• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Investigating the Teaching Concerns of Engineering Educators

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 November 2007, 06:00 CST

By Turns, Jennifer Eliot, Matt; Neal, Roxane; Linse, Angela

ABSTRACT 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.

Keywords: Faculty development, Teaching concerns

I. INTRODUCTION

Teaching concerns are a promising lens for exploring teaching activity. While teaching concerns research is an already established approach for helping K-12 educators to improve their teaching, the opportunity exists to bring this line of thought to the challenges of improving engineering teaching and speeding up the processes of change. This study offers a beginning point for understanding the teaching concerns of engineering educators at a Research Extensive university. Using instructional consultation as our context, we investigated the concerns expressed by individual educators and teaching-related groups during the consultation process.

We were drawn to teaching concerns because of the historical precedent associated with this body of scholarship, the promise of using concerns as a tool for explaining and even predicting difficulties and resistances, and the related issue of the strong link between this body of scholarship and the practical goal of helping educators improve their teaching (through both formal education and professional development). The engineering education community is increasingly recognizing the importance of proactively helping engineering educators advance their teaching effectiveness [1]. A number of valuable resources are currently available, ranging from individual instructional consultations to larger workshops on teaching skills. Furthermore, engineering education researchers are actively seeking to prove the effectiveness of specific teaching strategies. However, such efforts might have greater success if we as a community knew more about the actual needs of engineering educators. In this light, the investigation of teaching concerns represents an initial form of needs analysis. We believe that such information can help a range of stakeholders in the engineering education process to anticipate concerns that educators will have, and to develop strategies to address and manage those concerns.

Our study approach addressed one of the challenges of investigating teaching concerns (indeed a challenge of any form needs analysis)-the issue of when and how to get at the needs. In the context of engineering education, teaching is typically a private individual activity, thus making it difficult to get the needs documented. This research stemmed from a unique opportunity to capture information about teaching concerns soon after they were mentioned by educators. In particular, we debriefed an instructional consultant after interactions with individual educators and teaching- related groups. This approach represented an opportunity to identify engineering educator concerns associated with "lived" teaching challenges rather than concerns generally reported by instructors in a decontextualized situation.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews research on teaching concerns as well as research on the instructional consultation process, the context we used for studying teaching concerns. In the Method section, we describe our means for collecting data in the context of instructional consulting and our approach for systematically reducing the data in order to both identify the underlying concerns and address research questions related to those concerns. The Results section focuses on a characterization of the teaching concerns relative to two prevalent teaching concern theories (a deductive analysis) and in terms of emergent themes (an inductive analysis). In the Discussion, we relate these findings to three broad issues.

II. BRINGING TEACHING CONCERNS TO ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Teaching concerns have been defined as comprising "the questions, uncertainties and possible resistance that teachers may have in response to new situations and/or changing demands" [2]. The majority of this research to date has focused on K-12 environments. The differences between the K-12 and engineering education contexts suggest that an exploratory approach to investigating teaching concerns in engineering education would be both revealing and beneficial.

A. Prior Work on Teaching Concerns

Teaching concerns research has its roots in teacher education and teacher professional development. Work in this field seeks to (a) understand and categorize the types of concerns that educators encounter when learning to teach as well as when engaged in teaching practice, (b) confirm theoretical propositions about the link between the relative presence of different types of teaching concerns and a teacher's level of experience, and (c) explore teacher preparation and teacher professional development strategies that characterize teachers in terms of their concerns. Interest in teaching concerns theory has been tightly tied with the notion that teacher education informed by concerns shared by teachers will be more effective than one that fails to consider common teaching concerns.

Frances Fuller is the point of origin for the work on using teaching concerns as a lens into the development of teaching skill. In her germinal study almost four decades ago, Fuller [3] collected information on the concerns of pre-service teachers via open-ended prompts and found that these concerns could be grouped into three categories: survival, situation, and pupil. Further, she noted that beginning pre-service teachers had more survival concerns while those teachers farther along had more pupil concerns. This observation became the basis for concerns theory, the understanding that concerns about teaching evolve as the teacher develops his or her teaching skill.

Over time, these three categories became known as Self, Task, and Impact and the general theory came to be understood as a developmental stage theory. According to Borich and Tombari [4, p. 574], concerns theory is "a view that conceptualizes teacher's growth and development as a process of passing through concerns for self (teacher) to task (teaching) to impact (pupil)." Further, these authors describe the three stages as follows:

* Self [survival] stage. "The first stage of teaching during which beginning teachers focus primarily on their own well-being rather than on their learners or their process of teaching" [4, p. 5].

* Task stage. "The second stage of teaching in which a teacher's concerns focus on improving his or her teaching skills and mastering the content being taught" [4, p. 5].

* Impact stage. "The stage of teaching when instructors begin to view their learners as individuals with individual needs" [4, p. 6].

The educational psychology textbook from which the above description was taken is itself an example of how concerns theory has been used as a teaching tool. The textbook introduces concerns theory in the first chapter, provides a questionnaire that teachers can use to help characterize their own concerns in terms of the theory, and then discusses how the material in the related course relates to those different concerns [4].

In the time since Fuller's work, researchers have sought to confirm the basic propositions of the theory: the three categories and their occurrence as a developmental progression. This additional work has used not only open-ended data collection methods like Fuller's, but also various survey instruments that ask teachers to rate the extent to which they are concerned about specific items (e.g., [5]). Researchers have also sought to extend the work to teachers beyond the pre-service level to in-service teachers [6], beginning teachers [7], teachers over their first seven years [8], teachers with significant teaching experience and also teachers in other cultures (e.g., more than 15 years, Lebanese teachers, [9]). Researchers have also extended the work into the specifics of multicultural education [10] and science education [7].

