Section 5.10 Meeting regularly to discuss what was happening.
¶Frequently mentioned during the interviews was the importance of the on-going meetings among faculty teaching the new upper-level courses. One of the co-PIs commented:
We were meeting often...and we would discuss particular students, particular things, and it did give a continuity to the whole program and a connection, people knew what was coming ahead and what was being done, what had gone before...
One of the faculty members commented on changes that occurred:
Before, you're assigned to teach a course, and you go ahead and teach it, and no one asks any questions, nobody talks to you, so people were doing a good job at that but it was just different, it was old style.
He compared this to the culture that emerged after the paradigms faculty started meeting regularly to discuss what was happening:
The new style I think was more catering to what the students needed to know rather than just throwing them information...we had meetings, we'd say, the students don't understand this, or you'd see on exams they'd do this, we kind of developed these sets of things we knew they didn't quite get. I'd taught it enough, I just kind of saw things, students asked questions, but I think that we had those meetings was important for the whole program to make sure people knew what had to be emphasized...
The PI commented upon issues in facilitating these meetings and particularly their value in helping faculty to understand the overarching goals for subject matter content that the students would develop throughout the series of courses:
...how to talk about curriculum was something I thought about explicitly... to talk not in generalities was really important, we just kept going back to that, we had this brainstorming session about what we thought were the overarching content goals, this list of resonance and energy and discrete to continuous...
She noted that this was a gradual process for the faculty, shifting from a focus on their own courses toward a broader understanding of how the various pieces of the curriculum fit together:
so we worked up over the course of the year to people at first starting out by thinking about their own courses but then thinking about what are the content goals that cross, and...then once we'd chosen goals, thinking about what could each of these individual courses do to contribute to attainment of that goal, that list, that took us probably several months to do, that even that we should have those conversations,...understanding how all pieces fit together was essential...
The PI also reflected upon how sharing what was happening in specific courses contributed to developing this broader understanding of the entire curriculum:
Then I would say once we were doing the paradigms, having the every three weeks meetings, where people after their paradigm reported out what had happened and how things had gone, and coming back to those touchstone goals, I think was really critical in the early days for having things fit together, and the fact that everybody had been part of the card sorting, everybody knew what the other pieces were.
This shift in culture involved not only in meeting regularly but also in talking and thinking differently together about teaching and learning, with input not only from their own perspectives as physics faculty but also from the reports of the perceptions of the students and from the expertise in science and mathematics education underlying the perspectives of the external evaluator and her assistant as discussed next.