Investigating the teaching concerns of engineering educators

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.