Hall and his colleagues built on Fuller's work in their effort to characterize how concerns evolve when teachers are in the process of adopting innovations [11, 12]. The product of their effort is the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM), an expansion of Fuller's three stages into six stages of concerns that educators can encounter with the implementation and use of an innovation. These stages and their alignment with Fuller's original categories are described in Table 1, using the words of Hall and Hord [11]. While this adoption of innovation work has been criticized for not having more theoretical critique [13], the CBAM researchers are unique in that they have developed an entire suite of tools for helping instructional consultants (e.g., a stages of concern questionnaire, a stages of innovation questionnaire). Based on their experiences with the model and these tools, they argue that studying stages of concerns helps instructional consultants and administrators predict and circumvent initial barriers to innovation adoption as well as varying reactions to sub-components [11].

Over time, the research results (both the research focused on Fuller's ideas and the research such as CBAM that has been inspired by her work) have provided support for the three core categories of Self, Task, and Impact. These results suggest that future work with concerns theory is on solid ground when using the categories as a means for organizing concerns, particularly when there is opportunity to see what types of concerns populate the categories. However, the results have provided less dear support for the developmental proposition that Self concerns give way to Task concerns which give way to Impact concerns as the teacher gains experience. Rather, researchers have noted that Self concerns may reduce over time but do not seem to go away entirely, Task concerns are often relatively limited in number, and Impact concerns are often the largest category even for the most novice of teachers (e.g., [8]). This suggests that future work not assume a strict development progression, but rather focus on documenting the relative levels of concerns in each category and looking for explanations for why those levels of concerns exist.

B. Bringing Concerns to Engineering Education

While teaching concerns have been used as both a lens for understanding and a tool for impacting teaching at the K-12 level (and in undergraduate teaching preparation programs generally), we were not able to find any published accounts of the teaching concerns of engineering educators. Thus, the opportunity exists to document and reflect on the teaching concerns of engineering educators. There is also reason to be cautious in assuming that these frameworks will let us fully account for the range of concerns we find. On a surface level, there are clear differences between engineering education and K-12 education in terms of the topics being taught, the academic level of the students, and the role of funded research at the heart of the Research Extensive context. Focusing specifically on the educator in engineering education, we can note that (a) teaching is typically not the only responsibility of engineering educators who often have significant research and service responsibilities, (b) engineering educators may not receive formal training for their role as educators, and (c) engineering educators often have a great deal of autonomy in what and how they teach. As a result, we might anticipate finding surprising topics within existing Fuller and Hall categories as well as topics that fail to be captured by these categories. Under such circumstances, an exploratory approach has merit since it can help us discover as well as characterize and confirm.

C. Instructional Consultations as a Context for Studying Teaching Concerns

Instructional consulting sessions are a common approach to professional development in the higher education context, and typically complement other approaches to faculty development such as policy setting, workshops that help educators adopt specific pedagogical approaches, and efforts to develop new pedagogical approaches. In an instructional consultation, the client (typically an educator) discusses one or more teaching issues with the instructional consultant, who in turn offers suggestions and resources that concurrently address the client's issue and highlight effective teaching practice [14].

Because the instructional consultant is typically working together with the client to address client issues, instructional consulting represents a promising context for identifying a range of engineering educator concerns. Further, there are at least two reasons why concerns that are voiced as part of the consultation process are an excellent complement to concerns identified directly by educators in response to surveys or prompts (the technique used in much of the previous work on teaching concerns). First, concerns revealed in the context of actually working on teaching situations can be considered more situated and therefore possibly more authentic. Second, by looking at the concerns that are revealed through the consultation process, we do not rely solely on the educators' relative ability to describe their teaching concerns.

Instructional consulting is also challenging as a context for identifying engineering educator concerns for a number of reasons. For example, instructional consulting sessions are typically private events making it challenging to get access to the activity in the event. Also, while instructional consultants typically focus on the needs of their clients, they do have their own expertise which can affect the direction that a consultation takes. Finally, because a consultation is a two-party event in which the consultant in facilitating the educator, this can make it difficult to determine whether the educator had the concern prior to the consultation or if it arose during the consultation.

D. Research Questions and General Expectations

The overarching question guiding this research was: What types of engineering education teaching concerns are revealed through the instructional consultation process? Our approach was founded on the assumption that concerns arising in an instructional consultation context are by definition linked to teaching and thus are teaching concerns. Based on this assumption and the information presented above, we proceeded with the following specific questions and general predictions:

* Using Fuller's Self-Task-Impact model as a means for categorizing types of concerns, we asked: Which concerns expressed during the instructional consultations can be categorized as Self, Task, or Impact? What is the prevalence of each category? What specific issues are being addressed by concerns in each category?

* Using Hall's notion of adoption as a specific aspect of teaching and CBAM as a framework for understanding the concerns associated with adoption, we asked: What is the prevalence of concerns related to the adoption of any type of innovation? For those concerns related to the adoption of an innovation, which concerns can be categorized in terms of Hall's Concerns-Based Adoption Model? What specific issues are being addressed by the concerns in each category?

* Finally, working from the notion that these two models may not fully or more effectively describe all of the concerns we would collect, we asked: Are these models sufficient for organizing all of the teaching concerns of engineering educators? What types of concerns do we see when we look to the data using inductive thematic analysis?

