On Becoming a 21st Century Engineering Educator: Building Competencies and Acquiring Needed Skills

The paper explores ways to effective professional development of junior engineering educators, to enable them to assume the roles they are entrusted with. The purpose here is to offer a new way to think about the development of the professional engineering educator. The paper focuses on:(i) the cognitive processes that faculty would tend to follow as they learn more about teaching, (ii) the discipline-based industrial/practical experience they need to acquire to add to their repertoire as “practitioners”, and (iii) the institutional initiatives, including: administrative support, and resources. What is needed is a change in culture within the institution, i.e., the department or college, to generate a comprehensive integrated set of components: articulated expectations, a reward system aligned with expectations, and opportunities for professional development to occur. Ultimately, to identify what educators and their institutions can do to generate more powerful and responsive forms of education that improves the quality of student learning

Inspiring practice: a guide to developing an integrated approach to supervision in children’s trusts

CWDC would like to thank Fran McDonnell and Harry Zutshi for their work on this guide

FrAmework for Multi-Agency Environments (FAME) : Final Report of the Learning & Evaluation Strand

Framework for Multi-agency Environments (FAME) was one of the Local Government On-Line funded National Projects sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). Within FAME there were six local projects (known as strands) led by English local authorities in partnership with service providers. Each strand aimed to improve a particular set of services (for example, to vulnerable older people or disabled children) through effective and appropriate exchange of information. These local projects worked with IT suppliers (known as technology partners) to produce a technical system to facilitate the exchange and management of client / patient information across agency boundaries. Not all the outputs of FAME were in the form of IT systems. Improvements to business processes and information sharing practices were also expected. Newcastle University led two further strands, the Generic Framework and Learning & Evaluation. The Generic Framework identifies and describes nine building blocks that are essential to effective multi-agency working. The FAME website http://www.fame-uk.org contains details of these building blocks, together with a ‘how to’ guide and a toolkit to support local authorities and their partners in assessing their ‘readiness’ for multi-agency working. This is the report of the Learning & Evaluation strand. The Learning & Evaluation team worked closely with the local FAME project teams, who were supportive of our work and generous with their time. Throughout the project we reported back to the local teams both individually and collectively. Evaluation was thoroughgoing and critical, not an exercise in public relations or advocacy. It is important to stress that learning is likely to be gained from what did not work as well as from what did. Problems and setbacks, as well as successes, are therefore documented and analysed in the report

How integrated working facilitated the transition of children from primary to secondary school (Sharing our experience, Practitioner-led research 2008-2009; PLR0809/014)

This research focuses upon the impact that the transition from primary to secondary school may have on adopted children, and the role schools could play in supporting adopted children during this time. Questionnaires were sent to adopted children and their adoptive parents: 20 parents and 11 children returned questionnaires. The questionnaires focused on attitudes towards the transition from primary to secondary school, the needs of adopted children compared to other children and the role of schools in supporting adopted children. Following the questionnaires, a focus group was held with six adoptive parents and then interviews with four secondary school teachers. The interviews and focus groups had seven key areas: • sharing information • curriculum issues • the perceived needs of adopted children • the transition process • pastoral support • homework • training for schools. Both parents and children alike felt that adopted children have additional educational needs, particularly around issues of self-organization. However, adoptive parents were often unclear about who to talk to in their child’s school, and how to ensure that information about their child’s adoption was subsequently passed on to all appropriate members of staff. Equally, schools were generally keen to support adopted children, but often had poor channels of communication for ensuring staff were well informed. Additionally, some teachers revealed a lack of awareness regarding the needs of adopted children and the types of support that might be useful. However, where school staff had worked closely with parents and other agencies, such as the Educational Psychology Service and the Post-Adoption Service, parents and pupils reported helpful outcomes. This would suggest that working with other agencies may be particularly useful in enabling schools to gain a better understanding of the needs of adopted children, and allow them to take a more proactive approach in offering support to these children. Caroline Feltham King Hampshire Educational Psychology Service 200

Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany

For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice