[Phys-L] curriculum reform -- revolutionary, or not

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 08/27/2015 08:22 AM, David Marx wrote:

> However, a textbook author would find it difficult to get
> many adoptions of his/her book because the majority of teachers will continue
> to do what they have always done.

An excellent point.  Let's talk about that.

When discussing curriculum reform in general, and textbook
reform in particular, we should keep in mind the following
point:
  Teachers are an important part of the team!

Any reform needs to respect the teachers, and deal with
their needs.  Everybody talks about doing what's best for
the students, but that is /not/ sufficient.

The teachers are not a bunch of slobbering troglodytes.  They
have a hard job, and they have good reasons for doing things
as they do.  In particular, they are heavily invested in the
current way of doing things, a hundred times more so than the
students, and it makes sense that they would want to protect
that investment.

> From the point of view of the students, and of the physics
itself, PSSC was probably the best textbook ever written.
However, it did not succeed in the marketplace, and any 
would-be reformer would be well advised to figure out why.
I don't claim to fully understand it, but I reckon a big 
part of the problem was that the book asked too much of the 
teachers.  It was too revolutionary.  (Students are perfectly
content with revolutionary approaches, and indeed have no 
idea what's revolutionary and what's not.)

Here are some possibly-constructive suggestions:

*) Anybody who is serious about curriculum reform needs to
 write /two/ books ... one for the students, and one for
 the teachers.  There are two market segments here.  They
 are coming from different backgrounds, and have different
 needs.

 For example, if you leave out any discussion of Kirchhoff's
 laws, the teachers need an explanation ... but the students
 don't.  You shouldn't even mention it in front of students,
 not even once.  Ditto for sig figs and "entropy=disorder" 
 and a thousand other ridiculous things.

*) People tend to overestimate what can be done in the short
 term, and underestimate what can be done in the long term.

 In that spirit, I can imagine a "modular" textbook, where
 individual chapters can be replaced without invalidating
 the others.  This is super-easy to do online, and certainly
 possible in hardcopy if you write 40 small booklets rather
 than one ponderous 40-chapter tome.

 Then the idea is, you start with something completely
 traditional, and then upgrade 4 chapters per year for
 10 years.  That gives the teachers a chance to keep up.
 They don't have to drink from the proverbial firehose.

 Perhaps better, you could come out with two sets of 40
 booklets on Day One ... a "regular" version and a 
 "high octane" version ... and let teachers mix&match
 as they see fit, upgrading gradually.  They could even
 assign different versions to different students.  We've
 seen examples of this sort of thing already, e.g. the
 Track-I and Track-II sections of Misner/Thorne/Wheeler
 _Gravitation_.

*) The math instruction needs to be integrated with the
 physics:
   -- the physics motivates the math
   -- the math explains the physics

 The idea that either one can exist without the other strikes
 me as 99% absurd, for the 99% of the population that is not
 interested in pure math for math's sake.

 Integrated instruction is another of those things that is 
 a big win for the students, but places a tremendous burden
 on the teachers ... the math teachers in this case.  They
 will be better off in the long run, but the transient is
 nasty.  (The physics teachers are already stuck teaching 
 remedial math every day, in addition to all the physics, 
 so integrated instruction is an unmixed blessing for them.)