Section 6.1 Passing responsibility for teaching the new courses to other faculty.
¶The department practice had been that faculty were assigned to teach a course for only three years and then were assigned to teach a different course. However, the new person was expected to preserve the coherence and continuity of the new courses. The new chair described this shift in practice as follows:
Part of the culture at the time was ok, you're teaching a course and its your course, and you do whatever you want to do but with paradigms, no, with respect to the paradigms themselves, the content is very much prescribed, so it isn't what you want to do but have to, because otherwise it (the upper level program) goes wrong. So some people find it very easy, “oh it's fine, I like it, because I don't have to think about it;” other people say “no, it's all wrong, I have to change, I can't do this”
He noted that for people to learn that “yes it's ok to follow things which might not be what you think” was difficult and acknowledged differences in how this new course take-over process worked:
I think that it worked mostly...and then there were some people for whom it didn't work; some of the people that it didn't work for, they still did very well because they did make changes but they didn't lose the overall thread of it and other people were kind of, ok, after one term of somebody, let's take it back again and see where we were before, some assignments did not work.
One of the experienced faculty members noted the advantage of this more formalized take-over process for new faculty members in that they have access to well designed materials:
Anybody teaching one of the paradigms, (a new faculty member, for example,) has come in and he's teaching several of the paradigms, he's got all this material we have for him; he doesn't have to start over, he doesn't have to start from scratch figuring this out; he just has to look at the material.
Particularly for new faculty just getting started in establishing their own research programs, this can reduce the stress level experienced in also beginning to teach courses.