Engineering education is increasingly becoming considered an important component of STEM integration in formal pre-college settings. Professional development programs take a significant role in helping teachers develop necessary classroom practices to integrate engineering into their curriculum. The COVID pandemic has further complicated instructional conditions, necessitating emergency remote learning methods to continue instruction amidst safety concerns. Combined with a general struggle to scaffold integration of engineering in K-12 classrooms, emergent conditions that restrict instructional choices such as pandemics threaten to repeatedly aggravate future efforts and make it prudent to consider the pedagogical choices teachers are able to make for STEM integration and what future professional development programs should try to do with teachers to enable them. This research aims to describe and explain the conditions and dynamics related to teacher pedagogical choice to employ engineering design activities in their classes both within the context of a partnership program and during the COVID pandemic. Using end-of-program semi-structured interviews with participant teachers in the VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools) program collected in the midst of the pandemic, data was coded with a focus upon identifying connections with a dynamic framework for pedagogical choice as well as identifying and explaining the expansion of practices in the two contexts. The coding process yielded a set of themes for conditions and developments teachers experienced in the process of conducting classes with changes induced by the program and by measures in response to COVID. Findings from the study show that teachers with supports that overcome or nullify inhibitive factors for pedagogical choice will be able to adopt and develop innovative practices. Teachers balance proposed changes with their own sense of professional expectations influenced by internalized, structural, and cultural conceptions of their work. Remote learning modalities and COVID-induced safety measures constrained the ability to teach according to familiar principles of instruction, harming teachers' beliefs and development in the practice of the modalities. Based on these findings, the framework for teacher pedagogical choice showed VT PEERS' effectiveness in its opening presentation and execution to set the stage for teachers to make innovative choices to employ engineering activities, yet it was not as useful in describing how the remote learning measures taken during COVID would not lead to expanded practices for that modality. Thus, there is a need for a model that includes complex interactions between the teachers and their environment that promote or inhibit teacher agency. Such a model would inform a more empowering design and execution of professional development initiatives than feature-dependent frameworks. COVID also demonstrates that preparation will be necessary to equip teachers with more efficacious and flexible practices for remote learning to prevent further damage to student outcomes given that the potential for recurring pandemic conditions in the future makes remote learning more of an expectation than an emergency. / Doctor of Philosophy / Engineering education, the E in STEM, continues to gain attention as a needed subject in pre-college schooling. To do this, teachers primarily receive help from professional development programs to learn how to use engineering in their classrooms. The COVID pandemic created a new condition for instruction that may complicate the process of using engineering, and the restrictions to how teachers teach may adversely affect their choices when it comes to engineering. Understanding the process of teachers making the innovative choices and how they come to do so is an important topic for research. This research aims to describe and explain the choices teachers make for the practices they use in the classroom to employ engineering design activities within the context of a partnership program and during the COVID pandemic. Using end-of-program semi-structured interviews with teachers as part of their involvement in VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools), I looked at teachers' perspectives on their experiences and struggles using a theory of choice-making to inform analysis. Findings from the study show that teachers that receive appropriate support and feel free to choose what they do are able to make innovative choices and become more skillful. Teachers are influenced to make choices by what they believe their job requires of them; the way schools work and how others view the role of schools affects this belief as much as the teachers themselves do. However, when choice is restricted and teachers cannot teach the way they would choose to, such as during COVID with distant and computer-based classes, they are neither growing nor thriving in their job. The theory for teacher choice used to analyze these interviews helped understand the role of the partnership in helping teachers choose to use engineering activities in classrooms, but helped less to understand how teachers struggled during COVID. It appears that when teachers actually have choices, they can be innovative; therefore, professional development programs should consider that promoting teacher choice is a necessary initial step to bring about change in schools, including for engineering education. Furthermore, COVID may not be the last pandemic within this generation, and education reforms (including for engineering education) may need to account for future instances of remote schooling as an expectation rather than considering it to be an unfortunate, one-off issue of education.