Although engineering educators are not formally trained as educators, teaching is a job requirement and continued employment suggests that they are relatively successful. As a result, we anticipated finding concerns in all three of Fuller's categories in the consultation debriefing transcripts, but with the greatest number of concerns in the Impact category due to on-the-job training and the support of the instructional consultant. Also, because the engineering education community has devoted a great deal of effort towards creating and publicizing teaching techniques and resources, we expected concerns related to the adoption of such techniques and resources to be present. At the same time, since engineering practice itself consists of designing new solutions to situations, we did not anticipate adoption concerns to represent the majority of the data. Finally, because of the differences between the prior work on teaching concerns and the context of our work, as highlighted earlier, we expected that not all of the concerns we identified would fit the assumptions of these models and that an inductive analysis would be fruitful.

III. METHOD

Our study sought to investigate the teaching concerns of engineering educators, to evaluate how these concerns could be mapped to the results of prior research on teaching concerns, and to explore how these concerns illustrate the nature of teaching in engineering education. In this section, we discuss how our data collection took advantage of a unique opportunity to gain insight into teaching concerns and how our data analysis approach reflected a commitment to using systematic, auditable, and transparent techniques for handling qualitative data.

A. Data Collection

We collected our data by debriefing an engineering-specific instructional consultant (one based exclusively in a College of Engineering) after 63 consultations with individual engineering educators (primarily faculty members) and teaching-related groups. This instructional consultant worked with a wide variety of clients on a first-come, first-serve basis and helped these clients with whatever issues they identified. The College of Engineering and the instructional consultant that were the focus of this study were both known for their efforts to promote student-centered learning practices. The transcriptions of these interviews formed the principle dataset for this study.

These debriefing interviews, which took place during 2003 and 2004, consisted of the consultant providing a narrative retelling of the interaction with the client and then responding to a series of open-ended questions designed to clarify and expand on points in the narrative. This interview process represented a combination of the formal open-ended interview and the "interview guide" approach as discussed by Patton in his Handbook of Qualitative Research [15]. As part of this process, the consultant was able to report on educators' concerns in their own language and also offer an expert's perspective on the issues underlying the concerns. The exploratory nature of this project spurred the research team to gather a large number of interviews. The need for anonymity for the study participants presented challenges for data collection in this study. Demographic information, such as engineering department, gender, and level of teaching experience could all serve to identify participants and therefore could not be collected. As a result, we cannot report precise information on the number of clients represented by the data, their disciplines, or their levels of experience. This final issue represents a point of departure from Fuller's work in which she could characterize her subjects in terms of their expertise (i.e., in-service teachers, practicing teachers). Based on an approximate 20 percent repeat rate provided by the instructional consultant, we estimate that our dataset represents the concerns of 40-45 different individuals.

B. Data Analysis

Our analysis of the data consisted of three activities: reducing the data to a set of teaching concerns, deductive analysis in which we coded these concerns using the previously identified teaching concerns models, and inductive analysis in which we identified themes specific to our data. Our overall analysis approach of combining deductive and inductive activities is one of the strategies mentioned by Patton [15, p. 452-453]. Consistent with his explanation, we chose this approach because we wanted to see the data through an existing theory as well as find new patterns. The purpose, approach, and product of these activities are further elaborated below.

1) Data Reduction: Identifying Concerns: The purpose of the data reduction was to transform the debriefing interview transcripts into a dataset of individual teaching concerns. In our data reduction, we focused on identifying individual concerns present in the transcripts and then recording each concern in terms of a title, a description, and relevant excerpts from the transcripts that represented the "evidence" of the concern. Where possible, language from the transcript was also incorporated into the concern title and description. When identifying concerns, we focused on identifying any concerns that appeared in the transcripts, resulting in teaching concerns beyond those associated with the engineering educator clients.

Three members of the research team coded the transcripts for teaching concerns. Initially, all three coders independently coded several transcripts and then compared the results in terms of (a) the specific concerns identified and (b) the type of evidence recorded for the concerns. Once we were satisfied that each coder understood the process, all remaining transcripts were coded by an individual coder using NVivo qualitative data analysis software, and the results for each transcript were then summarized in a Word document which was presented to the other coders for review and discussion. These discussions often resulted in refinement to the concern titles and descriptions in order to better capture the essence of the concern represented in the data. This coding process resulted in the identification of 376 teaching concerns that are documented in coding summaries for each of the 63 transcripts. Example concerns, as identified by their tide and the transcript from which they originated, are given below:

* My students "seem like they don't want to be ...there." (Indiv_36)

* Are my ideas for the Broader Impacts section of an NSF proposal any good? (Indiv_37)

* I'm alone and without professional allies in my bid for full ... professorship. (Indiv_58)

* Peer-evaluated faculty feel "put upon" and get conflicting information from reviewers. (Indiv_57)

2) Deductive Analysis: Mapping Concerns to the Theories of Fuller and Hall: The purpose of the deductive analysis was to use the teaching concern models presented earlier to better understand the types of concerns we had collected. In particular, we sought to determine the number of concerns that fit into the categories defined by each model and the general topics represented within each category. Figure 1 provides an overview of our deductive analysis process.

We started this analysis by filtering the entire dataset of concerns relative to two assumptions underlying the previous work on teaching concerns: we filtered for those concerns belonging to engineering educators, and then filtered for concerns related to the educators' core teaching activity (defined as some type of interaction with students). Two coders coded the entire dataset of teaching concerns relative to each of these filters, then met to determine the level of agreement in each case (reported as a measure of reliability), and finally negotiated all disagreements to consensus. The two coders then coded the resulting subset of concerns (the engineering educator core teaching concerns) relative to Fuller's three categories of Self, Task, and Impact, met to determine the level of agreement, and negotiated all disagreements to consensus.

