Chapter 6 Coming to Understand the Dependencies Across Courses
¶In traditional departments, a faculty member typically makes decisions independently about what to include and what to leave out in a given course. Such decisions often involve simply indicating which sections of a standard textbook will be formally taught through lectures, homework, and exams.
With the paradigms in physics reformed curriculum, however, faculty need to be careful to retain content that later courses assume has been taught as well as to be aware of and build upon content included in earlier courses. In designing the paradigms in physics courses, the initial faculty had identified and traced how the various reformed courses addressed particular themes and used common mathematical tools. (See appendix A of Part III.) The process of developing these content themes had ensured that the initial faculty members teaching the reformed curriculum were well aware of these dependencies across courses.
The new faculty members typically struggled to make sense of the unusual organization of the physics content within the paradigms courses they were assigned to teach, much less how that content built upon and prepared for content addressed in earlier and later paradigms in physics courses. One new faculty member reflected upon this need for understanding the dependencies across courses as follows:
I didn't start figuring that out until I'd taught a class that connected to another class. It was kind of a rude awakening for me, that in (a paradigms course)...I was teaching them how to do...things that they should have learned already. (Later) I was the teacher for (a prior paradigms course) and realized, “Oh, it's in the curriculum, everything I spent days on in (the first course) was teaching materials that they were meant to have already covered.”
When I say rude awakening, that's kind of what I'm meaning. I really had not made the most of the material that they should have already covered; I hadn't been building on previous knowledge in the way that I could have.
What this new faculty member would have liked was access to “documents that are quick to read that convey the major points easily” to help him understand the dependencies across the various courses.