Three teaching things: week of November 8
A paper on what should go into a syllabus; a resource to help guide your students' study habits (and inform your practice) and; a tool to help you with soliciting mid-term feedback.
Issue #25
1. The paper
Preparing An Effective Syllabus: Current Best Practices
If you’re teaching in a system with courses that are typically 12-14 weeks long, you’re probably thinking of what your Winter semester courses are going to look like this year (and from what I’ve heard from faculty colleagues, this reminder comes with a sense of angst, so, sorry about re-surfacing those feelings).
One way we communicate those plans to students is through the syllabus. In a learning environment where faculty-student contact (broadly) looks different than it ever has, the syllabus takes an even more important role in the learning experience. If you’ve not stopped to really thing about all the diverse functions a syllabus serve, this paper by Slattery & Carlson provides an excellent overview (the authors reference at least seven different purposes).
From my perspective, a thoughtfully created syllabus is more important than ever this Winter: one of the syllabus functions described in the paper is structure (“A good syllabus creates an effective structure for both faculty and students, allowing all parties to recognize where they need to go and what they need to do to get there” p. 160), and we are hearing from students this Fall that this clarity is one component of remote courses that they’re craving.
Slattery, J. M., & Carlson, J. F. (2005). Preparing An Effective Syllabus: Current Best Practices. College Teaching, 53(4), 159–164. https://doi.org/10.3200/ctch.53.4.159-164
2. The resource
Studying 101
Perhaps this resource is less for you than it is for your students (it’s certainly written for students to read), but I’d argue that all educators should be familiar enough with relevant findings from cognitive psychology that they can be used to help guide practice (as appropriate).
With that in mind, while this post is written to help students’ approaches to studying, it also includes some practices that the author takes to help direct students into successful study (e.g. suggesting students use margins to identify in notes when the instructor says something is important, encouraging students to focus future study on what they got wrong in non-graded quizzes). These strategies might seem intuitive for us, but let’s not assume that our students wouldn’t benefit from learning about these approaches.
(Hey, maybe this post could even summarized or linked in a syllabus section on resources to support student learning? …OK, I’ll stop with the syllabus stuff already)
3. The tool
SSC
Stop-start-continue: you could be familiar with this approach to get student feedback halfway through a semester (Bonus research suggests that the stop-start-continue technique improves the quality of student feedback, too).
SSC is an app and website that allows you to facilitate the collection of student feedback, and is ideal for use in remote courses. One augmentation of the typical analogue facilitation of stop-start-continue that the app affords is the ability for students to review and rank their peer’s feedback.
Developed by a Mohawk College (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) faculty member, Dr. Peter Basl, Dr. Basl summarizes the app in the video embedded below:
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Thanks for reading!