Section 5.14 Resolving conflicting visions and approaches.
¶As often happens when radical change is underway, opinions differ and conflicting visions can emerge for what to do as individuals undertake specific actions to implement what has seemed to be general agreement on goals. A transition also occurred with the retirement of the department chair. The new chair also was strongly supportive of educational reform and of the new upper-level program. He had been a faculty member in the department for many years before becoming chair and so knew how the plan had evolved and how it was beginning to be implemented. The early discussions that led to development of the Paradigms in Physics program were primarily about content:
There were several people not happy with the way the upper division education was working...It was not “not working” but for different reasons, I think, (some thought) something could be done differently so people started talking, “what's missing here?” ... In the beginning it was very much content driven, “what do we do with the content?” The original discussion was about content. Everybody had the opportunity to think about and participate in the discussion. Not all at the same time –there were the famous cards, note cards on the table that people could play with...
Although there had been a wide variety of views, there was agreement to make big rather than small changes:
People could choose to participate or not participate and there were strong views, “this is all nonsense” to “we have to do it differently” of course, but we got a feeling for what is a good way to restructure things...At the same time at the faculty meeting people asked, “Shall we make small changes? Or big changes?” and unanimously people said, “we should make big changes,” so the idea that “ok we don't have to limit ourselves to small things” was important.
The new chair acknowledged the spectrum of involvement and opinions at this stage:
Looking back, some people had more interest in it than other people so were more involved than other people and that made sense; I was not very much involved frankly myself at that point. Some of the faculty members that basically didn't believe in this idea also stayed out of it...in a faculty meeting they might voice a criticism, but...they were not blocking it...So the majority of people...wanted to go forward one way or the other.
Agreement on a framework helped get implementation started but this was a learning process in understanding, for example, how the junior paradigms and senior capstone courses would work together:
And then we got a framework for how to organize things, how we set up the paradigms, how we set up the capstones. For the first people teaching it, the material was worked out relatively well, content wise again. And then...people teaching capstones had to learn in the beginning that a capstone isn't the start, that it builds on something more nebulous; if you were doing the capstone...it's not that you have to start at the beginning but that there's several pieces already there, which you have to take into account, that was a learning experience...but after discussion that was worked out as well.
Differences emerged in the instructional approaches, however, which the new chair tried to help revolve:
I think then the biggest issue became not what the content is but how do you present the content, how do you work with the content? what do you do with it? So there, I think...there were...opposing views and that got to a point that... people couldn't come to a conclusion there. We were trying to resolve that.
He attempted several approaches: discussion to seek common ground; help through facilitation by someone outside the situation; and eventually assistance in making arrangements for one of the individuals, who decided to leave.
At that point I was department chair and first thing you can try to do it seems to me you assume that if people talk together, they are reasonable people...they can find some pieces of common ground but that didn't work so at some point we went this far to say we need some outside person to help guide the conversation...but that didn't solve it either...now there is help for these things as well, so trying to resolve it by discussion, what's important? What works? And basically this problem was solved by the person leaving so that was too bad...and in this case it wasn't too easy to work out too well but at least was possible.
This was a difficult process for all involved but seems likely to occur when radical change is underway and individuals feel strongly about what needs to be done.