Workshops (or special sessions) have been a staple of dissemination practices and professional development activities for many years. However, not all workshops create positive experiences for their participants. What makes a workshop work? In this special session, we will demonstrate and highlight how to use evidence-based principles to create inclusive and engaging workshops. Throughout the workshop, we will encourage participants to reflect on previous workshop activities and what made them more or less effective. From there, participants will put their workshop development skills to the test with a fun activity to apply different workshop tips to randomly assigned workshop topics and audiences! The workshop facilitators have designed the workshop to highlight the different recommended strategies. We propose that by using these evidence-based inclusive educational practices, professional development efforts like workshops would be more engaging. Come see if our workshop really works!

The goal for this session will be to demonstrate a faculty development opportunity to help engineering faculty reflect on one aspect of their teaching practice related to enhancing equity and inclusion – student academic belonging. Participants will be provided with time to individually reflect on current practices and generate ideas for moving forward with their fellow participants.

Early career faculty are undergoing a stressful transition period and actively negotiating their professional identity. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the daily activities in early career faculty’s personal and professional lives and thus complicated the negotiation process. This study explores how engineering faculty members redefine and reconceptualize what it means to be in their early career during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an emergent qualitative coding technique, we identified two themes: 1) the blurring of personal and professional boundaries, and 2) the renegotiation of different identities. The findings offer insights into how to better support early career faculty and allow them to balance these different dimensions of their academic identities.

This work-in-progress paper will discuss the evolving response by an engineering education center to proposed changes in the ABET general criteria for accrediting engineering programs relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). ABET is a "nonprofit, ISO 9001 certified organization that accredits programs in applied and natural science, computing, engineering and engineering technology." The paper will discuss the plan of the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education located in the College of Engineering at Pennsylvania State University to help faculty and departments meet the proposed changes in ABET criteria relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition, the College’s strategic plan calls for the integration of DEI into the curriculum, leading to a changing emphasis in the work being done in the Center. This paper would likely be of interest to engineering educators and other faculty developers who will have to demonstrate that their engineering programs meet ABET accreditation requirements or have similar strategic goals. In addition, the paper will describe current and evolving efforts to date as well as discuss the challenges that occurred during the development of the DEI curricular integration and training plan.

This special session highlights the Entrepreneurial Mindset for Innovative Teaching (EMIT) initiative at Penn State where faculty are challenged to use entrepreneurial principles to improve and innovate with their teaching. The EMIT academy uses an adaptation of the Business Canvas Model, titled the Entrepreneurial Teaching Module to help guide faculty through this process. Upon completing the model, faculty participate in a “Shark Tank” like experience, which will be recreated as part of this special session.

The purpose of this document is to describe a special session to be presented at the 2020 Frontiers in Education Conference. This special session will feature a workshop that was created as part of a larger a faculty development initiative within the College of Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. The faculty development initiative, called Entrepreneurial Mindset for Innovative Teaching (EMIT), was funded as part of the Engineering Faculty Impact Collaborative (EFIC) being led by Arizona State University and the Kern Family Foundation. The EMIT project builds on the idea that the practices and mindset associated with quality teaching mirror practices of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset. The special session will feature the introductory workshop developed as part of the overarching EMIT program. The session will be interactive and will allow participants to consider how the processes of teaching and entrepreneurship can be similar. Activities included in the session will be reflections, pair-and-share, case studies, and small- and large-group discussions.

This special session will be an interactive conversation around the key strategies instructors can use to engage their students in the processes necessary for effective collaboration and successful teamwork. Session participants will reflect on and discuss what these necessary processes are, learn about ways to facilitate these processes, and, through facilitation role play, have the opportunity to actively practice facilitation strategies on a simulated student team.

This special session/workshop seeks to encourage Zui Quan pedagogy and risk taking in everyday classroom practice. The term “Zui Quan” refers to a style of Chinese martial arts that is loosely translated as “drunken fist” or “drunken boxing.” To the untrained eye, the practitioner appears uncoordinated, untrained, intoxicated, and vulnerable. However, those trained in Zui Quan are capable of powerful attacks and require a significant amount of skill to proceed with an ease of flow from one movement to another. The same may be said for those practicing innovative pedagogies in the classroom. The overall goal of the session is to address issues that inhibit faculty from taking pedagogical risks and provide tools and support that will aid faculty with implementing these approaches in their course.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a special session intended to help instructors better understand the difference between fixed versus growth mindset and how instructional approaches can implicitly or explicitly promote one or the other. Originating with Carol Dweck, individuals with a fixed mindset believe that a specific ability or intelligence is innate and fixed. In contrast, individuals with a growth mindset believe that ability or intelligence can be improved with training and practice. Through implicit and explicit messages to their students, instructors may inadvertently trigger students to approach tasks with a fixed mindset. The interactive session will focus on common messages and strategies that will help students to approach tasks in a class with a growth mindset.

