Section 2.2 Building on prior experience as a teaching assistant
Some new faculty members had been TAs in charge of student laboratories. Typically they still based their vision of good teaching in formal classes, however, on their own experiences learning through lectures. One noted:
I had not taught full classes before; I had TA'd and I had substitute taught on a few occasions. I definitely had largely an image of teaching as lecture, that was how I had been taught; my first year teaching graduate courses that's how I taught...
This new faculty member had started out teaching with lectures but later shifted toward primarily using active engagement strategies after experience as a co-instructor in a paradigms course.
Another new faculty member described a similar initial teaching strategy:
I was actually trying to follow the style of the professor I liked the most. I had one professor in graduate school, all his lecture was on the board, written very smoothly from top left to bottom right but it was so nice, if you were able to follow him. He started the minute the bell rang, and finished the minute it was supposed to stop, never delayed, never had an issue of timing. If you tried to follow it, you captured probably 50 percent of what he said; you kept writing notes and at home you would get maybe the other 10 to 30 percent. So I was basically trying to do the same thing because that was the class I learned most because I was so engaged. So that's what I tried to do.
This vision of good teaching contrasted sharply with the vision of the faculty who had initiated the paradigms in physics program. With coaching and encouragement, however, this new faculty member has begun using the more open-ended teaching practices characteristic of the paradigms in physics program.
One new faculty member, however, had had highly relevant prior experiences as a teaching assistant with a lot of support:
...as a TA I had a lot of materials given to me, I had a lot of guidance, and I had really enjoyed being given a lab. I would supervise an electromagnetism lab, for example, for 20 to 30 students, and the document, the packet I was given, told me what to say, when to say it, what the student misconceptions would be, some ways to answer those student misconceptions, some physical analogies that would work well. It laid everything out beautifully, and so that was my first experience teaching and I thought it worked great.
And then I was thrown in the deep end when I started as a professor and told “teach (a graduate course), we haven't taught it very well before...” so I did it from scratch and I didn't do a good job on my first quarter so going back to paradigms was a little like going back to being told, “these are the things that work, this is what we want you to do.”
This individual welcomed the opportunity to teach in the reformed undergraduate program where faculty had formed an on-going community supporting one another in new approaches to both organization of content and interactive pedagogy.