Section 2.1 Building on little or no teaching experience
Several new faculty members had had very little or no prior teaching experience. One stated,
I had not taught whatsoever, not even really any TAing per se. At a lot of the schools I went to, all the students were fully funded; we had fellowships and different things so I came with essentially zero teaching, besides some grading and a few labs...
Research had dominated the graduate programs for these new faculty members. Their visions of teaching primarily reflected how they themselves had been taught, by lectures.
Before coming here, however, this new faculty member had had the opportunity to go with colleagues to a workshop sponsored by the university to enhance scientists' abilities to communicate.
One of the very interesting things is the summer before I came here I participated in a five day workshop called “The Alan Alda Series for Communication in Science”...he's devoted much of his semi-retired life to helping people communicate in science...you learn how to communicate by doing a lot of theater games with Alan Alda and his staff...it was very small groups, pretty much all faculty and senior post docs...that in particular was a little bit transformative experience
This introduction to communicating science through participation in small group activities was a helpful preparation for undertaking the active engagement strategies characteristic of the paradigms in physics courses. This workshop also had raised for this new faculty member another important aspect relevant to teaching the students in these courses:
Actually the most valuable message I learned, which I'm still struggling with to this day, is when you talk and when you communicate you have to keep in the back of your mind your primary job is to take care of your audience...
As faculty teaching in a state land grant university, the experienced faculty members who had initially designed and implemented the paradigms in physics program had a similar belief in the importance of meeting the needs of their 'audience'. As one stated “it is our moral responsibility to take the students we have and move them all forward as best we can” (see part III, Visions, p. 5).
This was another aspect of the task facing these new faculty members. Not only were they to teach physics content organized in a new way with an instructional approach different from how they had learned themselves, but also they would be teaching students who varied widely in preparation, long-term goals, and even in just the time available outside of class to focus on learning physics. Only a few would be students like themselves, who as undergraduates, had been intensely focused physics learners heading toward highly selective graduate programs.