8 years ago, I sat in a Focus on Faculty presentation about the syllabus. I took home a lot of good messages about not only how to design a syllabus, but how a syllabus can relate to teaching and learning. My hope today is that I can help you begin a similar journey in using your syllabus not only a tool for disseminating course information to your students, but also as a tool for reflective teaching. First a bit about myself. I am in the department of Applied Linguistics. My major role within that department is to teach courses on language acquisition, first and second, theory and language structure. My research focuses on language acquisition, in particular psycholinguistics. I have an interest in pedagogy, but it’s not a focus of my work. It’s mostly for personal interest and to improve my own teaching. (my disclaimer) What I’m sharing with you today, then, has come about as part of my journey into teaching and the scholarship of teaching.

I’m going to cover four major areas in this workshop. We will briefly talk about the functions of a syllabus and the elements to include in a syllabus. Both of these relate to create a learner-centered (rather than a teacher centered) syllabus.

First, your syllabus is a tool for course planning – it’s what you, and your students will use to make sense of the information, figure out what’s happening, and what you all need to do. In addition to course planning, a syllabus has another function: It serves as a point of contact between the instructor and student. This is what the student takes home, and what they will have to help them through the course. It lays out the logistics for contact. But more than that, it sets the tone for the course. A well designed, detailed syllabus puts your students at ease – they know you’ve thought through the course. They know what to expect. A poorly designed or inadequate syllabus puts your students on edge. A syllabus can also be seen as a contract between instructor and student. It’s not set in stone, but students will hold you to your syllabus. And if you have expectations of your students, it’s hard to hold them to those expectations if you have not laid them out explicitly in your syllabus.

In addition, it can explain available resources to the student. It tells them where they can find books, which books are on reserve. If you’re using a web-based portion to your course (WebCT, Blackboard, or your own webpage), provide that information. As part of this, you should add a statement of resources for students with disabilities. The on-campus Disability Resource Center asks that all faculty put such a statement on their syllabi. The statement should invite students with disabilities to make their need for accommodations known. In order to receive accommodations, students must be registered with the DRC. Students need to identify themselves to you as needing accommodations, but they do not need to disclose their diagnosis. The DRC can help you determine whether the accommodations they are requesting are legitimate and/or how to implement them. I’ve given several examples of statements for students with disabilities on the handout. The final function of a syllabus is that it places your course in a larger context. It can help provide students with a conceptual framework (how you’re going to approach this course, theories used, etc.) and place the course within the departmental context – including prerequisites and where it fits within your program.

We’re going to talk next about the elements to include in a syllabus. But, before we do that, take a look at the syllabus you brought along. What information do you include in your syllabus? What’s their function? Given what I’ve just talked about in terms of functions, do you see any functions missing in your syllabus?

The first major set of elements that should be included are basic course information This includes the course name, and #, the number of credits (this will be helpful to students who might transfer, and need their syllabus evaluated somewhere else) Course meeting time and location – this was something I didn’t think to put on my syllabus at first, but I find it helps students (and me on the first day, since I inevitably forget where the heck I’m teaching!) Contact information should be included as well. How and where can they get a hold of you? When? Are you going to give your home phone or just your work phone? Do you ever check your e-mail? Your phone? What’s your preferred method of contact? If at all possible, establish your office hours BEFORE the term begins. If students don’t know when you are going to be in your office, they won’t come to see you. I put my office hours on and then “or by appointment” and explain to students that I realize that some people will have conflicts with my office hours and I’m happy to make appointments. But official office hours eases your life and theirs. Finally, a detailed course description so students know what they’re getting into and any prerequisites. This helps students figure out if they belong.

Next comes the meat of the syllabus – information about the content of the course. This should include course objectives – which are ----? (what you want to get done) In addition, you should include a description of the assignments, how the elements of the course will be weighted, and finally, grading criteria. Two crucial elements here that many instructors do not include: Student learning outcomes and grading criteria. We will come back to these elements soon. For me, these were pivotal in not only planning, but improving my course.