To code the concerns relative to Hall's Concerns-Based Adoption Model, we first filtered the engineering educator core teaching subset for concerns specifically related to the adoption of a teaching innovation. We used a liberal notion of innovation as any teaching practice with norms, which is consistent with Hall's explanation. We then coded this subset of the concerns relative to Hall's categories. As in the previous case, the filtering process and the coding process were both completed by two coders who first coded independently and then met to determine the level of agreement and to negotiate disagreements to consensus. In the Results section, we report on the reliability of each coding step, the number of concerns that ultimately fell into each category, and the nature of the concerns that fell into the categories.

3) Inductive Analysis: Identifying Emergent Themes: The purpose of the inductive analysis was to identify patterns in the concerns that had not been captured by the deductive analysis. Our overall approach consisted of identifying themes, confirming the extent to which the themes were present in the dataset, and then looking for patterns in the themes. To identify the themes, we used a "data wall" affinity process-we created a physical environment (the "wall") in which we could view all concerns concurrently and thus immerse ourselves in the data [16, 17]. Using this technique, three coders visually scanned the 376 individual concerns based on their title and description and documented themes that were present. For example, the concern "My students seem like they don't want to be there" was one of the concerns that were clustered around the theme "Educators questioning how much responsibility they should take for student learning."

We used a member check procedure as a means to further validate the themes [18]. Stakeholders in the member check reviewed the results for relevance and comprehensiveness. Our member check consisted of sharing the themes with a panel of engineering education experts who were asked to comment on those themes that were most familiar and those that they had encountered most often in their interactions with engineering educators. This information influenced our decision concerning which three themes to present in the Results section of the paper.

IV. RESULTS

Our process of data collection permitted us to identify 376 concerns. These concerns represented a broad set of issues ranging from relatively specific concerns such as how to address disruptive students, to such broad concerns such as how to create a culture that values teaching and how to write better grant proposals. Furthermore, the concerns we identified belonged to a range of stakeholders including engineering educators, students, the instructional consultant, deans, chairs, and the National Science Foundation. The analysis of these 376 concerns is presented in the subsequent sections.

A. Deductive Analysis: Interpreting Data via Existing Teaching Concern Models

As explained in the Method section, in order to code the concerns using the two teaching concerns models, we first had to filter the entire dataset for those concerns fitting the assumptions of the models (concerns belonging to educators and related to the educators' core teaching activities). The first level of filtering, identifying the concerns belonging to engineering educators (see Figure 1), was completed with 88 percent agreement and reduced the dataset from 376 concerns to 180 concerns. The 196 concerns that were filtered out included the concerns of the instructional consultant, administrators, funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and even concerns belonging to students. The second level of filtering, identifying the core teaching concerns (see Figure 1), was completed with 79 percent agreement and reduced the data from 180 concerns to 120 concerns. The 60 concerns that were filtered out included concerns about the instructional consultation process and concerns related to grant writing. The remaining 120 concerns represented the concerns that were consistent with the two teaching concern models.

1) Concerns Interpreted Through Fullers Self-Task-Impact Model: In coding the 120 concerns that were identified as belonging to engineering educators and related to their core teaching activities, we identified 31 Self concerns, 19 Task concerns, and 70 Impact concerns. This coding was completed with a reliability of 81 percent as measured through agreement. Table 2 provides an overview of the results of this coding.

Within the 31 Self concerns, some trends emerged. For example, several of the concerns related to negative repercussions of teaching activities, with several educators voicing concerns about credibility (such as a concern about women's attire having a negative impact on respect and credibility), reputation (such as not wanting to be "labeled a radical" for expressing one's views), departmental standing, and also being blamed for poor teaching evaluations. Another thread within the Self concerns related to concerns about discomfort and/or vulnerability, such as being personally put on the spot and feeling uncomfortable outside one's area of expertise. A third thread within the Self concerns was the general issue of difficulty and workload, such as concerns about the difficulty of implementing active learning. The 19 Task concerns made it the least populated category. To be coded in this category, concerns needed to focus on general "how to" issues. Two types of concerns that did end up falling into this category were concerns about (a) approaches and opportunities to improve one's teaching skills and (b) curricular level activities such as gaining feedback about possible curricular choices, making curriculum changes, and figuring out one's autonomy to adopt and adapt curricular materials. Inspection of the results suggests that the low number of Task concerns resulted not from a lack of "how to" concerns but rather from the fact that many such concerns went beyond the simple "how to" to the realm of "how to in the best interest of a student," which resulted in the concern being coded as an Impact concern.

With 70 concerns, the Impact category was the most prevalent. These concerns covered a wide territory in terms of teaching activity, including issues of:

* maintaining quality while providing accommodation,

* keeping the curriculum up to date to better prepare students for industry,

* improving students' engagement with their own learning,

* inclusiveness in terms of including all kinds of students.

Impact concerns also varied in terms of the number of students involved, how the concerns were framed, and their relationship to a disciplinary topic within engineering. For example, while some concerns focused on issues related to a single specific student (e.g., dealing with this disruptive student), other concerns focused on relationships with students at the individual level (e.g., mentoring issues), groups of students within a class (e.g., dealing with the students who do not want to be there), groups of students within engineering (e.g., underrepresented students), and all students. Also, while some concerns were framed as problems (e.g., dealing with a disruptive student), other concerns were framed as goals (e.g., maintaining quality while providing accommodation). Finally, while some concerns were tightly tied to a topic being taught by an instructor (e.g., concerns about supporting student exam preparation, concerns about how to link content to the engineering context, and concerns about teaching engineering principles before application examples), other concerns were related to engineering in general but not to a class (e.g., concerns about engineering students being trained to be passive, concerns that engineering students have skewed perceptions of engineering as a discipline) and even to issues not very specific to engineering (e.g., a concern that male educators need to learn to advise female students).

