What is “Engineering Teacher Professional Development Endorsement”?
The growth of professional development (PD) opportunities for PreK-12 engineering educators raises a number of important questions for providers and consumers of such programs, including:
- How can providers of PD ensure that their program is properly designed to emphasize the aspects of engineering content, pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment that they think is essential?
- How can providers of PD ensure that their program meets relevant quality standards?
- How can consumers of PD find appropriate PD opportunities?
- How can consumers of PD properly understand the focus and emphasis of a PD opportunity that they are considering, and compare the focus and emphasis of multiple programs that they might be considering?
- How can consumers of PD assess the quality of a PD opportunity that they are considering?
To address these multiple needs, the ASEE has developed a system for endorsing PD programs. This endorsement is based on the 2014 Standards for Preparation and Professional Development for Teachers of Engineering and the associated matrix. (For more information about these documents, the history of the effort that led to their publication, and the literature review that supports them, visit the ASEE website.)
The Standards for Preparation and Professional Development for Teachers of Engineering offers a comprehensive set of objectives while acknowledging that no PD program can cover all of them. Each PD provider will prioritize some subset of engineering content (Standard A), engineering pedagogy (Standard B), engineering as a context for teaching and learning (Standard C) and engineering curriculum and assessment (Standard D), while all high-quality programs will place a moderate to high emphasis on aligning their work with research, standards, and educational practices (Standard E).
| The ASEE Endorsement is intended to certify that a given program’s emphasis on Standards A through D is what the program claims, and that the program meets all of the quality standards to be considered a high-quality program. |
Each consumer of PD is looking for an experience that emphasizes the “right” elements of Standards A through D to meet their needs, while also seeking a high-quality experience that prioritizes all elements of Standard E. The ASEE Endorsement serves as a useful tool for such consumers by providing a certification that a program emphasizes what it claims to, and does it in a high-quality way. If you are looking for the right PD experience, simply search the Endorsed Programs page of the ASEE Endorsement website for a program that meets your criteria. You can be confident that the program you choose is doing what it claims to do, and using best practices for PD in the process.
Learn more about the standards and endorsement through our webinar recording.