The final elements of a syllabus to include are the schedule and the administrative details. The schedule is one element that your students will demand. You don’t want your schedule to be so ‘tight’ that you can follow up interesting lines of discussion when they occur. On the other hand, you don’t want your schedule to be so loose that students don’t know what’s coming next or how they should prepare for class. I always build in a ‘catch-up’ day to my ‘unofficial’ schedule, and sometimes I include that in the official schedule as well. I also recommend adding a statement that the schedule is subject to change. Because students see the syllabus as a contract, some of them get very upset if you don’t stick to the schedule. Adding that statement gives you some leeway. I have never, in all my years of teaching, followed a syllabus to a T. Even for classes such as FLA or SLA that I teach regularly, no two classes are the same. So, give yourself a little room for slack. Policies and Administrative Details – this is another area that’s often overlooked. However, I have found this to be one of the crucial areas of my syllabus for smooth running of my courses. I include a policy on late assignments, student conduct, important dates for students to remember and the statement for students with disabilities under this section. I want to spend just a minute on my policy for late assignments and the conduct parts. My initial syllabi did not contain these, and I added them after several problems with students. My policy on late assignments developed when I had several quarters where students turned in homework or papers weeks after the assigned due date, with the apparent expectation that I grade them. I was stunned. And miffed. I teach several homework intensive courses, and grading homework after the fact is a pain. In addition, it’s not fair to those students who busted their butts to get them in on time! And then I also discovered students who missed a deadline and assumed that since they’d missed it, they couldn’t hand it in, and so failed the whole assignment (and often the whole course). So, my policy on late assignments speaks to these issues: It lets them know that there is an ultimate date beyond which I will not accept late assignments and it applies a mild penalty for being late (i.e. gives the students who were on time an advantage). Beyond that, it keeps me from being the homework police. And while my policy makes me sound a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West, it puts the burden of responsibility back on the student. I’ve had many students come to me on a due date and say “It’s just not ready to hand in. I decided it was better to do another draft and take the penalty than to hand it in as it is.” Paradoxically, this policy also makes me look ‘nicer’ to my students. When I didn’t have a late policy and I lowered a grade because something was late, the student was disgruntled. And it makes me look petty. When I do have one, I can choose to apply it or not. If a student has been sick, or comes to me with a plausible tale of woe, I often ‘waive’ the late penalty. (I’ll usually waive it on the first one for almost anyone who gives a good excuse.) That makes me look magnanimous.  Student conduct is also something to consider. I started to include conduct expectations for discussions/classroom behavior after one disastrous seminar. I had one student who would not be quiet, who rambled on, often with off topic or just plain old inappropriate comments, and never let anyone else speak. It was so bad that we had to sit down as a class and create ‘discussion guidelines’ so that the other students didn’t throttle the problem students. (Wait 30 seconds before answering; if you have addressed two previous points, wait 5 minutes before addressing another one…) Ironically, after I’ve included this blurb in my syllabus, I have never had to enforce it. I don’t know if it’s the blurb and my brief mention on the first day that nip the problem in the bud, or if I’ve just been lucky and never had a student quite so bad since. But, I have had several students who have come to me and said “Thank you for including this. I’m in a class now with a student who is constantly monopolizing the discussion and I’m going nuts!”

I want to spend the rest of the time talking about relating your syllabus to teaching and then improving the course with your syllabus. The two are intimately connected, so some of the content here will overlap.

I’m just going to gloss over these points, not because they aren’t important but because I’m expecting that these aspects of creating a syllabus are at least somewhat familiar to people.

Use the resources you have at your disposal – prior syllabi in the department, online syllabi, information provided by textbooks.

When you’ve got the basic outline of your course down, I want to encourage you to spend some time focusing not just on the content and the schedule, but on course objectives and student learning outcomes. Most of us are familiar with course objectives – these are the instructor’s objectives for the course. And most syllabi that I have seen include course objectives. I conducted a completely unscientific google search of syllabi for language acquisition courses – of the 10 syllabi that I looked at, 8 had some sort of course objectives. And most read just like the one that I had on my syllabus the first time I ever taught first language acquisition: To become familiar with the major theories of language development and some of the major debates in field

But, as I learned in the workshop that I took on syllabus design, there are several problems with course objectives. The first is that they tend to be teacher centered – focusing on what the teacher will do. Thus, it keeps the responsibility for learning squarely with the teacher, and not with the student. But more problematically, I think, is that they are usually quite abstract. They are often couched in language that makes them difficult to assess. How do you, or your students, know whether you have achieved these goals? How do you know whether your students have ‘become familiar’ with something?

This is where the distinction between course objectives and student learning outcomes comes into play. The difference is really in the language that is used to describe them (see, I knew I couldn’t keep language out of this!) You can think of student learning outcomes as operationalized course objectives. These are things that can be measured.

Partly they should come from your course planning. As part of your course planning you should think carefully about what knowledge or skills students will demonstrate, and also how you will assess this. But you also need a way to operationalize the course objectives. For that, I have found taxonomies of learning, such as Bloom’s taxonomy very helpful. I know that there are many other taxonomies, and ones for other domains. Because the course that I teach tend to be focused on cognitive skills, and my preferred learning styles tend toward cognitive and abstract, I’m very comfortable with Bloom’s taxonomy.

Comprehension: Understand the meaning, translation, interpolation, and interpretation of instructions and problems. State a problem in one's own words. Application: Use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction. Applies what was learned in the classroom into novel situations in the work place. Analysis: Separates material or concepts into component parts so that its organizational structure may be understood. Distinguishes between facts and inferences. Synthesis: Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure. These are generally viewed hierarchically – in comprehension is built on knowledge, etc. Thus the “lower” levels are often basic skills and the upper levels more advanced. Not all people who use this taxonomy view it hierarchically  -- some view it circularly.

While these levels are somewhat abstract, the taxonomy also has a set of verbs that indicate behaviors at each level. So, knowledge is demonstrated by defining or identifying or matching or labeling… These verbs are nicely organized to help write assessments and learning objectives.

