Section 4.1 Using the prior course instructor's materials
The experienced paradigms faculty members were generous in sharing their course materials with their new colleagues. Typically they provided a binder with printouts of their class notes, homework assignments, and descriptions of activities as well as with access to technical resources. These were helpful as well as problematic in a variety of ways.
Receiving a course binder.
One new faculty member described this process:
I then met with (an experienced faculty member) and she had such a great deal of compiled material; she had done a very good job of keeping every little sheet, every little thing along the way; she gave me two binders and a few gigabytes worth of stuff that she just downloaded on to me...I had to sift through it and figure out what did she do and how can I make it like she did and that was successful, actually it was surprisingly successful. I think to me that was the best way to disseminate the paradigm material, to have a massive compendium and let the educator do the choosing and the walking through.
This new faculty member appreciated seeing the evolution of the instructional materials that was evident in the binders:
It's also good that when there's a lot of material, you sometimes don't want to repeat things, or one assignment is better than the other one or one question is better than the other, and you see the revision process that the professors have gone through in improving it (the course) and you can kind of pick and choose...
Although more time consuming than simply adopting a formal text, this process provided a way to observe an experienced faculty member's pedagogical decision making, a vicarious form of apprenticeship that this new faculty member had valued.
Seeking an overview.
A binder typically provided some structure but often not an overview. A new faculty member noted:
Where I was just given a binder and had to teach from that, I was much more careful, more conservative about teaching it just exactly as it had been taught before, because I couldn't realize how everything was going to fit together on Day 1; it wasn't until I was at the end of the course that I had the big picture.
When teaching something for the first time, without a formal textbook or one's own prior experience as a learner in a similar course, gaining an overarching understanding of what one was supposed to be teaching could be difficult.
Planning based on homework problems.
A new faculty member described planning a course by focusing on homework problems:
Most of how I plan a course involves planning the homework. I decide which homework problems I want to have due on which due dates, and I try to schedule them such that no homework has too much work, every homework has enough work, and the homework problems cover everything I want students to have done by the time the course is over, and that tells me the pacing that I need...and then knowing the pacing tells me the sequence of subjects that I need to cover and roughly how much time I will have per subject, and then each subject will have a set of activities and a set of, I originally used to think of it more as a set of lectures...
This new faculty member is referring here to a shift made from structuring a specific class session around lectures to planning what will happen in the class around a set of activities.
Another new faculty member reflected on a discussion about homework that had occurred during a upper-level faculty curriculum meeting. A new faculty member had described using homework to plan a course:
So I remember when...(a new faculty member) was teaching (a paradigms course) for the first time and I remember (the original designer of the course) being disappointed that he didn't ask any more questions about how to teach the course and in the upper division curriculum meetings, (the new faculty member) talked about how he knew what the content of the course should be from the homework problems that had been assigned in the past,
Then the original designer of the course expressed surprise and some consternation:
And I remember (the original designer of the course) saying, that's weird because they had just picked some homework problems, they (the homework problems) had not been carefully selected to reflect the content that had happened in the lecture. And that was interesting to me because...the way that (the new faculty member) felt like the goals of the course were being communicated to him was through the problem set but that wasn't the intention of the developer of the course; and so for (the new faculty member), the problems that were assigned were playing the role that a textbook would.
If using a standard text book, an instructor typically plans a course based on the sequence of topics discussed there; in a similar way, these new faculty members had based their planning on the sequence of topics addressed in the homework problems assigned in prior versions of the course as documented in the prior instructor's course materials that they had been provided.
Inheriting technology resources.
Sometimes the technology that had been used was a problem. One new faculty member remembered:
I think he gave me a binder of his class notes; I definitely used a lot of the same homework problems and in-class exercises. I remember him telling me about a computer program that would help with simulating things...I think I didn't end up using it because...it was an old program, I don't think I was able to get it working...
Changes in the available technology have occurred so quickly that even the experienced faculty members sometimes have had trouble keeping up.
Preparing to teach what one has not yet learned oneself.
Another issue was having sufficient knowledge to teach what had been taught before by consulting resources. A new faculty member reflected:
I had to learn some new physics to be able to teach it that way...he certainly pointed me in the right direction but it was also a matter of me reading the homework question and saying how do I do this problem and going to (a recommended) textbook, to the relevant areas...
New instructors often have to relearn material they supposedly already know but the unusual organization of the subject matter in the paradigms courses sometimes added new topics to be quickly mastered well enough to teach them.
Hesitating to use resources provided.
Sometimes a new faculty member hesitated to use the resources provided. A new faculty member mentioned:
(The prior instructor) has some power point slides made for that class so I was able to see the type of materials (this instructor) was covering, but in general I avoid power point slides; I would rather slow stuff down so the students can keep up.
Such hesitations also occurred occasionally with respect to the intellectual level assumed. According to a new faculty member assigned to teach a course designed by a faculty member who had retired:
(The original developer's materials) had been made less and less suitable for this demographic; I suspect, although I don't know, that even when he was here, (the original developer) was out of touch with what students were knowing when they came into his class; I suspect that, but it is certain that his (materials were) moving more and more toward being like a grad textbook...and so that posed interesting problems; so taking over the material was not entirely successful...I spend way more time now on the basics before getting to (a topic), where he jumped to that very quickly...
In this situation, there seemed to have been agreement among the experienced faculty that this course had not been as successful as hoped and the experienced faculty encouraged the new faculty member to make adjustments.