2) Concerns Interpreted Through Hall's Concerns-Based Adoption Model: Of the 120 educator core teaching concerns, we identified 66 as related to adoption of innovation (reliability of 77 percent as measured by agreement). The range of "innovations" reflected in these concerns included:

* strategies and practices that form a part of teaching, such as using textbooks and disability accommodation,

* broader pedagogies for classroom teaching, such as service learning, group work, and active learning,

* practices such as mentoring and advising that have teaching relevance but typically occur outside of the classroom,

* assessment and monitoring practices, such as student ratings, that are used to collect information and determine how well other strategies are working, and

* various practices such as information discussion groups that educators use to learn about and improve their teaching skills, and reflect on the other practices mentioned.

While some of these innovations seem rather loosely denned, what was common about them in the context of the concerns is that they were treated as an existing practice that could be learned about and had norms.

We were able to analyze these 66 adoption of innovation concerns with an agreement of 87 percent. The results of the analysis of these 66 adoption of innovation concerns relative to Hall's CBAM model are reported in Table 2.

As indicated in Table 2, we found Consequence to be the most prominent category (which is not surprising since Impact was the prominent category in the previous coding). These 29 Consequence concerns represented issues such as (a) understanding how to use the innovation with students and (b) determining what mediates an effective use of the innovation. We also noted one concern explicitly capturing tradeoffs associated with the innovation (i.e., a concern about how to dock late assignments without violating student rights).

While we did not identify any Awareness or Refocusing concerns and only identified one Informational concern and one Collaboration concern, we did find a number of Personal concerns (n = 21) and Management concerns (n = 12). The Personal concerns reflected links between using the innovation and (a) career issues such as promotion and tenure, (b) self image and work image, (c) workload, and (d) managing perceptions of one's expertise. The Management concerns reflected issues related to (a) the level of freedom and flexibility inherent in using the innovation, (b) challenges inherent in using the innovation, (c) identification of tasks associated with the innovation that were not student specific, and (d) the types of resources beyond student capabilities necessary to use the innovation.

Collectively, this section has focused on analyzing the concerns of our engineering educators relative to existing models. We were able to analyze 120 of our concerns using the models. The remaining concerns were either concerns of educators that were not related to their core teaching responsibilities and/or concerns of engineering education stakeholders other than the educators. In the next section, we turn to the inductive analysis which, while prioritizing the core teaching concerns of the engineering educators, also sought to bring these other concerns back into the analysis.

B. Inductive Analysis: Seeking Themes Across an Entire Set of Concerns

The themes which emerged from the affinity process illustrate the complexity of engineering education in a research-focused environment. Table 3 presents these 14 themes, organized alphabetically.

Due to space limitations, we cannot go into depth on each of these themes. As a result, in the remainder of this section, we focus on presenting three of these themes in greater detail. These themes were chosen not only because of the richness of the data relative to the theme but also because of their ability to highlight the breadth of our dataset in terms of concerns that were consistent with the assumptions of the Fuller and Hall models, and also concerns that went beyond the assumptions of those models (e.g., educator activities beyond core teaching, concerns of stakeholders other than educators).

In this vein, the first theme, "Educators questioning how much responsibility they should take for student learning," was chosen because it clearly represents a core teaching concern of the engineering educators in this study. The second theme, "Educators grappling with many roles beyond classroom instructor," was chosen because it captures the complexity of engineering educators' professional lives, a complexity that goes beyond the vision of teaching that Fuller describes. The third, "Educators, administrators, and funding agencies trying to create a culture that values teaching," was chosen because it is a theme that focuses beyond core teaching activities and also illustrates a shared effort by the many stakeholders in engineering education.

1) Educators Questioning How Much Responsibility They Should Take for Student Learning: Engineering educators may have difficulty determining how much responsibility they can take for their students' learning. While being actively engaged in supporting their students, participants in this study expressed a number of concerns related to the degree to which students engaged in course activities, students' preparation for the higher education setting, and some educators' perceptions that students put less time and energy into their coursework than the educators do themselves. Given that engineering educators are increasingly being required to change their teaching to increase student learning, this apparent discrepancy between student engagement and expected learning leaves educators in an ambiguous position. Each of the following sub- themes describes a particular aspect of educators questioning how much responsibility they can take for student learning.

a) Educators questioning students' engagement with their own learning process: Engineering educators may be concerned about how their students approach their own learning. Participants in this study expressed concerns about a variety of student behaviors that could be indicative of a lack of engagement in their own learning. One educator spoke about "a significant amount of students skipping class" while another suggested that his students "seemed like they didn't want to be there."

Moreover, the educators were concerned that they themselves would be blamed for poor student performance. One educator had designed a course that included students taking online "pre-flight quizzes" before class time, a non-graded activity that was intended to reinforce student learning and to help the instructor prepare for that day's class session. The client reported that a number of students were skipping class and that 20 percent of the class was not taking the quizzes: The client was concerned that his students would blame him for their poor performance. Why would they blame him? Would they see material covered in lecture and think "you gave me the impression the online material covered the lecture?" Would they just blame him in general for not teaching well? (Indiv_69, Lines 182-185)

Several educators expressed concerns about the relative workloads that educators and students bear in preparing for class. One such concern questioned the degree to which students came prepared for class, especially regarding the reading. The instructional consultant responded to her client's concerns as follows:

So we talked about how in a traditional class the students don't do a lot of work while the instructor does a lot of prep. But in an interactive course, where [students are] actually doing some assignments ahead of time....the students are much more active in the class because they're prepared to talk... (Indiv_28, lines 200- 204)

This subtheme describes one aspect of educators' uncertainty about the degree to which they can be held responsible for student learning: the perception that some students may be taking less than adequate responsibility for their own learning process. As the following subtheme describes, educators also realize that students may be lacking some of the baseline skills for functioning well in the higher education setting.

b) Educators realize that students have difficulty in the higher education setting: Another factor limiting how much responsibility educators can take for student learning is students' preparedness for the higher education setting. Educators in this study expressed concerns about students' ability to perform the basic tasks needed to learn at the university level. One educator, for example, suggested that students may lack the ability to effectivery work with a textbook:

The client had a hypothesis about student engagement and use of the textbook Students don't know how to read a textbook...They really don't know how to get information from a textbook (Indiv_24, lines 25-28).

