math, science, and social studies teachers. In those buildings the math and science teachers have been able to collaborate and “team teach” engineering design units with the math teacher focusing on the math content and the science teacher focusing on the science content.

However, generally speaking, the remote rural schools have appreciated CEEMS the most. I think this is partially due to the fact that they do not have many other outside partnerships due to the distance from universities and businesses. We wrote a paper about our impact in rural schools that will be presented at the upcoming ASEE Conference.

Jim, that is a great question. Unfortunately, we do not track the students’ progress beyond their participation in the program. However, we do follow the teachers and survey them to see if they are still following the pedagogies they learned through CEEMS.