Rob Kowlczykexplained: I think within the department you need to get a lot of support from your chair, because teaching in this environment is a lot more work than in a traditional classroom. In a traditional classroom I can just go in and lecture for fifty minutes and I'm done. Where in this classroom it's much more difficult to do that, because you've got all these students in teams and if you try to lecture too much, students would just start socializing, and whatever. I've been hearing from the other instructors that have been teaching in IMPULSE this year, that they are finding teaching in this program is more work than in the traditional classroom.

In this regard, some IMPULSE faculty were beginning to ask for release time to participate in the program.

On the managerial side, it is important to have good technical support as well as somebody who will be responsible for all technological program details.

A computer support person told us: You need a strong project manager if you're going to do this. I have no project management training, and I don't claim to be a project manager. The biggest thing that this project lacked was someone to sit in on all the meetings and make sure that all the details were taken care of. If you're going to do it, make sure the technical expertise is in place because the faculty does not necessarily understand the implications of some of their decisions. Make sure that there is a budget for technical support as well as money to update hardware and software.

Plan a way to survive turnover in faculty
It's an old story: a really innovative instructor gets going, changes a course, leaves it, and the course drops back to the status quo, as if nothing had happened. Nick explained that they made a big investment in this program and didn't want that to happen. He explained that to keep it going, the following "team" factors are critical:

The team effect among the faculty makes it much more stable. If there is a team effect among the students, that makes it much more stable too. If you've got a faculty member who decides just to lecture through the math class-and it did happen some this semester, the students push back at her a little bit. The students will start to correct the things the faculty didn't do. So those are the exciting things, and at the same time they also deal with the sustainability problem.

This said, IMPULSE faculty also made clear that thoughtful selection of the central group of participating faculty-whether those who start out with the program or sustain it over time-is of paramount importance. The instructors should not only be "reform-ready" and willing to collaborate across disciplines but also be good communicators.

Bob Kowalczyk (mathematics) explained: The first thing you need is to find a group of people that will communicate with each other. If the engineers, the physicists, and the mathematicians don't talk to each other, you can get into a lot of trouble. I think it would become a traditional program in a different kind of classroom. So get whatever support you can to be sure that the different faculty and the different college and departments communicate with each other.

The original group of IMPULSE faculty realized that it is important for IMPULSE faculty to be very effective with freshmen. They also decided it would be important to continually include new members in their group, both to renew the group with fresh ideas, and to replace people who retired or left for sabbaticals or other reasons. They learned that keeping the group resilient also depends on an effective process for integrating new members. John Dowd provided an effective prototype for integrating new members. Preparing to retire, he hand-picked and trained a successor. The training consisted of co-teaching his course with his successor (Renate Crawford) for a semester before he retired^a.

Nick observed that the resilience of the core faculty is also significantly enhanced by timely changes in leadership. For example, Nick decided that, in order to ensure that the program took on a life of its own, and avoid the phenomenon of becoming too strongly associated with an initial founder, he would step out of the leadership. Of course, once on their own, the new course leaders had to experience some of their own "organizational learning." But it is precisely this kind of experience that enables the new leaders to "own" a program. Fortunately, the continuing faculty already had begun using formative feedback regularly and knew the importance of getting together every week to discuss new information about the program, and make needed adjustments. As a result, the program is getting better, as demonstrated by student outcomes data as well as the robust group of faculty participants.

Get training from colleagues elsewhere in the nation
Many IMPULSE instructors stressed the need to attend workshops and be trained in the teaching methods. John Dowd said, "I'd advise them to go to some workshops. Go see some places that have done it and see if you think you can do it." Ray Laoulache emphasized the value of training in collaborative learning methods: "On pedagogical issues, you need to learn how to ask questions for teams, not for individuals; otherwise, you will be in deep trouble." According to Nick Pendergrass, the topic of how to manage the dramatic change process should be addressed in these workshops.

Nick explained: I wish I had had time to get together with Karan Watson at Texas A&M and learn about the change process before we started. Karan came in six months after we had decided to implement IMPULSE and did a change workshopÉ She told us what was going to happen. For example,"You are going to have some senior faculty come out of the woodwork and try to stamp it out. It's going to happen." If we had known that, we might not have agonized as much. We would have known that it wasn't us, it was a process that inevitably would have resistance. We still would have moved fast, and pushed people, because we also learned that there is an optimum implementation time. If you go too long, things will polarize and you'll never get there-you'll be in "permanent pilot." So you need to move fast if you want to succeed. But we wouldn't have responded so personally to the resistance.

Make the learning problems evident to departmental colleagues, but be diplomatic!
Another instructor said it is important to get support from department colleagues, and that a good way to do so is to make evident that current methods are not resulting in adequate student learning. The process of making this evident can be dicey, however, as he clearly explains:

You're got to have support from your department and your college before you do it. One way you can get support is if you can show that current methods aren't working. That's a very tricky thing to do with some people because they take it personally.
"Can I come in your lecture and give this pre-test and this post-test?"
"Sure, sure John, come in."

And then at the end of the semester,

"Oh! your students only knew 40 percent of the material going in and when they came out they only knew 50 percent. So you only taught them 10 percent. You didn't teach them much at all."

People don't like that. So you have to be a little diplomatic about it and hope that people realize that it isn't an indictment of them, but of the method that we've all grown up with and used. It's not the best method for teaching a large number of people.

Make adaptations as necessary to suit your students
Several IMPULSE instructors expressed concerns about adopting a purely inquiry-based format (i.e., an environment where students explore science and math with virtually no lectures). Ray (mechanical engineering) felt that this approach can be catastrophic if the instructor does not have the skills necessary for this approach:

I'm afraid that if you take an instructor who doesn't understand this approach, you could have a disaster. And the disaster can be on an exponential rather than linear scale. Why? Because if you don't know how to pull this together, to make that inquiry learning successful, you can have an exponential failure. You do not deliver; the student did not learn the material; it's a catastrophe on both sides.

Some IMPULSE instructors responded to this concern by adapting the purely inquiry-based approach to fit their freshman students, who they believe lack the maturity to take full responsibility for their learning.

Renate (physics) explained: I would say don't completely go to purely inquiry-based classroom. I know the research shows wonderful results if you use only inquiry-based methods and you're only there as a mentor. It's not my experience. Maybe that'll work at a junior level, but my experience is that students just coming out of high school need more guidance, need more hand holding.

Some IMPULSE instructors adapted by including mini-lectures to provide structure in the inquiry-based environment and to insure that even if students do not learn some of the basic concepts, they are at least exposed to them. According to Ray (mechanical engineering), leaving students to develop the concepts on their very own is too risky and, "There is nothing wrong with lecturing, as long as we don't turn a lecture into a movie style presentation where we are completely passive."