Merredith Portsmore

The online Teacher Engineering Education Program (TEEP) took years of CEEO research, experience, activities and curriculum and transformed it into a four-course graduate certificate program for K-12 educators that support them in developing their engineering content and pedagogy.  Created for in-service educators, the TEEP program, led to new research questions about the way in which online learning supports teachers’ own engineering learning.  The National Science Foundation awarded Jessica Watkins (PI) and Merredith Portsmore (Co-I) funding to study how elementary teachers in the program develop their engineering teaching skills. “Developing Teacher Noticing in Engineering in an Online Professional Development Program” focuses on teacher noticing  — how teachers pay attention to and make sense of the complexity of classroom activity.  Over the past year, the Teacher Noticing project has been interviewing TEEP teachers, discussing videos of students engaged in engineering, and reviewing their coursework.  The project’s beginning analysis is developing evidence for how online video clubs for teachers work, how teachers noticing changes over time, and how the interaction between engineering design experience and noticing interact.