As we all come together at FIE to explore advancements in engineering education, many attendees may ask themselves, “How could I use this in my classroom?” At Penn State, the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education has been working with faculty for the last 25 years to help answer that exact question. This special session will offer FIE participants the opportunity to bring their new ideas together to collaborate with other participants, and members of the Leonhard Center, to develop specific strategies for how they can take that new idea (innovation) and turn it into classroom practice. The structure of this session will mimic a t-ball game to help exemplify the Leonhard Center's core values of exuberance and fun through learning while allowing participants to think about classroom practices from a different perspective.

Faculty members' decisions to alter teaching practices is often driven and restricted by both institutional and personal factors [1]. When examining these factors, faculty make judgments as a mechanism to evaluate the cost-benefit of enacting such a change. Behavioral economics concepts, such as satisficing, meliorating, path dependence, and bounded rationality [2], provide a lens to examine if and how faculty decide to alter a teaching practice or implement an evidence-based instructional practice. This special session engages participants in an agent-based simulation to examine faculty members' responses to stimuli that may affect their decision to change their instructional practices. The simulation will result in a model that can be used by faculty and instructional specialists to further analyze and support the use of evidence-based instructional practices.

The field of engineering education has initiated a focus on ensuring engineering education research is disseminated and implemented within the classroom. Numerous researchers have investigated the reasons for the adoption of evidence-based practices, or, more often, the lack thereof. The Professional and Organizational Development (POD) network community is an underutilized potential ally for ensuring the implementation of engineering education research due to their focus on organizational change and improving teaching practice. Using the Diffusion of Innovation framework and best practices for adoption, this session will guide faculty in envisioning a wide variety of channels for moving engineering education research into the classroom. Participants in this special session will brainstorm ways to encourage collaboration between these two communities culminating in a "message in a bottle" to the POD community to help them understand the activities and needs of engineering education researchers. This message will be delivered to faculty development professionals, centers for teaching and learning, organizational change specialists, and others in the POD community at their annual conference in November 2015.

Numerous avenues exist for faculty to learn about new pedagogical techniques, but these techniques rarely make it into practice, even by experienced and motivated engineering educators. They often suffer from the perception of “that won't work because my classroom is different.” The focus of this session is to help faculty explore this perception and to identify new techniques for potentially overcoming this limitation. Using the Diffusion of Innovation framework, faculty will be guided through several activities to explore ways of adapt known evidence-based instructional practices to a variety of classroom setups and course styles. They will then have the opportunity to confront the limitations they hold about implementing them in their own courses.

Allegories have been used to represent ideas, concepts, and processes, primarily in classical literature. In engineering education, allegories have been used to describe the different roles within academia [1]. Here, we focus specifically on the path of a doctoral student in engineering working towards earning their degree and completing a dissertation. The path will be discussed as an allegory to “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien [2]. This allegory explores the milestones, characters, barriers, and support doctoral students will meet along their journey. The session will utilize identity-trajectory to guide discussion and encourage attendees to explore and share their experiences. The session is aimed at providing guidelines to students progressing through a doctoral degree and to assist graduate advisors in supporting their students on this journey.

Research in Engineering Education has led to the development and dissemination of a number of different instructional strategies (such as active learning, problem based learning, and concept tests) contributing to greater student learning in the classroom. However, there is little research to demonstrate how Research Based Instructional Strategies (RBIS) are being propagated from the developers to engineering faculty for use in the classroom. To examine the process of dissemination, this study uses Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation framework, which has traditionally been used to examine the dissemination of technological innovations through a population or organization. Rogers discusses five stages (knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation) of the innovation-decision process to explain how adopters make a decision about an innovation. To investigate faculty members' participation in the innovation-decision process, we conducted a survey of electrical, computer, and chemical engineering faculty (n = 221) teaching engineering sciences courses. The results show that ECE and ChE faculty members are located at a variety of stages throughout the innovation-decision process. However, most respondents have progressed past the knowledge phase; they are aware of the different RBIS. It is important to account for this when presenting an innovation or trying to encourage adoption of new practices, such as RBIS. It was found that workshops and presentations can influence the trial and use of RBIS when faculty are at the persuasion and decision stages. Also, women are more likely to try and use an RBIS than men. Many of the results found here are consistent with those found in a similar study done in physics education.

One of the challenges for engineering professors is providing realistic design projects for their students to work on. Since 2007, Engineers Without Borders, Australia (EWBA) has coordinated a national first year engineering design challenge for students attending Australian universities. The EWB Challenge offers students the opportunity to work in a team on a real world problem aiming to improve conditions in a disadvantaged community. Since its inception, the EWB Challenge has had over 18,000 students at 31 universities participate. A majority of the participating universities have integrated the Challenge into their first year engineering course focusing on professional engineering. In 2010, the first semester course coordinators working with the Challenge were interviewed about their experience working with EWBA on the Challenge. These interviews were one component of an overall program level evaluation that began at the end of the first semester in 2010. The course coordinators are in a unique role of translating the provided EWBA resources into a learning exercise that is appropriate for their students. Coordinators emphasized the importance of utilizing the Challenge to provide the students with a real-world problem that would impact an actual community. The coordinators also discussed a number of different challenges they were facing that were not limited to working on the Challenge such as keeping their students motivated, finding the right balance of providing information and having the students conduct research on their own, as well having trouble facilitating teams and emphasizing communication skills.