We encourage all of you to read an interesting book by John Heywood from Trinity College Dublin-University of Dublin titled Empowering professional teaching in engineering: sustaining the scholarship of teaching.
Dr. John Heywood has been involved in education since the 1950s. He has been a faculty member at technical colleges as well as at the Universities of Lancaster and Liverpool, and a visiting professor at Salford University in the United Kingdom. He also served as professor and head of the Department of Teacher Education at Trinity College Dublin. Dr. Heywood’s work has been particularly focused on examinations and assessment in higher education, and more generally on the theory and practice of the curriculum. Much of this work has been on engineering and technological topics, with major contributions to the development of engineering and technological studies in schools. He has more than 150 publications. He was a founding editor of the International Journal of Technology and Design Education. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and an IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Fellow.
Empowering professional teaching in engineering is an interesting approach: the author makes an effort to show what should be done to improve teaching. Heywood is an experienced scientist, who also has his own thoughts about teaching and different school systems. He tries to share with us not only some general remarks, but also his own views, opinions, and thoughts about teaching engineering, based on many important events in history.
The book consists of 16 lectures-which the author calls “journeys”-based on a 2016 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education workshop organized by Professor Arnold Pears of Uppsala University. Cooperation with Dr. Mani Mina led to a course on teaching and learning in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industrial Design at Iowa State University.
Journeys 1 through 3 are on teacher accountability, with journeys 2 and 3 focused on effectiveness. Journeys 4 through 6 highlight the importance of assessment in learning. Journeys 7 and 8 refer to the scholar academic ideology with inquiry-based learning (journey 7) and the spiral curriculum (journey 8). Journey 9 presents the advanced organizer methodology according to Ausubel’s approach. Journeys 10 and 11 discuss the role of concept learning and teaching complex and fuzzy concepts. Journey 12 is on the learner-centered ideology, where the student is a self-activated maker. Journeys 13 through 15 deal with the concept of intelligence: intelligence testing (journey 13); the nature versus nature controversy (journey 14); and testing and alternative views on intelligence (journey 15). Journey 16 covers social reconstruction ideology.
The construction of each journey is very similar: an introduction that shows necessary preliminaries or references to literature; discussion about the considered topic; examples and exercises; and notes with references. Presented examples, references, and literature reviews reveal the author’s deep reflections about the issues.
The full review of this book is available on Computing Reviews (after login):
http://www.computingreviews.com/review/review_review.cfm?review_id=146627
or as an attachment.
empowering_professional_teaching_-_review.pdf (277.12 KB, pdf)