Educators also expressed concerns about a variety of possible causes for poor student performance. One educator was concerned about how well a student's undergraduate math education prepared her for graduate-level engineering courses. Another educator expressed concern about some students' lack of time management skills, suggesting that students lack "realistic expectations" about the number of hours required to effectively complete course-related responsibilities.

There was also a perception that the higher education setting itself was not supporting student learning. The instructional consultant referred to one author's framing of this institutional bias:

She said the environment is hostile toward helping students achieve a degree and is geared more towards weeding out those who are struggling. They need to have a less competitive environment (Indiv_28, lines 45-48).

The educators were also aware that some students lacked a positive self-image in regard to their own scholarship. This seemed particularly true for female graduate students in engineering:

The client and I had [a number of conversations] about women grad students....that they run into these lands of things more often. They convince themselves that they're stupid...even though they know analytically that they are not (Indiv_30, lines 79-82).

While the first subtheme primarily addressed student behavior and abilities, this second subtheme captures institutional deterrents to student learning, whether those deterrents are a lack of adequate preparation or the perception of higher education as a hostile environment. These two subthemes capture educator concerns about students' ability to engage the higher education setting as a learning environment. In the face of these concerns, educators are also attempting to create a positive learning experience for their students, as the next subtheme attests.

c) Educators want students to excel: In the midst of these concerns about students' ability to engage their own learning, some educators in this study also expressed concerns about creating a classroom environment that best supports learning. These concerns ranged from questions about specific teaching techniques to more general approaches to teaching:

The client writes: I'm teaching a new course and I've never taught it before. I usually just figure it out the first year and try new things. But I hate to do that to the students. So if you have any ideas on how to make it not so hard on the students, I'd really like to know (Indiv_67, lines 7-9).

Some educators in this study approached the goal of increased learning by learning to build better rapport with their students and create an open atmosphere for discussion in the classroom. Others sought to make the structure of the course and their own teaching more transparent.

Overall, this theme captured an ambiguity in teaching: educators wanting students to excel while also recognizing that some students do not or cannot engage the learning process surficiently to reach the expected level of competency. While this paradox is not new, educators may feel caught between actual student performance and the expectations of administrators and funding agencies for increased student learning. As a result, such educators may benefit from a community-wide discussion of how much responsibility they can take for student learning in classroom context and how much responsibility students must bear. At the same time, classroom instruction is but one of a number of responsibilities that engineering educators face on a daily basis. The following theme addresses the complexity of educators' professional lives, specifically those of faculty, by recording some of the many roles they perform within and beyond that of classroom instructor.

2) Faculty Grappling with Many Roles Beyond Classroom Instructor: Fuller's Self-Task-Impact model of teaching concerns, which was founded in the study of undergraduate student teachers and K-12 teachers, focused primarily on educators' responsibilities as classroom instructors. While the engineering educators represented in this study also had a strong focus on the classroom and were actively engaged in improving student learning, these educators' concerns revealed that they were also engaged in activities associated with a variety of other roles. For example, the concerns revealed roles including employee, department member, domain expert, grant writer, industry liaison, mentor, policy-maker, and researcher. Given this multiplicity of roles, which are often themselves in a state of flux, engineering educators in this study used the instructional consultation process to address challenges beyond those usually associated with classroom instruction. The following sections discuss a sample of the roles that were revealed. They are arranged by their relationship to the classroom, from those that are directly associated with classroom instruction to those that involve the greater academic environment.

a) Multicultural Educator: Educators at all levels are increasingly expected to incorporate multicultural teaching methods into their teaching practices [10]. Yet engineering educators may have difficulties implementing diversity-based instruction. Some engineering educators represented in this study had limited understanding of general pedagogical terminology and therefore needed to have multicultural education materials "translated" for them. The instructional consultant also suggested that some educators may understand the importance of multicultural education but may not recognize that there is a problem in their own classrooms. In this study, the instructional consultant actively supported engineering educators in improving their multicultural education skills.

b) Industry liaison: Several engineering educators represented in this study sought assistance from the instructional consultant to better incorporate common issues and practices found in industry. For example, one educator wanted to take a wide perspective of "introducing the discipline and its dynamism" to students and giving them a realistic perspective on his rapidly changing field. Another educator approached the instructional consultant for assistance at a finer grain, incorporating "real world" examples into the curriculum as a way to increase relevance for students while also preparing them for employment.

c) Researcher. One defining difference between Fuller's participants and the educators represented in this study is the professional requirement to conduct funded research. Engineering educators represented in this study used the instructional consultation setting to express concerns about research demands and the interplay of teaching and research. For example, one educator was concerned that teaching and research seemed like two separate activities and sought a better understanding about how to integrate them. Another educator was concerned about how his research approach could affect the tenure and promotion process.

d) Grant-writer: Engineering educators in this study also came to the instructional consultation process seeking help on writing grant proposals, the necessary first step in the acquisition of funded research. Many of these educators sought specific guidance on writing the Broader Impacts section of an NSF proposal. They asked for help on writing about the educational aspects of the proposed research, asking especially for appropriate supporting citations. Others wanted more global feedback on the quality and acceptability of the proposal as a whole. In relationship to this and the preceding Researcher role, it is interesting to reflect on how these educators came to use instructional consultation to support their research-related responsibilities. e) Department member. Engineering faculty belonging to a department represents a significant aspect of their work context. Some educators represented in this study expressed concerns about how to cope with challenging communication patterns within their departments. For example, an international faculty member worked with the instructional consultant to better understand how to interpret the social dynamics within his department. New educators expressed concerns about the tenure and promotion process, questioning the impact of their student ratings or their research projects on their advancement towards tenure. Women educators also approached the instructional consultant for support in working in a traditionally male academic department. For all of these educators, the instructional consultant seemed to serve as an interpreter of the academic culture itself.

