Work in progress — Preparing high school teachers to teach design

We are developing and implementing a comprehensive professional development program for in-service high school teachers to prepare them to teach engineering design and problem solving, and to use design-based teaching approaches in their science curriculum. The program uses a constructionist, immersion pedagogy as part of an unconventional three-phase learning cycle. Pre- and post-test results for the first summer workshop indicate significant gains in understanding the engineering design process among the teachers.