Section 3.2 Variety of visions.
¶A variety of visions emerged for approaches to teaching the new courses. The PI, a theoretical physicist, had been teaching the physics course on mathematical methods and had become well aware of difficulties students were encountering, particularly in learning to reason geometrically. She had grown up with reform pedagogy, from learning with the ‘new math’ curriculum used in elementary school, taking PSSC physics in high school, and enjoying small physics classes with lots of interaction among students and faculty in college, at a time when computers were just beginning to be used for independent learning. She was comfortable with interactive teaching as well as with technology and was envisioning using these techniques in the new courses.
One of the co-PIs, an experimentalist, commented that the curriculum seemed old-fashioned in that quantum mechanics was ‘conspicuously absent’ until the senior year and stated, “my motivation was really a very small scale one, I thought it was important for them to learn some quantum mechanics earlier.” This faculty member's interest was in having enough time during a lab where “you could sit and discuss how the experiment was working and what the things were that were in play.”
The other co-PI, a high energy physicist, was interested in modeling, where students explore phenomena with some equipment, make observations, try to develop a model from those observations, and then test that model. He was aware of research on learning cycles (Zollman, 1990) as well as mastery learning (Kulik, Kulik, & Bangert-Drowns, 1990) and was interested in designing project-based courses.
These various perspectives had developed from the faculty members' respective educational experiences and research interests. The PI saw their diverse views as a strength:
I saw the old curriculum as being taught by a lot of different people with very diverse understandings of the content, diverse understandings of how to teach, and how to reach students...It was very important to my vision to preserve that diversity."
As discussed below under implementation, the faculty developed the new courses with each taking responsibility for designing courses reflecting their own professional and pedagogical commitments but with respect for the vision of coherent development of content described next.