For pilot curriculum, growing pains

One year after the College of Arts and Sciences implemented the pilot curriculum, administrators and students are starting to take a step back and examine the potential strengths and weaknesses of the fledgling program.

The curriculum, which will replace the general requirement for 200 of members of the College Class of 2005, consists of only four general categories, with each class team-taught by three professors from different disciplines.

And as the program enters its third semester, administrators have noted several problems. Most notably, according to College of Arts and Sciences Dean Richard Beeman, students are having problems with team teaching and are not sufficiently prepared for the challenge of the interdisciplinary program.

Beeman said students found it difficult to adjust to having three professors for one course.

"The faculty loved teaching the courses, but some of the students felt insecure about them," Beeman said. "When classes are team taught, it is a challenge, and students found it more difficult to grasp the material through this method, so we have to figure out how many courses should be team taught."

College sophomore Camryn Walsh noted that in Globalization, the first pilot course she took, it was hard for the three professors to coordinate amongst themselves.

"The first course was not that well taught because the teachers were still trying to figure out how to organize it, which made it hard to get myself organized in the class," Walsh noted.

And Beeman added that the program did not take into account students' prior knowledge about the different disciplines.

"One of the assumptions behind... the pilot curriculum [is] that these students are smart enough and prepared enough to do something fairly different than they did in high school," Beeman said. "With some students, we took too much for granted about how much they knew about the individual disciplines."

And this year, though the school was able to fill the program to capacity, Beeman said the Class of 2005 and their parents seemed less likely to embrace a more innovative and interdisciplinary curriculum.

"Entering freshmen are pretty conservative, as are their parents, so they seem to want to go with the more traditional curriculum," he explained.

College sophomore Inna Dexter said she was initially disappointed by the curriculum, which only offers students a choice of several pilot courses each semester.

"I thought first semester was going to be good, but the classes were not the greatest," Dexter said. "You do not have a lot of options, and I thought it was going to be a lot better than it actually was."

Despite these problems, students generally seemed to prefer the team-teaching method over the traditional style with one professor.

"I think it is better because you have more of an opportunity to interact with the professors," Dexter said. "You have more resources to utilize if you have a question or a problem, and there is more variety."

Likewise, Walsh said she preferred the team teaching method.

"I really liked it because you have the ability to go to three different teachers for assistance as well as a [teaching assistant]," Walsh said. "I found that there is one teacher that I always like so if you have disagreements with one of them you have two other teachers you can go to."

The curriculum, which was first offered to incoming freshmen in the fall of 2000, will be evaluated in the spring of 2004. If deemed successful, it will be implemented for all incoming freshmen in 2005.

Beeman said the evaluation will be vital to the ultimate success of the program.

"The most interesting thing is that over the course of five years the curriculum will be used to make education experiments in order to determine the most productive curriculum," Beeman said. "We have an open mind about this program and are hopeful about its prospects."

And students offered positive feedback about the curriculum after the first year.

"The second course I took, which was Biology, Language and Culture, was really good," Walsh said. "The professors were awesome, and they worked really well together. They were able to integrate their subjects so that people were not lost and I was able to connect with all of them."

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.