Worksheet: Constructing a Syllabus

Elizabeth A. Dreyer
Appendix 3

These guidelines are meant to be used in a conversational setting in which one participant presents a syllabus to be read and discussed by a group of 1-2 others.

Presuppositions

1. In an ideal educational setting, both teachers and students are both teaching and learning all the time.
2. Syllabus construction is a part of one's scholarship. It is another way of thinking about and articulating a body of knowledge.
3. Syllabus construction is a creative act in which the teacher steps back from the subject matter to design a structure that will be faithful to the material at hand and also make this material available to students.
4. Syllabi reveal one's relationship to the subject matter, to the values shaped by religious commitments, cultural context and personal experience, and to the teaching-learning process.
5. Each syllabus contains a rationale that the teacher should be able to articulate.

Some Questions to Consider

1. Students:
   1. Who are the students you teach?
   2. What do you know about them and how they learn?
   3. What do your students already know about the course material?
   4. Can you find out how students view the instructor and the material?
   5. What are their motivations for being there?
   6. How do you acknowledge and affirm their prior knowledge, experience and beliefs?
   7. Why should students want to take this course?
2. Contexts:
   1. Where does the course fit in your students' curricula?
   2. Are there subsequent courses that depend sequentially on what students learn in your course?
   3. Are there prerequisites for the course?
   4. What must the student know or be able to do in order to begin the course?
   5. How does your course serve institutional mission?
3. Goals:
   1. What are your teaching/learning goals?
   2. What do you want your students to know? How to think?
   3. What should they be able to do? To feel?
   4. What knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs do you want them to have as a result of your course?
   5. What must be taught/learned?
   6. What are the essential questions and epistemological assumptions of your discipline?
   7. What are the irreducibly most significant basic facts, ideas, concepts, themes and skills your students must know?
4. Assessment
   1. How will you assess student learning?
   2. How can you get feedback on how well the course goals are being fulfilled?
   3. What ways can you devise for learning about student experience?
5. Teaching/learning practices
   1. How will your students fulfill these goals?
   2. By what specific strategies, assignments and learning experiences?
   3. Why do parts of the course come in the order that they do?
   4. What are the purposes of your assignments?
   5. Why have the books and reading assignments been chosen?
6. What messages are you trying to convey in the syllabus?
7. What messages do you think that the students receive?
8. What has the syllabus helped the students to know about the content of the discipline?
9. How does the syllabus negotiate the demands of the content expectation with the demands of student needs?
10. In what significant ways has the syllabus changed over the years that you have used it?

Issues for Discussion

1. How do professors take into consideration the following: Who are the students in this particular class? Why are they in school? In this particular class? What do they need to know? What do they want to know? What is the purpose of this educational setting? What are blocks to learning that may be present?
2. Tension between need for careful planning and flexibility in light of student learning, schedules. Is a detailed structure reassuring and freeing or inhibiting?
3. Tension between what the students want to know and what teachers want them to know.
4. Study guides for reading assignments? Detailed instructions for writing assignments?
5. Teacher's need to have a sense that the course is going well, performance needs and sense of self.
6. How move students from vague sense that what is happening is the teacher's own opinions to realization that both student and teacher can make informed, critical judgments based on careful study of relevant materials.
7. Have students respond at end of course to "I thought this and now I think that."
8. How does one address the high incidence of cultural relativism among traditional age undergraduates? How lead students to take a position, to examine a range of scholarly opinions on a topic, and to understand religion in terms other than a private belief system?
9. How present the fact that there is no absolute neutrality in scholarship, but that each author, the teacher, and the students approach the material from a certain vantage point. How identify and disclose one's perspective? How to become rigorous in examining and understanding a variety of positions before offering criticism?
10. Do students get good direction for their writing projects and do they have the opportunity to talk over their ideas with a professor and revise at least once?
11. Do students have the opportunity to give oral presentations (they become the teachers)? Do they meet with the professor to talk over their ideas and the organization of their presentations in order for them to deliver their reports with some confidence and energy?