While this range of roles may not be surprising, the fact that these roles were all invoked during instructional consultation sessions reflects the intricate way that teaching permeates faculty life. In the next section, we turn to a theme that reflects not only the concerns of the engineering educators that have been reflected in this section and the previous section, but also concerns associated with other stakeholders in the engineering education system. The final theme discussed in this paper addresses how the engineering education community is creating a culture that supports teaching.

3) Educators, Administrators, and Funding Agencies Trying to Create a Culture That Values Teaching: Several of the concerns in our dataset suggest an underlying desire for and efforts to create a culture that values teaching. For example, some educators expressed a desire for a forum to discuss teaching issues within their departments and actively sought out assistance with various aspects of their teaching. More broadly, administrators and stakeholders such as funding agencies also wanted to build a culture that values teaching by seeking ways to motivate individual educators to adopt new methods, to spread teaching innovation beyond innovators, and on an even more fundamental level, to get educators' buy-in for pedagogical change. The articulation of these issues provides insights on the barriers that educators and other stakeholders encounter when trying to create such a culture.

a) Wanting a culture that values teaching: Educators represented in this study, as well as the instructional consultant, expressed a desire for a culture that values teaching and teaching innovation. In particular, these educators wanted explicit discussions of teaching to be an ongoing aspect of academic engineering culture, whether supported at the college, the department or program levels, or simply among their peers. In one consultation, an educator/ administrator pointed out a perceived need for a greater discussion of innovative teaching techniques:

There isn't a forum for people to talk about [teaching]. And this faculty member realized that. He said that it is not working to have the innovators talking to each other in a committee meeting (Indiv_1, lines 123-126).

While the preceding excerpt captures an interchange between the instructional consultant and an academic administrator, engineering educators themselves also recognized the importance of creating opportunities for educators to come together and help each other improve their teaching. For example, one educator e-mailed the instructional consultant to schedule a consultation with the following observation:

I thought it might be a good idea to have a lunch workshop where an expert on engineering teaching can do a workshop, very similar to the one... where Rich Felder spoke on "Why Should I Change the Way I Teach?'... I think it would be a great opportunity to really use this time to infuse into the community the importance of active/ experiential learning and how easy it is to implement this (Indiv_60, lines 15-24).

For the engineering educators in this study, instructional consultations served as a forum to talk about their own teaching. The availability of instructional consulting represents one element of a culture that values teaching.

b) Motivating educators as a key to creating the culture: When engineering educators and other stakeholders are working to increase the visibility and value of teaching, they can be challenged by those educators who appear on the surface to be "recalcitrant" or somehow lacking in motivation. For example, a department chair worked with the instructional consultant to increase awareness of teaching in his department, especially among established faculty:

We were talking about faculty buy-in, which we talk about every time because this is a big concern of his. He's thinking perhaps about the more negative end of the distribution of faculty and thinking how he's going to reach [them] (Indiv_73, an lines 329- 333).

Another educator, who was writing a proposal for a department- wide pedagogical change, wanted to increase the awareness of teaching among his peers. He sought help in framing his efforts in a way that would appeal to the broadest set of educators:

He talked about his idea of how do you find out what they're even interested in when it comes to teaching? We talked a lot about faculty buy-in, that if you're going to talk about pedagogical change, faculty have to have a reason to do it. They have to be able to take ownership of it (Indiv_43, lines 93-96).

Finally, one educator suggested that the bottom line may be the best way to motivate certain kinds of faculty to increase their teaching skills:

And I said well actually there's a lot of proof that [active learning] works...and he said yeah but it needs to impact student ratings because that's what they look at in the tenure and promotion process. That's the reward structure you know (Indiv_7, lines 149- 152).

Larger scale attempts to motivate educators to change their teaching were also reflected in the concerns related to this theme. For example, funding agencies such as the NSF are actively working to create a culture that values teaching through initiatives that include the funding of research on engineering education and the opportunity to satisfy the broader impacts requirement by linking the research to educational activity.

V. DISCUSSION

In this paper, we have reported on a study of teaching concerns arising in one engineering education context-consultations between engineering educators and an instructional consultant. We collected narrative accounts of 63 consultations between the instructional consultant and engineering educators (a place where we expected concerns to be voiced) and analyzed these accounts to create a dataset of 376 individual concerns.

