MCLA Blog

Posted by Adrienne Wootters

We kicked off our first year of meeting with a discussion of the syllabus as a teaching tool and not merely a listing of the nuts and bolts of a course.

Physicists are notorious for their brief syllabi—we generally prefer to think of them as elegantly concise. My wake-up call was at a SENCER* meeting a few years ago, when we were handed several examples of syllabi and asked to describe the courses, the professors, and what we thought we would learn if we took these courses. More importantly, we were asked what skills and attitudes we thought we could expect to have by the end of the course. The least information-giving syllabus by far was the one for the physics course, and it looked just like mine—just the facts, ma’am. I realized at that point that my students were likely proceeding blindly through my courses, unaware of next steps, and more importantly, likely unaware of what they should be doing with the information and skills learned in any given chapter.

I’m not such a slob of a professor that I don’t have these conversations with my students through the course of the semester. But the point drilled into my head was that students need to know from the outset what I expect of them in terms of attitude and habits of mind as much as what I expect in terms of homework and exams.

In addition to providing basic information, a learning-centered syllabus contains course goals and objectives: what do you want your students to get out of your course? How would you and they know if they met your expectations? By offering a learner-centered syllabus to our students, we ask our students to engage immediately with our course. We give them more responsibility for their own learning; ideally the course becomes more of a team effort and less of a one-person performance.

At our meeting, I passed out some examples of syllabi that some consider exemplary. Some of these syllabi were 15 pages long! Our conclusion was that you can have too much of a good thing: Balance is the key. In an effort to be complete but not overwhelming, some professors put up online syllabi, with links to more information so the student could click on what was personally interesting.

Here are some links which explain in depth the notion and practice of learning-centered syllabi:

From the NEA: The Elegant Syllabus

From Iowa State: Workshop on Learning-Centered Syllabi

From the University of Delaware: Designing a Learning-Centered Syllabus

Classroom Realities by Shari Wilson

From University of Texas, El Paso: Reviewing a Syllabus

-Adrienne Wootters

*SENCER: Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities. A very cool nation-wide movement in science education reform. Check them out at http://www.sencer.net