Abstract Many traditional engineering education environments operate according to an authority model where teachers (the authority) seek to educate students (the subordinates). Although the presence of an authority does not necessarily imply that an education system is authoritarian, teachers operating under an authority model often apply fear-and incentive-based control mechanisms to achieve desired educational goals and outcomes. These control mechanisms can achieve results but may also undermine classroom cohesion, encourage an adversarial atmosphere, and be less effective than alternate approaches such as those based on leadership training and research. This paper reconsiders engineering education through a leadership perspective where teachers voluntarily relinquish control, seek influence over authority, nurture cooperation over compliance, pursue projects and activities in partnership rather than in isolation, and work to establish an environment of mutual trust. These characteristics of leadership-based education are highly compatible with many current trends in university engineering programs, including the flipped classroom, problem-based learning, and on-line education, including massively open online courses (MOOCs). I. Background From kindergarten to graduate school, the vast majority of classroom experiences follow a traditional lecture format where a teacher delivers a mostly one-way communication of course content with minimal audience participation. Participation, when it does occur, often follows an initiation-response-follow-up (IRF) or similar model of questioning (see Most university professors, following decades of schooling, excel under a traditional lecture environment, which might partly explain why so many continue to follow the same format when teaching their own classes. While most conscientious instructors do, in fact, adopt new pedagogical techniques in an effort to improve student learning, one only needs to walk down the halls of most any university to observe that the traditional lecture format still reigns supreme. The lecture itself is an eight-hundred-year-old university tradition that, despite frequent criticism in recent years, is highly adaptable and likely to endure for years to come, albeit in continually modified or augmented forms The modification or augmentation of classroom and lecture structure deserves special consideration, particularly when contemporary changes diminish the effectiveness of traditiona
