MY PHILOSOPHY
re-Engineering Education
9
Engineering my educational philosophy:
That may have been enough to get me started but I was not satisfied. I found it to be successful in the classroom and my students found my style very approachable but there had to be more. Therefore, like an engineer, I had to do some background research to find out what it was that I did not know about my new career. I found myself in the library checking out stacks of books on Educational Science, Educational Psychology, and anything else related to teaching. I even found sources on how to set up your student’s desk to fit the style of lecture, or lab best suited to your area of teaching. In between my classes, and meetings, and other college related service, I poured through the books, taking notes, studying other schools successes through case studies grasping anything I could to develop my own design.
I have heard the comment, “Why reinvent the wheel?” As an engineer, I say, we design different wheels for different terrains and education is no different. Each of our students, even if they grew up in the same side of town, had a different way of learning. This made sense to me because they had different experiences growing up. It is what made them individuals. The other train of thought was, “This is the way it is. If students cannot grasp these concepts, then maybe they are not college material. ”I thought, “College Material? What the heck was that?”
Then I remembered the first formal school established by Aristotle himself. It did not look anything like our classrooms today. In fact, it was outdoors, and designed to meet the public’s needs and enlighten them; it was not a privileged place to be.
Engineering an Educational Model:
How do you design an educational model using the engineering design method? I was not sure it was appropriate to do so. Educational science textbooks follow the Scientific Method. I gave it a try.
The Problem: Much like troubleshooting, its important to identify the correct problem. This is not always obvious and there are not signs and symptoms to test. The one symptom was clear and that was unhappy students, unhappy administration and unhappy hospital BMET directors.
Background research: Not being an education major, I studied educational models developed by educational scientist.
Specify requirements: The technical requirements are easy being set by national standards. However, the standard for delivering those requirements is where I realized my problem lay. The next part moved rather rapidly and iteratively.
Brainstorm, Evaluate, and choose solution: Working in the classroom, trying new lesson plans, assessments, online classes, and getting immediate feedback from the student was critical.
Testing our solution: Testing our revised lesson plan to check whether it met the aforementioned symptoms, was intense. This required a thick skin, and lots of patience. Ultimately we have been refining our model to meet all the internal and external demands.
What we are working with now is a complex model that is different for certain courses depending on the level of the course and the level of the student. We continue to follow the engineering method to rework the problem until all symptoms are identified. The result so far looks to be a combination of methods of which we are very comfortable implementing.