Developing a community of reformers
High on the list of Nick's priorities was developing a community of like-minded reformers among peers in the disciplines of engineering math and physics. Nick accomplished this by focusing the conversation on a subject that many faculty members could relate to--students learning or the lack thereof:

I got involved with some other faculty on campus. We were talking about how different the students coming in were; that students were looking at things in little stovepipe kind of cells. The thing that actually got the conversation going was a physics faculty who said, "Yeah, you know they've had calculus before they come to Physics 1. And I put up an integral and say you (the students) all know what this is? And they're staring at me blankly and it took me a while to figure out that the reason was because I had a "t" in it instead of an "x", under the integral." He had to reconstruct calculus to some degree in physics. And we started talking about that and realized that's a darn good place to learn calculus, by working with physics problems. Isn't that how Newton kind of got into it? It was particle motion. And so the conversation got going among several of us as faculty concerned about how students were learning today.

We asked Nick how he recruited specific faculty members from physics, math, and engineering--all disciplines with different traditions--to participate in IMPULSE.

It was easy. Sitting around a table talking about our challenges. This is a small university. At the time physics wasn't in the College of Engineering. Neither was computer science. Math is in the College of Arts and Sciences. But those of us who were sort of interested in curriculum reform and making education better, we'd find each other and we started talking. I would go over and say, "I think we should put a proposal to the Davis Foundation to build a classroom that looks like this. Would you like to be involved?" That was easy. I also knew many of the faculty, like John Dowd in physics, for example. So we had exposure to each other. Then I talked to somebody in physics about "Well, who do you think might be really interested in picking up the calculus portion?" Bob [Kowalczyk] has been working for years on something called TEMATH, which is a software program that helps calculus students understand derivatives and integrals. And so there's a person who might want to move into a technology-equipped classroom to teach calculus. It turns out when I started talking to him, he was really frustrated that they didn't have a room like that, and he couldn't ever get one in the College of Arts and Sciences because of space and budgetary limitations. And so he jumped into this as a way to get his room. Turns out, he did get his room in the Math Department patterned after the model of the IMPULSE classroom.

Garnering financial support
If developing a community among peers at UMD was important, making a case for external support was crucial. As Nick pointed out, internal support only comes after the ideas have been blessed in kind by external agencies:

We could show the Davis Foundation that it lowered the cost of instruction. The Davis Educational Foundation wants to improve education but also to lower its cost and so we were well-tuned to their particular criteria and they gave us $180K to launch this program. The university came up with something more than $180K to renovate the classroom. Our budget from the Davis Foundation included equipment and getting people like you to come and talk in order to get people to think that change is not bad.

However, not everyone gets to ask and receive this kind of financial support from external foundations, or for that matter his or her own institution. How did Nick mange to convince these groups to invest money in his idea?

It's a whole lot of going around, showing slide shows, and telling people that it's a good idea: "Look what we can do with this." What really helped a lot was we had things from RPI and Foundation Coalition schools like Texas A&M where we could show attrition rate curves that looked good. What I could help them understand is that we're not doing a bold experiment. We're going to build on the best programs in the country.

In order to garner support from within UMD a certain amount of political skill was required. Nick realized that a dean-level position could help him significantly in gathering support for redesigning classrooms for an inquiry-based program:

I started to hit some grants in that direction. The Dean decided to change my title to Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs so that building classrooms could be done more easily. And it would add a little bit more credibility to the idea... At some point, I started devoting 100 percent of my time, other than my teaching load, to worrying about undergraduate programs, especially the freshman year.

John Dowd (physics), who is now retired, was an original member of the team. He explained the importance of getting buy-in from all segments of the institution for a program as ambitious as IMPULSE. He also commented on Nick's skills in crafting this coalition and selling the program:

Everybody I've talked to has told me that you have to institutionalize it. You have to have buy-in from everybody from the president of the university to the faculty members who are going to be teaching, to the TAs and to the students who are going to be in it. And you can't do that if you rely exclusively on one person. I had planned to retire. So I went into this knowing that in two years I'm going to retire. I'm going to get this thing going and then walk out the door after it runs the first year. So I was aware that I had to do as much as I could to involve other people. Having it spread over three different classes was a big help with that.

Nick was fantastic in getting buy-in from the top --- the Engineering School, his compatriots in the Engineering School, and also the higher-level administration. The administration saw IMPULSE as something they could show off on the campus. That's one of the reasons for having the fish tank (large glass panels allowing passers-by to look into the classroom). They could bring the Trustees or other VIPs for them to look at how hard the students work. This is one of the things the fish tank window does, despite the fact that the kids hate it.

It certainly did not hurt having the former Dean, now Provost, as part of that supportive coalition:

I had a dean who was not at all reluctant to change things, as long as we didn't get the faculty really unhappy. We verged on that last spring. He was proud of being able to show these statistics to the provost's office and so on. So, he was an advocate for doing it. Because we knew that typically if the Dean becomes for something, the faculty become against it, he had to quietly be in the background helping with resource issues and so on. At lunch the other day, he looked at me and he says, "I still don't know where you got all that money." He provided some of it. He may not even be aware he provided some of it. But, it worked.

Designing the program
Lastly, there were programmatic and curriculum issues that needed to be tailored to the institution's culture. One key strategy here was to run a "pilot" program. Nick explained that the term "pilot" helped alleviate anxiety that can accompany an abrupt change:

We were able to get people to buy into it as a pilot. It would have been virtually impossible to start this program without the word pilot in it. Let us try it. We will have firm milestones. We will prepare and then we will review the program. Our plan was to review it in the late spring and into the summer after one year of operation. We ran it the first semester and we were already seeing, even by midterm, remarkable results.

A second key strategy was reducing the number of credit hours allotted to IMPULSE, which meant re-writing material being adapted by the program.

John Dowd (physics) explained: I realized I was going to have a problem using Priscilla Laws' material. She had a six-hour block of time that she uses. I forget exactly how it's broken up, but it's six hours a week. One of the great drawbacks of bringing the engineering faculty up to RPI is that they discovered that physics supposedly can be taught in four hours. That was the lesson from RPI-- that physics can be taught in four hours. That established the parameter. I didn't expect that to happen, but nonetheless, that's what happened. We had been teaching physics in six hours, but after all was said and done engineering decided that if it could be done in four hours, so much the better. I'm exaggerating, but nonetheless, that was a hard and fast parameter to sell the program, I think, to the engineering college. The students wouldn't spend that much time in it, but we were then trying, I kid you not, to have them learn as much or more than in the traditional six hour courses.

And a third strategy was weaving the idea of assessment into the program and getting colleagues to accept the validity of the resulting assessment data. This task required some doing on Nick's part:

We knew we wanted to do the assessment. We also knew that faculty would, if they had some clues about the program, start to say, "Well, if students self-selected their way in there, they must be the better students." So we decided that we wouldn't. We would simply randomly select. And that's what we did. So, the students showed up at orientation. They were told they were IMPULSE students and we took them in the classroom. We were also concerned about faculty reaction to the assessment data. So we hired an assessment specialist and we put the entire data gathering into institutional research.