Professor Bill Lucas
It’s not just what engineers do that is important – it is how they think. And this is something that can be taught to young people of all ages, says Professor Bill Lucas.
It is widely believed that we need more engineers. And it is frequently asserted that people have a poor grasp of what engineering is all about.
Just as the scientific method is integral to science, so there are ways of thinking and doing that epitomise engineering.
Rather than sticking to an outdated supply-and-demand model, which plainly is not working, we should be focusing instead on embedding engineering thinking and doing skills into young people’s education – nudging more down the engineering pathway while also enhancing general technological literacy.
This was the premise that underpinned our ‘engineering habits of mind’ project for the Royal Academy of Engineering. Through wide consultation and discussion, and by exhaustively trawling through what had already been written, we attempted to come up with a consensus on what engineers do and how they think – something we called ‘engineering habits of mind’.
We settled on a simple description of what engineers do: being an engineer is all about ‘making ‘things’ that work and making ‘things’ work better’. We found surprising levels of agreement about our proposed six engineering habits of mind:
We also considered the processes in which these habits are applied, and stirred seven more generic ‘learning habits of mind’ into the mix.
Notably, these habits of mind are strikingly apparent in the way primary-age children naturally behave – young children are little engineers. Yet we make little effort to exploit this natural propensity – quite the reverse – and by secondary school we distance children even more from the world of engineering, encouraging abstraction and more academic pursuits.
If we want to nurture engineering habits of mind, we are going to have to rethink our approach to education. This can be done, even within the constraints of existing content-heavy, outcome-oriented curricula and without a specific place for engineering within the curriculum.
Indeed, in our project we identified many examples of good teaching and learning practice that promoted the development of engineering habits of mind – particularly problem-based and project-based active-learning approaches.
Our hypothesis is that it is feasible to implement these approaches routinely in schools and that they will be at least as good as traditional teaching methods, in terms of students’ academic achievement, while also enhancing our desired engineering habits of mind.
We are testing this hypothesis in a range of schools, primary and secondary, across the UK. At primary level, engineering-oriented problem-based learning is something that all children can engage with.
The main challenge is to give primary teachers the confidence to use unfamiliar approaches to teaching and address potentially unfamiliar subject material. At secondary level, more sophisticated approaches may mean focusing on more restricted groups of students.
We have identified suitable resources and are working with a range of schools and teachers who are introducing new methods in action learning projects, tracking impact on attainment and the development of their students’ thinking skills.
Where do we go next? Hopefully we will generate hard evidence that engineering subject-specific pedagogy has a beneficial impact on students’ learning – that we really can inculcate engineering habits of mind.
Adopting our approach more widely would be challenging, but the proof of principle has been established. We have created a platform for transforming young people’s exposure to engineering thinking – we now need policy-makers to be equally open to new ways of thinking.
Professor Bill Lucas (Bill.Lucas@winchester.ac.uk) is Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning and Professor of Learning at the University of Winchester. He led the team that produced the Royal Academy of Engineering report ‘Thinking like an Engineer: Implications for the Education System’.
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