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The Skillful Learning Institute is preparing a virtual short course experience for engineering educators to expand the explicit engagement of engineering students in their metacognitive development, which is currently lacking. Participants will develop a unique metacognitive activity for their context. The ultimate goal is to enhance the education of engineers through explicit metacognitive training, and we focus on instructors for their enduring and multiplicative impact on current and future engineering students, and secondary impacts on their colleagues. We have designed the short course as a series of three two-hour synchronous virtual workshops over a six-week period in the summer. The experience is designed to build instructors’ capacities to teach metacognition and to continue to use and develop engaging metacognitive activities. By eliminating the time and cost of travel, this project will enable populations that might otherwise be limited in attendance such as professional-track faculty, teaching focused faculty, community college faculty, adjunct faculty. 

Failure analysis is central to the work of engineers, and yet we neglect to analyze our failures in the field of engineering education. In this paper, we examine our failure in the development and deployment of an immersive faculty experience for graduate students in engineering education. Professional development is a significant focus of graduate studies. Professional development broadly defined includes any activities supporting the acquisition of skills, knowledge, and abilities relevant to one’s current or desired position. In the context of graduate studies, professional development often involves such activities as conference or workshop attendance, internships or job exploration, mentoring or coaching directed at students, and certification programs. Despite the importance of professional development in graduate school, anecdotal and research-based evidence supports the assertion that graduate students experience professional development unevenly. Whether this unevenness results from intrinsic or extrinsic factors is not established. We investigate the barriers to participation in professional development, with a focus on an immersive faculty internship; however, this work revealed barriers associated with professional development in general and related to specific other types of professional development. We focus on barriers specifically because engineers examine both successes and failures in the effort to improve product design, and because our product—an immersive faculty experience for graduate students—was designed to overcome barriers identified during customary discovery research. For this analysis of failure, we rely on interviews and survey data from varied stakeholders (e.g., graduate students, their mentors, graduate program directors, representatives from grant-giving organizations, and faculty on hiring committees) to identify these barriers. We also share our personal reflections on the challenges associated with this effort. From the data collected from members of the engineering education community, we found that barriers to participation include time spent away from support systems, potential delays in graduation, lack of understanding of the value of professional development, and funding for participating in these opportunities. Graduate students perceive (rightly or wrongly) that their advisors do not support an immersive, off-site professional development experience, perhaps because advisors want graduate students to continue the work important to advisors or the advisors do not consider the experience valuable for cultivating the students’ professional identities. In addition, organizational challenges include facilitating a multi-site experience from a single institution that is subject to both institutional and NSF rules for budgeting. Stakeholders in graduate education have a significant interest in removing barriers to professional development, including opportunities like immersive internships. By doing so, they increase graduate students’ satisfaction with the graduate school experience and improve graduate students’ placement and career success. We connect our failure to both the concept of root cause failure analysis and the literature in organizational change. By doing so, we highlight how failure is an under-appreciated experience in the field of engineering education. 

In this Lessons Learned paper, we describe the implementation of an on-campus workshop focused on supporting faculty as they develop metacognitive interventions for their educational contexts. This on-campus workshop at Duke University included faculty from engineering as well as other faculty from campus and was developed and implemented by members of the Skillful Learning Institute Team. First, we describe the purpose and intent of the workshop by the host institution (Duke University) and the workshop development team (Skillful-Learning Institute Team). We then provide the workshop overview across the two day period, including a description of instruction provided and structured breakout sessions. Next, we provide a lessons learned section from the perspectives of the host institution and the workshop developers. Finally, we offer insights into how those lessons learned are being incorporated into the development of future workshops. By providing the two perspectives, our lessons learned should help those who invite speakers in for faculty development and those who are creating faculty development activities.