Using Bloom’s taxonomy, I sat down and operationalized the course objective. And I found when I did that, that I actually had several learning objectives. I wanted the students to be familiar with the basic aspects of the theories, but I also wanted them to be able to compare and contrast them. This helped me, and my students, understand what I meant in my course objectives. Thus, unpacking my course objectives into something more concrete not only helped me assess these, but it helped me see that I had several goals, at several different levels of cognition.

Now on to the final point of our workshop – using your syllabus to improve your course Part of this can be done with planning – if you have good course objectives and good student learning outcomes, then you have a good sense of what you and the students are working toward in the course. In addition, you can use your planning to plan for a variety of learning styles, activities and more active learning on the part of the students.

One easy way to use your syllabus to improve your course is to link outcomes to delivery. One quick way to do this is to create a table where you list your student learning outcomes on one axis and your various methods for content delivery on the other. Then mark where they intersect. One thing that I discovered when I first did this, was that although I had several learning outcomes related to theory, theory itself was only covered in a single lecture in my course. Thus, I increased the readings and the class activities related to theory. I’ve given you an example here of several of my student learning outcomes and my different methods of content delivery for my first language acquisition course. My goal is always to have at least one activity that’s individual, one that’s group; one that’s more teacher centered, one that’s more student-centered. This then is at least a step to meeting the different learning styles and preferences in my classes.

Listing how your class activities intersect with your learning goals in a table like this is also a good way to reflect on your content delivery – what are you doing to encourage active learning? Are you addressing different learning styles? How do your activities fit with your course structure and educational philosophy. So, for example, most of my upper division courses are a mixture of teacher-centered lecture and then small group work with data analysis, article discussion or issue discussion. My introduction to Linguistics course, on the other hand, is much more teacher-centered. There is large group discussion and some pair work, but much less than my other classes. My philosophy (and experience) for that course is that students need to be led more. It’s also a large class, making small group work more unwieldy.

Another way to improve your course is to take a look at how and where you are assessing your learning outcomes. Remember that assessment is not always graded work. So, I include in-class work and discussions, because that often gives me (and the students) a sense of where they are.

My final suggestion for improving your syllabus is to add explicit grading criteria to your syllabus. Explicit what? Grading criteria. What are grading criteria? They are explicit guidelines telling students how their work will be evaluated. There are a number of advantages to doing this. First, it’s a way to make sure that your assessment is linked to your learning outcomes. In addition, it helps clarify the assignments for students – they know what you’re looking for and how you’re going to assess that. In addition, it can help you focus your class time on what you consider important – are you covering the skills and information necessary for your students to achieve their learning goals?

Now, I’ll admit. When I attended my syllabus workshop 8 years ago, I nodded dutifully through the section on adding grading criteria, and immediately dismissed them.

But after several quarters, I began to reconsider my stance. Several things led to this. As I was preparing for my 3rd year review, I looked in depth at my class evaluations. And “Grading criteria clearly defined” was consistently rated lower than any other aspect of my teaching. Now, if this had been the only reason, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to add grading criteria. My attitude was still “short of writing their papers for them, they’re always going to complain about this.” But several other factors contributed to my change of heart. The first was that I was giving a lot of As and high Bs for papers and work that I didn’t feel in my heart was A or B work. Yet, when I looked at how they matched up to what I gave on the syllabus and what I said my learning outcomes were, they seemed to be meeting all these criteria. I had a sneaking suspicion that I was contributing to grade inflation, and I didn’t know what to do about it. The event that pushed me over the edge was when a very conscientious student came to me after receiving a B on her paper and said “Why is this a B paper?” Now, I’d been using a grading rubric to help me grade, and I could point to the fact that most of the content points on her paper were evaluated “good” and not “excellent”. But she, being a bright student, pushed me further. “Why were they rated good?” And I couldn’t answer her. Upon reflection, I realized that the difference between an A and a B paper was how the students integrated theory into their papers. Her paper made scant mention of theory. It did incorporate outside literature, but there was no discussion of theory. This then was my “Aha!” moment. I realized that developing explicit grading criteria might help me address all of these issues.

So, these are a short form of the grading criteria that I developed for take-home exams and papers. This table appears in my syllabus, along with a more detailed description of what these mean.

By adding these grading criteria, I discovered several things – and not just that my evaluations for “Grading Criteria clearly defined” improved! First, I can more accurately identify what’s missing from papers or what’s good. When a student asks “why is this a B paper?” I can explain. Perhaps more importantly, however, I discovered several implicit criteria that I had been using to judge papers, without realizing it. I had been using students’ ability to incorporate theory into the paper to grade them. But nowhere had I stated that. It wasn’t a student learning outcome. It wasn’t mentioned in my syllabus. My students were right! I wasn’t clear in my grading criteria. But even more damning, was my realization that the students who were incorporating theory, were doing so because they were naturally bright, NOT because of anything I was doing in the classroom. In fact, when I looked at my classroom activities, we weren’t spending any time at all on comparing and contrasting theories or discussing how theories relate to data. Adding my grading criteria helped me to revise my student learning outcomes, revise what we were doing in the classroom to more accurately reflect my goals, and  therefore helped my students grasp the importance of theory. It was a fundamental shift in how I conceived of my courses.