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JOURNEY 1

Accountable to Whom? Learning from Beginning Schoolteachers 1

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The engineering profession has been keen to develop engineering activities in schools. Both the ASEE and FIE annual conferences hold several sessions each year devoted to K-12 education in which there are exchanges about what has been done and what might be done. Occasionally it is pointed out that engineering education can learn to its advantage about teaching methods in schools especially in primary (elementary) schools [1, 2]. There are no detailed analyses of engineering educators at work of the kind carried out among school teachers by Lortie [3] and more or less replicated twenty years later by Cohn and Kottkamp in the United States [4].

My experience of teacher education leads me to believe that beginning engineering educators have much to learn from beginning teachers. Therefore, many examples in this text are taken from reports of what happened to beginning teachers and their students while researching their own instruction.

There seems to be general agreement that there is a need for induction to teaching that goes beyond telling beginning teachers where their classroom, rest rooms, and staff rooms are before they begin their teacher training. However, by all accounts engineering education is still at this primitive stage. It is not unreasonable to suppose that key questions on a beginning engineering educators mind relate to accountability: “to whom, and for whom am I responsible?”

1.2 ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Accountability is important because it is the devil that is driving the mechanisms that control the work of teaching, as for example, the ABET criteria. In the UK, higher education institutions are now being judged for their teaching quality as well as their research [5]. That is, in addition to the quality assurance procedures already in place.

To begin at the beginning, Sockett wrote in 1980 that: “Central to the debate on accountability are the twin ideas of responsibility and answerability for actions undertaken by one party on behalf of another” [6]. My version of the development of accountability in the education system in England is that it began with the student revolt of 1969. Parliamentarians found that although the student unions in the universities received funding from student fees they were not required to account for how it was spent, and this frustrated those parliamentarians. They also came to believe that the measures in place for checking on the usage of funds by the universities were not adequate. In consequence, and it took a long time, the funding and accountability mechanisms were changed in the latter half of the nineteen-eighties. By far the most important control mechanism became the regular review of research, that is, the rating of departments against the number of publications produced, their quality as measured by peer review and the medium in which they were presented (e.g., conference, journal). Publications also became important in the United States for academics seeking tenure or promotion to associate and full professorship. Research became more important than teaching in many institutions, and the term research university coined.

Many beginning engineering educators are brought up in this system without any break in industry, and understand they have to publish or perish. The key qualification for progress into engineering education is the Ph.D., not paradoxically a Ph.D. and a qualification to teach. Some beginners may have had the experience of being a teaching assistant but few will have had any training for teaching, although training courses are available in some countries and compulsory in others [7]. A beginning teacher coming from industry will be in this situation but will have experienced the discipline of working in industry, and some of them find the organization and attitudes of engineering educators surprising. In either case both types are suddenly faced with role conflict between the relative efforts they should put into teaching on the one hand, and on the other hand, research. They come to a crossroads one of which points to research, and the other in the opposite direction toward teaching. As things stand unless teaching is formally appraised they are more likely take the research option.

Demands for improvement in teaching may increase the tension between research and teaching [8], and if undertaken within existing procedures for quality assessment create tensions between traditional teaching and innovative teaching as Pears has demonstrated for engineering in Sweden [9]. A few of the graduate student teachers whose exemplars are given in these chapters found the tasks I asked them to do brought them into conflict with their Master teachers.

1.3 ACCOUNTABILITY AND EVALUATION IN SCHOOLS

In parallel with these developments schools were also subject to similar pressures. However, in the UK, university education departments and colleges of education ensured that there was a substantial debate about accountability which extended to teacher education courses. Sometimes, as in my case, it was linked to problems associated with evaluation, since evaluation is a form of accountability [10]. I focused on the relationship between accountability and professionalism and argued, following Elliott, that the first point in the chain of accountability was the teacher.

Elliot wrote in 1976 that, “If teacher education is to prepare students or experienced teachers for accountability then it must be concerned with developing their ability to reflect on classroom situations. By ‘practical reflections’ I mean reflection with a view to action. This involves identifying and diagnosing those practical problems which exist for the teacher in his situation and deciding on strategies for resolving them. The view of accountability which I have outlined, with its emphasis on the right of the teacher to evaluate his own moral agency, assumes that teachers are capable of identifying and diagnosing their practical problems with some degree of objectivity. It implies that the teacher is able to identify a discrepancy between what he in fact brings about in the classroom and his responsibilities to foster and prevent certain consequences. If he cannot do this he is unable to assess whether or not he is obliged to. I believe that being plunged into a context where outsiders evaluated their moral agency without this kind of developmental preparation would be self-defeating since the anxiety generated would render the achievement of an objective attitude at any of these levels extremely difficult” [11].

