Chapter 3: Forgive and Remember: The Challenges and Opportunities of Learning from Experience

Recently, I was in Washington D.C. to meet with a group from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). They plan to create a national center for research on how people learn to be engineers.¹ I was helping them think about ways we can study how people learn a profession, in this case, engineering. How can you get people—in this case, faculty members—to move from the findings of research to actually applying it in practice? They said, “You know, professors of engineering don’t have a lot of time to lead educational research. They think they know how to teach engineering—the way they were taught. How can we get them to do something different?” This may sound familiar to those of us who work in teacher education or teacher professional development.