We’ve arrived at week three of this series on course design, and some of you might be asking, “Dude, where’s my syllabus?” For many, the work of course design/planning is synonymous with writing a syllabus, planning a class schedule, and organizing our LMS… my hope is that the past few weeks have been a chance to think more deeply about the goals of your course(s). (What do you really want them to remember?) Who are your students, and what impact does that have on how you want to teach? But, how do we reconcile these ideals, goals, etc. with the many day-to-day realities (and responsibilities) of teaching. Accordingly, I’m going to share a few specific resources to consider as you look ahead to the first day of class next week.
Three teaching resources to structure your thinking
Last year, I posted about two such resources prior to the start of classes. The first was a ‘12 week plan for a 15 week course.’ TL:DR (too long, didn’t read): creating space for ‘onboarding’ at the beginning and wiggle room for reflection and revision at the end can pay dividends. It does mean making a few decisions about which content is critical and which content is even more critical than that… (to paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All content is equal, but some content is more equal than others…”). I don’t make light of these decisions, but I do vouch for the net positive of creating time and space to introduce students to your course/teaching and the time to reflect (link). You create space to introduce students to your vision of the course, and you have time to ask who they are and learn a thing or two.
The other resource that I shared was a piece by James Lang entitled ‘How to prepare for class without overpreparing.’ TL:DR – rather than thinking of each class period as a time period to fill by scripting to the minute, we can think of each class period as consisting of a series of modular activities (of which lecture is but one…). We can have a repertoire of strategies that we build to offer students time to listen/learn, reflect, try out new techniques, and talk to each other. When we think about this balance on a day by day basis, we’re more likely to balance between the goals we have of absorbing/mastering content and those of reflection and social learning…
I want to add another resource into the mix: transparent assignment design. Focusing on the purpose, instructions, and expectations you have for assignments can help make explicit what is not always clear to our students. I’ve written about this before, focusing primarily on the purpose aspect (And why should I care?). The project website for transparent assignment design (tilthighered.com) has great resources, including a template and example assignments in a range of disciplines. Yet, one quick way to get started is to engage in an exercise called the Five Why’s: starting with your stated purpose for an assignment and asking yourself “Why?” until you arrive at some bedrock objectives, values, and reasons for asking students to do a particular assignment. It’s often the case that the purpose is there but not necessarily explicit.
These are structures to think within, not cookbooks where you have to follow the recipe or risk your dish (your course) turning into a social media fail. By working with flexible structures, we’re reminded that we don’t have control over everything that happens in our classes (that’s a good thing!). We can create conditions for learning, leaving room for the (inevitably) unexpected.
‘Pobody’s nerfect’ – Arriving at the good (enough) place
Finally, I think that mindset can be just as important as the tools and resources we use. (Research bears this out, noting that faculty mindsets towards our students can impact learning outcomes). I want to advocate for what might be called a ‘good enough’ approach to teaching and learning. In an essay for the NY Times, Avram Alpert notes what a good enough orientation is (and what it is not):
“This teacher is good enough not in the sense that they’re adequate or average, but that they manage a difficult task: initiating the student into a course/subject so that they will feel both supported and ready to deal with (inevitable) challenges.” (Source link).
This phrasing echoes last week’s discussion on the balance between challenge and support. It’s not a coincidence that the idea of good enough has found its way into education, where teacher burnout is a problem from K-12 to higher education (check out the podcast The Good Enough Professor for healthy discussions of these challenges).
Finally (again), course design, like a lot of art, is iterative. On this note, the last thought I’ll leave you with is to start where you are and to start small. Wait, you may be asking yourself, didn’t you just spend three weeks flooding the blog with big ideas of how to transform my teaching/course? In his book, Small Teaching, James Lang makes a case for sustainable, evidence-based changes. I encourage you to approach changes in teaching as tiny experiments (the title of another book that I highly recommend). These experiments can be short-term, a commitment to try a new approach and evaluate the effects it has on your experience of teaching (and your students’ experience of learning). I’ll give James Lang the last word here:
We owe it to our future students to dream big. We owe it to the students in our classrooms today to start wherever we can, even if that means taking only one small step forward tomorrow morning. Small Changes or Big Revolutions
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out via email: asmith@pcad.edu