Successful accountability is more likely to be achieved when teachers take responsibility for their daily actions at what might be deemed to be the first level of accountability. The second level, which cannot be avoided, relates that accountability to the outside world through appraisal, that is, of objectives agreed between the teacher and the authorities (principals, parents, colleagues) to whom he is accountable. Thus, if teachers wished to consider themselves to be professionals then, in the first instance, they had to be self-accountable for the achievement of agreed goals. They had to be able to self-evaluate or as we would say today, self-assess.

1.4 ACCOUNTABILITY AND PROFESSIONALISM

In the traditional concept of a profession the professional person is self-employed. As such they are necessarily self-accountable for their work, and this impacts, or should impact, on the service they provide their clients. But this idea was challenged in the nineteenth century and persons who were employed came to be regarded as professionals. In the 19th Century the creation and development of the engineering institutions, the Institution of Civil Engineers in the UK in particular, led to the view that engineering was a profession. In the 20th Century, particularly in the latter half, many other groups sought recognition as a profession from society. Teachers belonged to this group, and they became recognized as such, as did many other groups [12].

Lest it be thought that this argument only applied to the UK, it should be noted that in the U.S. in 1970, Owens argued that since the teachers are professionals they should be responsible for what goes on in the classroom. The teacher is no different to the medical practitioner in this respect [13]. But those who teach in higher education do not regard teaching as a professional activity. In engineering their allegiance is to the engineering profession, and their research is associated with that allegiance. This is one of the, if not the major reason why faculty do not have much interest in aligning their teaching and assessment to the knowledge base of techniques that is available to them. It is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to reform or change the practices of engineering education.

The best that can be said of the majority of engineering educators is that they are “restricted” professionals to use a term coined by Eric Hoyle. He made a distinction between “restricted” and “extended” professionalism. He argued that at that time teachers looked for a restricted notion of professionalism which is “a high level of classroom competence teaching skill and good relationships with pupils” [14]. And this is what the public would expect. In Ireland, Henry Collins (sometime President of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland) examined Hoyle’s model of restricted professionalism, and concluded that achieving the competence that the public expects of teachers would necessarily extend their professionalism [15].

“Extended professionalism” wrote Hoyle “embraces restricted professionalism, but additionally embraces other attitudes of the teacher. These include seeing his/her work in the wider context of community and society, ensuring that his/her work is informed by theory, research, and current exemplars of good practice; being willing to collaborate with other teachers in teaching, curriculum development and the formation of school policy, and having a commitment to keep himself/herself professionally informed.”

Hoyle’s model of restricted and extended professionalism is easily adapted for higher education as Exhibit 1.1 shows.

Engineering Educators who attend the annual ASEE and FIE conferences are more likely to be, or have a tendency toward extended professionalism, and to take the issue of accountability seriously.

An important step that would enable engineering educators to become a professional has been taken by the American Society for Engineering Education who have promoted a code of ethics. Cheville and Heywood have discussed the problems of developing a code of ethics for engineering education with reference to those in use in engineering (world-wide) and other professions, and suggested the code shown in Exhibit 1.2 [16]. As yet there is no universally recognized system of training engineering educators that is the hallmark of a profession.

It is evident from the foregoing that what has been written about accountability in the school system applies equally to higher education.

The beginning engineering educator finds her/himself in a situation where it seems that she/he may have to choose between different priorities or to balance those priorities as best as he/she can. In 1994 Michael Bassey President of the British Educational Research Association published a book with the title “Creating Education through Research” [17]. He used the second page of his introduction to adapt and develop work by W. G. Perry whose study of student intellectual development in higher education is of considerable importance [18, see chapter VIII]. The last two paragraphs read,

“My fifth discovery was that I am not a watcher of the world but an actor in it. I have to make decisions and some of them have to be made now. I cannot say, ‘stop the world and let me get off for a bit, I want to think some more before I decide.’ Given differences of opinion among reasonable people, I realize that I cannot be sure that I am making the ‘right’ decisions. Yet because I am an actor in the world, I must decide. I must choose what I believe in and own the consequences.”