In our deductive analysis of the concerns relative to Fuller's Self-Task-Impact model, we first found that only 120 of our concerns fit the assumptions of the model in that these were concerns of educators related to their core teaching responsibilities. The concerns beyond this 120 subset represented either concerns of engineering educators beyond their core teaching responsibilities (e.g., grant writing) and/or concerns belonging to stakeholders in the engineering education process other then the educators themselves (e.g., instructional consultants' concerns about how to best market themselves to engineering educators). Our analysis of the 120 core teaching concerns found the majority of the concerns to be in the Impact category, showing the many ways that the engineering educators were endeavoring to take into account student issues. We also found concerns in two other categories of Self and Task Of particular interest were the many Self concerns related to the potential negative consequences of teaching activities. Because Hall's Concerns-Based Adoption Model was built on Fuller's model, we used these 120 concerns as the beginning point for our analysis relative to CBAM. We found that 66 of these 120 concerns fit the assumptions of the CBAM model in that the concerns involved some form of adoption of innovation. We further noted that the nature of the innovations varied (e.g., strategies such as using textbooks, specific pedagogies such as active learning, and more general practices such as accommodating students with disabilities). When coding these concerns relative to Hall's categories, we found the majority of the concerns to be in the Consequence category but also a significant number of concerns in the Personal and Management categories. Collectively, these results were consistent with our predictions.

Our inductive analysis permitted us to go beyond the limitations imposed by the previous theories and resulted in the identification of 14 themes that varied in the immediacy of their connection to students. In addition to providing a brief snapshot of each of these themes, we then reviewed three of these themes in greater detail: the issue of how much responsibility an instructor can take for student learning, the challenge of the many roles of an engineering educator and the links of these roles to the teaching mission, and the goal of creating a culture that values teaching.

A. Significance of the Results

Collectively, these results represent a benchmark concerning the needs of engineering educators and a basis for conversation. Although the concerns represented in this work reflect a large number of engineering educators the results in many ways are best described as a case study of the concerns of engineering educators at one public Research Extensive institution that arose when educators were grappling with some issues in a supportive context. As a result, future research is needed to know if the results are specific to educators who seek out advice, representative only of educator needs that cannot be addressed by other resources (e.g., online tools, workshops), specific to this one institution, or even unique to engineering. Further, future research would help clarify if engineering educators have the same types of concerns when they are on their own. The exploration of these issues can clearly be a part of the conversation stimulated by the work. These results also suggest that the engineering educators in this study deserve merit for the extent to which they were functioning in a learner-centered way. Current best practice guidelines for education highlight the importance of good instruction being "learner-centered" (e.g., [19]). We believe that many of our results represent evidence of learner-centered practices and illustrate the various ways that learner-centered thinking can manifest in engineering education. For example, the number and nature of the Impact concerns in the Fuller analysis and the number and nature of the Consequence concerns in the Hall analysis brought to the forefront the extent to which the engineering educators were grappling with student issues. Also, the theme of how much responsibility to take for student learning provides a more in-depth look across the participants at one specific student-centered concern of engineering educators. The other two themes that we explored were not specifically about being student-centered on the surface, but were nonetheless clearly tied to students. For example, the "creating a culture" theme, in its immediate form, focuses on the educator but a broader view of this theme suggests that a culture that values teaching would provide a space in which educators can focus on being student-centered. Also, the "many roles" theme points to the different contexts for being student-centered. Finally, even the Self concerns, which on the surface can be seen as evidence of teacher-centeredness, can be linked to learner-centeredness when viewed as challenges or obstacles to being learner-centered. For example, the Self concerns related to issues of negative repercussions can certainly be thought of as obstacles, or even the source of resistance to practices that may be more learner-centered.

The results also prompt thought in terms of productive ways to conceptualize or describe teaching, which has added significance given that the underlying framing of an activity such as teaching can significantly affect how we support that activity. In a nutshell, the results point to adoption of innovation and professional problem-solving as promising ways to conceptualize the activity of engineering educators. In our study, we found over half of the core teaching concerns to be related to adoption of some type of innovation. The results also complicate the issue of adoption in that the majority of the concerns related to adoption were Consequence concerns generally addressing how to adopt or adapt the "innovation" to the particulars of a situation while maintaining quality for students.

The processes and decisions associated with adoption can be viewed as just one aspect of the other lens we believe the results suggest as productive-the notion of professional problem-solving as characterized by Schon [20]. In his work on the nature of activity in the professions, Schon contrasted the models of technical rationality and professional problem-solving. In a technical rationality view, the professional learns the techniques of the profession and applies these techniques to the well-formed problems of professional practice. In our dataset, such a vision might have shown up as a large number of concerns in Fuller's Task category and Hall's Management category suggesting educators' grappling with simply understanding the techniques of the profession (i.e., teaching). Rather, we saw a large number of Impact concerns, specifically concerns often related to adopting an innovation to the particulars of a situation and developing solutions to specific problems of practice. Further, two of the three themes included in this paper can be characterized as examples of the complicated problems of practice (how much responsibility for teaching and creating a culture that values teaching). The "creating a culture" theme can also be characterized as the problem of creating conditions suitable for educators to engage in this problem- solving. The third theme (many roles of engineering faculty) can be seen as describing factors that complicate the problems of practice. These results seem highly consistent with Schon's characterization of professional problem-solving, suggesting that the engineering education community might reflect on the extent to which such a problem-solving view is reflected in the support provided for engineering educators.

One final note is the implication of the results for future efforts to model teaching activity. Inspired in a broad sense by a desire to understand how teaching happens in engineering education and how we might help educators teach more effectively, we collected data in the form of teaching concerns. Yet, analyzing the data relative to existing teaching concern models only let us account for less than half of our data (the portion representing the "sharp end" of teaching, educators interacting directly with students). In this paper, we used inductive analysis to bring in the rest of the data (the "blunt end" of teaching, educators focused on non-core teaching activities and other stakeholders). The presence of so much data that could not be analyzed through the models we identified suggests a need to look for other models. In particular, a desirable model would be one that can help to organize teaching-related issues beyond those associated with direct interaction with students, represent a wide range of stakeholders beyond those educators who have immediate interaction with students, and showcase how all of the issues come together to affect how our students get taught. We believe this suggests that future resear

Source: Journal of Engineering Education

More News in this Category