Chapter 4 Making Sense of New Ways to Organize Physics Content While Planning
¶By design, the paradigms courses juxtapose different physics contexts that use similar concepts and mathematics. This means that typically a course draws on multiple resources rather than a single textbook. Although this helps students build flexibility in using different notational systems and vocabulary, the newly hired faculty members typically could not depend upon the strong guidance of an adopted textbook in planning their courses. This created some frustrations as one new faculty member expressed:
I find it difficult to teach a course that I have not myself taken and that is not strongly aligned with a textbook. Some frustrations that I've experienced are that the courses are so different than what I've experienced in terms of the content ordering that it requires a lot of discussion with people who have taught a course before to understand what the story is, what the narrative is for the course. For some of the courses, I understand it but for other courses, like, for (the paradigms course this new faculty member was about to start teaching for the first time) I'm not sure I really understand it yet.
Given the unfamiliar classroom setting and the absence of an adopted textbook, the new faculty members used a variety of approaches to plan what to teach in a paradigms course to which they had been assigned. These included using a prior instructor's materials, talking with a prior instructor of the course, sitting in on an experienced faculty member's course, using a prior instructor's course website, and perusing the paradigms in physics program wiki.