Restricted Professionality in Engineering Education	Extended Professionality in Engineering Education
Instructional skills derived from experience	Instructional skills derived from mediation between experience and theory
Perspective limited to immediate time and place	Perspective embracing broader social context of education
Lecture room and laboratory events perceived in isolation	Lecture room and laboratory events perceived in relation to institution policies and goals
Introspective with regard to methods of instruction	Instructional methods compared with those of colleagues and with reports of practice
Value placed on autonomy in research and teaching	Value placed on professional collaboration in research and teaching
Limited involvement in non-teaching professional and collegial activities	High involvement in non-teaching professional and collegial activities
Infrequent reading of professional literature in educational theory and practice	Regular reading of professional literature in educational theory and practice
Involvement in continuing professional development limited and confined to practical courses mainly of a short duration	Involvement in continuing professional development work that includes substantial courses of a theoretical nature
Instruction (teaching) seen as an intuitive activity	Instruction (teaching) seen as a rational activity
Instruction (teaching) considered less important than research	Instruction (teaching) considered as important as research
Assessment is a routine matter. The responsibility for achievement lies with the student	Assessment is designed for learning Achievement is the co-responsibility of the institution, instructor (teacher) and student

Exhibit 1.1: An adaptation of Hoyle’s descriptions of restricted and extended professionalism on school teaching for higher education.

Engineering education has a large impact on the world, serving the ideal of human development through education and the ideal of truth through scholarship. Engineering educators respect the impacts culture and individuality have on these ideals. To serve these ideals engineering educators:

1. recognize that engineers and engineering works may impact the world for good or for ill. Engineering educators strive to develop their own and students capacity for moral purpose, serve as an example for life lived well, and recognize the rights of others to define their own welfare and quality of life;

2. treat others fairly, support others’ learning at all times, and honor differences between learners that arise through opportunity and culture;

3. balance responsibilities of the multiple roles they assume within the education system:

a. in the role of a teacher or mentor the engineering educator seeks to support learning, professional development, and enabling human thriving through education;

b. in the role of a scholar the engineering educator dedicates himself or herself to seeking truth and awareness of his/her own ideology;

c. in the role of an administrator, the engineering educator is guided by principles of fairness, justice, and compromise;

d. in the role of a patron, constituent, or client the engineering educator provides actionable feedback to improve education and helps support others professional development; and

While most times these rules are harmonious, in some cases the engineering educator will face ethical dilemmas that arise from overlaps of these roles. Resolving such conflict requires both adherence to law and moral judgment, tempered with respect for colleagues and students, and the recognition that vulnerable populations may often lack a voice. The engineering educator acknowledges the tensions inherent in supporting individual learners and an educational system with limited resources while undertaking unbiased evaluation of learning.

4. serve educational needs through:

a. supporting the needs of learners and upholding the rights of all individuals to an education with particular care for the vulnerable and disadvantaged;

b. recognizing the impact of credentials and the limitations inherent to measuring learning, and striving to improve how learning is assessed;

c. recognizing that learning occurs within a community and valuing the diverse expertise and contributions of their colleagues and the supports offered by the wider educational institution in which they function; and

d. building professional liaisons with others across the education system, and those who employ engineering graduates.

5. uphold standards of professionalism in any role they play within the education system;

6. balance their role as an educator with their role as an engineer by accurately interpreting state-of-the-art engineering theory and practice for learners, and drawing upon the science of learning to effectively promote and support student development;

7. act in ways that develop and hold the trust and confidence of others so as to support their role as teacher and mentor;

8. seek to advance, apply, and integrate the state of the art in both education and engineering theory and practice and dedicate themselves to life-long professional development; and

9. recognize a responsibility to participate in activities that contribute to access to education, and seek changes to situations that are contrary to the best interests of learners.

Exhibit 1.2: A proposal for a code of ethics for engineering educators by R. A. Cheville and J. Heywood (Cheville, R. A. and J. Heywood (2015). Drafting a code of ethics for engineering education. ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, pp. 1420–1423).

This text is written for beginning engineering educators and engineering educators who have decided to give teaching the same value that they give to research, and to show how the exploration of techniques that have been used in the school system can help the development of skill in self-accountability, enable choices to be made about curriculum and instructional design, and thereby, to create education. Since we expect students to take responsibility for their learning, they in turn have the right to ask us to take responsibility for teaching excellence.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[1] Crynes, B. L. and D. A. Crynes (1997). They already do it: authors]Crynes, B.L. authors]Crynes, D.A. Common practices in primary education that engineering education should use. ASEE/IEEE Proceedings Frontiers in Education Conference, 1219. 1

[2] Heywood, J. (2002). SCOOPE and other primary (elementary) school authors]Heywood, J. projects with a challenge for engineering education. ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, F2C-6 to 10. 1

