Tip: Writing a Syllabus

The syllabus is where important course relationships begin: student-instructor, student-content, & student-student. These interpersonal & intellectual relationships form the foundation of the course.

Syllabus time!

It’s syllabus week, that last push before the semester begins to have, at a minimum, the syllabus ready for the first day of classes. Kevin Gannon’s How to Create a Syllabus advice guide is packed with excellent advice and resources. If you’re writing one for the first time, you can’t go wrong with following his step-by-step process. If you’re revising, it’s also helpful, particularly his advice to keep in mind the why behind a syllabus:

an effective syllabus is a promise that, as a result of our course, students will be able to do a number of things either for the first time or at least better than they could before. As you create a syllabus, then, the question you ought to keep at the center of the process is: What am I saying to my students?

I approach the syllabus as a space where the important course relationships begin: student-instructor, certainly, but also student-to-content relationships and student-student relationships. These relationships - interpersonal but also intellectual - will form the foundation for any course, whether you're teaching writing-intensive classes or lab science courses, whether you have a small seminar or a large survey course. It's important to think about ways that you can foster these three levels of relationship within your particular context: think about how your context shapes these relationships, what this relationship-building process is going to look like for your students, and start to lay the groundwork for these relationships in the syllabus and in the first week of class.

“Big Questions” Syllabus

I have reorganized my syllabi around questions students need to have answered, rather than policies I need to communicate. I put the focus on bigger-picture questions, like: What is this course about? How will this class work? What materials & resources do I need to be successful in this class? I try to write in a conversational tone that, I hope, feels welcoming.

Image: “Big Questions” - focused syllabus

You may notice that this is a very short syllabus - all of the college policies are in the larges syllabus section of the LMS, which is where all the course assignments, weekly reading list, and due dates are. Rather than loading this information into the syllabus, which I typically post and send out to students several days before the first class meeting, I keep the syllabus document itself more focused and walk through how to use our Canvas site to find the course calendar, policies, assignments, and other information.

Syllabus Tools

Wakefield Forest’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) has two great tools to help with syllabi: the Syllabus Date Generator and the Student Workload Estimator (which I have shared here before, but it’s worth a second share). The date generator does what I used to (until quite recently!) use Excel for. Enter semester start and end dates, and your teaching days (Monday, Monday/Wednesday, etc.) and the generator provides a complete list of class meeting dates. The workload estimator allows inputs of pages read per week, pages written per semester, discussion forums, exams, other assignments, and class meetings. With all of these inputs, the calculator provides an estimate for the number of hours of work a student would do each week. You can adjust the settings for all the different pieces that go into the estimator. Here’s what it looks like:

Image: Workload Estimation for a 5-credit Writing-Intensive ESL Course

More resources…

• Podcast on “Writing an Inclusive Syllabus: A Conversation” from the Univ. Of Colorado, Boulder, Center for Teaching & Learning

• Writing creative syllabi that incorporate graphics and are visually engaging (of course, with any graphics or texts/fonts, make sure to do an accessibility check to make sure that your work is accessible to all students. Adobe has instructions here; Canvas LMS also provides this function as does Blackboard.)

• If you want to evaluate your syllabi to see how learner-centered they are, the Univ. of Virginia Center for Teaching Excellence has created a rubric that focuses on four criteria important to successful learner-centered teaching: learning goals and objectives, assessment activities, schedule, and overall learning environment.

Happy Syllabus Week!