Less is More: Balancing Tradeoffs in an Engineering Design Task During a Teacher Workshop

Despite the recent emphasis on the importance of K-12 students engaging in engineering content and practices, there has been little research done about how teachers learn engineering practices through teacher workshops and even less on how they utilize those experiences to teach engineering in their classes. Using methods of interactional ethnography, we analyzed data from an online teacher workshop in which elementary teachers engineered solutions to a multi-criteria problem in which balancing tradeoffs was a key practice. We found that teachers tended to focus on one criterion rather than both and lacked strategies to consider balancing these tradeoffs. We also found that a second iteration afforded all groups to demonstrate learning through improvement. Implications are discussed related to the importance of a focus on balancing tradeoffs in teacher learning and on pedagogy of engineering projects.