[3] Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher. A Sociological authors]Lortie, D. C. Study. Chicago, Chicago University Press. 1

[4] authors]Cohn, M. M. authors]Kottkamp, R. B. Cohn, M. M. and R. B. Kottkamp (1993). Teachers. The Missing Voice of Education. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press. 1

[5] authors]Hurst, G. Hurst, G. (2016). University teaching will be rated gold, silver and bronze. The Times p. 13, September 30. 1

[6] authors]Sockett, H. Sockett, H. (1980). Accountability in the English Educational System. London, Hodder and Stoughton. 2

[7] Training for university teachers. 2

Australia. Most universities including the research universities insist that new staff complete at least a basic course on university teaching that includes peer evaluation of their teaching. Some encourage their staff to complete a graduate certificate of higher education. Most universities offer such a qualification and it is “free” to their staff. At The University of Technology Sydney new teaching academics are supposed to be given a reduced workload in their first year of employment to allow them to do the Grad Cert.

Sweden. University teachers are now required to have pedagogic training. At Uppsala University there is a course specifically designed for engineering educators. The general requirement at Uppsala reads “a prerequisite of an applicant’s educational competence as satisfactory are completed, relevant, pedagogy of higher education courses with a workload comprising a minimum ten full-time weeks, or equivalent knowledge. In special circumstances dispensation can be granted to allow the candidate to complete the required ten weeks of education during the first two years of employment. For appointments to professorships the pedagogical education must include a course in research supervision.”

United Kingdom. Initially intended to be compulsory but is now voluntary and overseen by the Higher Education Academy (formerly ILT) which offers Fellowships at four levels. It has established a UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF). Some universities offer post graduate certificates in higher education that are accredited by HEA. Many universities require new staff to pursue post graduate certificates in teaching and learning—usually two years part-time. Some universities require departments to have a proportion of qualified teachers. The new legislation may lead to this becoming a requirement.

United States. Many universities in the United States have training programmes. These range from a few days like the NETI’s (National Effective Teaching Institute) offered through the American Society for Engineering Education to more traditional structures of the kind offered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I was privileged to participate in a 2/3 credit course for graduate students on teaching Engineering and Science (See Courter Sandra and J. Heywood (2002). The perceptions of science and engineering graduate students to the educational theories relevant to skill development in curriculum leadership. ASEE/IEEE Proceedings Frontiers in Education Conference, F4A-1 to 5).

[8] William, D. (2016). Letter to The Times p. 20, September 30. authors]William, D. The British approach relies heavily on student ratings. For a critique of student ratings see Heywood, J. (2000). Assessment in Higher Education. Student Learning, Teaching, Programmes and Institutions. London, Kogan Page. Chapter 4. The assessment of teaching by students and alumni. 2

[9] Pears, A. N. (2009). Implications of student conceptions of authors]Pears, A. N. teaching for the reform of engineering education. ASEE/IEEE Proceedings Frontiers in Education Conference, WA-1 to 5. 2

[10] Heywood, J. (1984). Considering the Curriculum authors]Heywood, J. during Student Teaching. London, Kogan Page. 2

[11] Elliott, J. (1976). Preparing for classroom accountability. authors]Elliot, J. Education for Teaching, 100, pp. 49–71. 3

[12] Heywood, J. (1983). Professional studies and validation in C. authors]Heywood, J. H. Church (Ed.), Practice and Perspective in Validation. London. Society for Research into Higher Education. 3

[13] Owens, R. C. (1970). Organizational Behaviour in authors]Owens, R. C. Schools. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall. 3

[14] Hoyle, E. (1973). Strategies of curriculum change in Watkins, authors]Hoyle, E. E. (Ed.), In Service Training. Structure and Context. London, Ward Lock. 4

[15] Collins, H. P. (1980). A study of some aspects of the status authors]Collins, H. P. of organized teachers within the education system. Med Thesis. Dublin. School of Education, University of Dublin. 4

[16] Cheville, R. A. and J. Heywood. (Cheville, R. A. and authors]Cheville, R. A. authors]Heywood, J. J. Heywood (2015). Drafting a code of ethics for engineering education. ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, pp. 1420–1423. 4

[17] Bassey, M. (1994). Creating Education Through authors]Bassey, M. Research. A Global Perspective of Educational Research for the 21st Century. Newark, Kirklington Moor Press in association with the British Educational Research Association. 4

[18] Perry, W. G. (1970). Forms of Intellectual and authors]Perry, W. G. Ethical Development in College Years. A Scheme. Troy, Mo. Holt Rinehart and Winston. 4