Exploring the teaching challenges of engineering faculty: What do they really want to know?

The engineering education community currently focuses a great deal of attention on helping engineering educators adopt effective teaching practices. While strategies in current use have had an impact on engineering teaching and learning, the persistence of engineering courses in which lecture is the primary teaching method indicates that there is room for improvement. We suggest that the success of current strategies is limited by the knowledge we have about the concerns of engineering educators. To address this, we are conducting research on engineering educator teaching challenges. To collect data, we are tapping a unique source - a program that has been highly successful in supporting engineering faculty as they implement effective instructional methods in their courses. This paper reports on this work to date.