Educational Technology and Change Journal

By William H. Zaggle

It appears to me that educational engineering is still the missing element in the realization of many key innovations in education. The compulsion of educators to observe ritual is not yet balanced by those trained to employ a process for innovation and convert research into practical applications. Having taught basic engineering creativity and ingenuity as well as innovation skills early in my career at Texas A&M University, I quickly put the two together, leading to the creation of an educational software company in 1986 dedicated to building tools for teachers.

What I have learned after 23 years of experience is that trained educational engineers would have a welcomed place in our global quest for real innovation and real transformational opportunities.

This really is not a new idea. W.W. Charters wrote about it in “The Era of the Educational Engineer.”[1] Projecting forward from the last half century, Charters wrote that statistics had profoundly stimulated the measurement of objectives, making it possible to quantitatively review the impact of emerging ideas. For example, with statistics, we now have a base for the exploration of educational differences between and among individual learners, echoing John Dewey’s notion that learning is not about preparing for life — it “is” life.

Charters wrote about how educators today are conducting experiments in their areas of interest and inventing new methods for the application of theories to address specific issues. The problem in the past, according to Charters, was that extravagant claims made for new ideas could be neither substantiated nor refuted because proper measurement and research methods were not available.

“Educators are more conscious of their problems today than they have ever been before,” says Charters, as he speculates that the future promises substantial increases in the amount of research and investigation into solving educational issues. To Charters, “The well-trained educational engineer assembles pertinent facts wherever found, and uses the best techniques in solving his problems of construction.” He called current educational engineers “amateurs,” trying to build only for efficiency. To improve, he suggests more training in operational research, laboratory methods, and other core instructional engineering subjects.

Charters reminds us that the patent office is full of unused ideas and that ideas have to be perfected until they’re useful. He seems to point to the notion that educational engineering will help us sort through and assess all of the innovative ideas now available for teaching kids. They will apply fundamental problem solving strategies and utilize relevant ideas from many allied disciplines. They will be responsible specifically for improving methodology rather than just compiling and analyzing statistics.

In closing he states that “Men of engineering temperament, who wholeheartedly believe that construction of efficient programs, methods, and techniques has professional priority, may well congregate and organize themselves into an enthusiastic and potent group to strengthen the interest of the profession in these matters, to encourage each other, and to propose programs of action.” While his points are accurate, he totally underestimated the time required for schools to change, as this work was published in 1951.

Another more recent reference is Richard C. Anderson’s “The Role of Educational Engineer.”[2] At the time, Dr. Anderson was the research director at East Brunswick Public Schools in New Jersey. In this article, he questions the common practice of moving straight from research to classroom practice. For example, he points out that science and scientific theory are great for describing how a rocket might actually work, but do little to actually get a rocket off the ground and into space. He suggests that “there is a need for a new role in education, that of an educational engineer.” For Anderson, the critical missing component between theory and application is engineering. In his opinion, research is about the relationship among variables, and these theories are of little value to practitioners even when they are understood and efforts are made to apply them in the classroom.

Further exacerbating the problem of implementation is the law of effect. Anderson says there is no reason to believe that any human who depends solely on “on the spot” improvisation could properly apply behavioral principles. In other words, no matter how skilled or dedicated teachers may be, when asked to instruct 20-40 students for an hour, for up to 30 hours a week, they can’t possibly apply theoretically sound practices.

Anderson concludes that it is important to draw a line between the work of the scientist and the work of an engineer, and that if education continues to depend on teachers to try and bridge the gap between research and practice, the quality of the principles of learning is going to be significantly reduced. He found that there is a strong “compulsion to observe ritual in the area circumscribed by one’s professional identification.” Said another way, teachers just seem to always do what teachers have always done. He firmly states that there is a good chance educational engineering could lead to some very important innovations in educational practice and that this role be developed for use in schools. This, too, is as beautiful a concept today as it was when Dr. Anderson suggested it in 1961.

Certainly there are plenty of college professors who are engineers, teaching other would-be engineers. Yet there are very few trained engineers who have gone back to school to become trained primary and secondary classroom teachers. Certainly there are a lot of primary and secondary educators who have the qualifications to become engineers, but few if any have actually gone through formal engineering training. Educational technology vendors often struggle with instructional expertise as much as educators struggle with educational technology.

Without trained educational engineers, schools and solution providers are left with only two possibilities: train engineers to think like educators, or train educators to think like engineers. The problem is that when product engineers try to think like educators, they usually define the task as, first and foremost, building a product that will sell to schools; and next, doing it quickly to meet the needs of investors. The results are often a shortened product design process causing numerous problems with ergonomics, implementation, and overall quality.

When educators try to think like engineers, they most often fall victim to a syndrome identified by Dr. Anderson, that is, they approach the task from the perspective of their primary professional identification. This most often results in the same thought processes and understandings being applied over and over again. Thus, something “new” or “innovative” rarely emerges.

So what would educational engineers look like today if we had them? All engineers today start out with engineering fundamentals such as math and science, along with communication skills such as writing and public speaking. These are augmented with specific engineering skills such as drawing and thought communication, computer programming and process skills such as laboratory activity, innovative thought, and team based design. Other content, which is critical to the role of an engineer as a bridge between theory and application, is added as specific courses and also blended throughout the entire freshman and sophomore curricula.

The one thing every engineer learns in school is, first, you design, second, you engineer, and last, you build. If we could get these basic engineering skills married to the basic behavioral and pedagogical skills taught to educators, we might actually see new bridges and new roads constructed to comfortably transport and transform our current educational rituals into new places and new meanings.

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1. Educational Research Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 9 (Dec. 12, 1951), 230-237+246.
2. Journal of Educational Sociology (Apr. 1961), 377-381.

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