Thriving in Academe

THE ADVOCATE

The National Education Association Higher Education Advocate,
a newsletter published monthly during the academic year
June 2001

"The Humble Syllabus as Creative Catalyst"

The last thing a fish notices is water. Similarly, we may not think about the course syllabus. Yet striving for a model syllabus exposes our teaching to peer scrutiny-thus fostering our creativity and students' learning.

By Michael J. Strada
West Liberty State College and West Virginia University

Introduction:

Long an under-achiever in the halls of academe, the course syllabus is cousin to those late-blooming students whom we love to teach--the ones unaware of how good they can be. But an elegant syllabus is more than mere over-achiever: it requires depth, creativity, and self-disclosure.

Transforming and enhancing our syllabi is a truly reflective exercise. The thinking in which we engage as we do so is potent enough to clarify our beliefs and assumptions. Thus the effort to change our humble syllabus into a sophisticated one can reveal something of our academic soul.

There are several reasons for giving serious attention to the syllabus. First and foremost, a rigorous syllabus enhances student learning by improving the way we teach our courses. In addition, rigorous syllabi provide cognitive maps that can broaden and deepen how teaching is evaluated in the academy. Fine syllabi also work as doses of preventive medicine bound to save us time and frustration in the future.

Finally, the assessment movement, led by non-teaching Institutional Researchers, nearly owned the decade of the nineties in higher education. Bushels full of hard (quantitative) data were generated by giving students standardized tests in areas like critical thinking and math skills. But a feedback loop between such tests and the classroom has not been established. Relevance can be breathed into assessment efforts by matching hard data with soft (qualitative) data, and, the detailed syllabus is the richest source of soft data providing tangible hooks to anchor accountability firmly in the classroom experience.

Tales From... "Syllabus Tales: Liberation from P(3)-Ville"

Until 15 years ago, my course syllabi lived amiably among their neighbors in P(3)-Ville (prosaic, puny, palliative). But conspiring against such inertia was my mentor, Sophia Peterson, whose eyes were glued to elegant syllabi residing in a shining city on the hill.

She poked and prodded, nudging me to grasp a simple truth: moving from the village pays educational dividends in perpetuity. However, she warned that no escape route back to P(3)-Ville exists. So I choked down the resistance to change that seems hard-wired into human DNA.

Gradually my syllabi grew from 3-to-10-pagers, and Sophia's truth became palpable. Striving for an exemplary syllabus forced me to think through the entire course more complexly. My penchant for getting lost in the details of the topic slowly but surely became transformed into a vision of each course's essence.

By serendipity, my emigration from P(3)-Ville became official three years ago when I expanded one of my syllabi to 23 pages. Why? Because I had written an introduction to the social sciences and included lesson plans as part of the syllabus destined for the Instructor's Manual of the textbook.

I do NOT write lesson plans for the upper-level courses I teach every fourth semester. However, including them in my introductory course taught me that lesson plans save time in subsequent semesters, help to replicate peak classroom experiences and bury failed experiments, and create an upward course trajectory when edited after each session. Finally, of course, these insights proved Sophia correct about never returning to P(3)-Ville.

"Creating the Elegant Syllabus"

Surprising benefits emerge when faculty strive to develop model syllabi.

What is the status quo regarding course syllabi? Surveying the literature reveals a mixed bag concerning current practice, as does my examination of more than many hundreds of syllabi.

Altman and Cashin suggest that weak syllabi impede the quality of communication between professor and student, and, that some instructors underestimate the value of a fine syllabus. I don't advocate reporting such colleagues to the syllabus police. A better tack is to expose all syllabi to a healthy dose of sunshine, enabling the syllabus to escape from the academic closet.

An elegant syllabus stretches beyond precision-aiming toward depth, creativity, and self-disclosure. A regular sidebar highlighting such ambitious efforts now appears inThe Chronicle of Higher Education. Ashraf Ghaly's "Construction for Humanity" (Union) brings together engineering and liberal arts students to explore cultural influences on architectural design, and Marcia Cantarella's American Studies seminar looks at 1920s film and literature as windows on current values in "The Big Money: America's Ambivalence About Wealth" (Princeton).

For two decades, FACDIS (WV Consortium for Faculty and Course Development in International Studies), has promoted improving course syllabi in order to enhance teaching effectiveness. By demonstrating progress via comparisons of pre- and post-project syllabi, accountability has coalesced around the task of improving course syllabi, and the project has received two national awards.

One decade ago, I taught for the Semester at Sea (SAS), a program motivated by its unusual mission to use the course syllabus as an accountability tool. This floating university circles the globe each semester, and its students spend 50 days in shipboard classes and 50 days taking field trips in a dozen countries. SAS requires instructors to submit detailed syllabi for departmental approval at the host institution, which grants the academic credit and assures the academic integrity of a unique program.

GRADING SYLLABI

The functions of syllabi vary somewhat by discipline. However, this does not diminish the value of establishing general guidelines. I have read enough syllabi to know what to look for. And how better to separate wheat from chaff than assigning letter grades?

Those deserving an "F" reveal themselves by their brevity. Length is not the sole criterion, but it is where the assessment process begins. A two-pager almost never fails to fail. What generally characterizes the "F" syllabus is a sketchy Preface (instructor and course facts), an all too brief outline of course topics, only hints as to when assignments are due, and incomplete grading criteria. Students need to know, and deserve to know, far more than that.

The "D" syllabus, at least, is likely to provide course descriptions akin to catalog entries, a fuller preface, a pinch of grading information, and hints concerning the relationship between course themes and reading assignments. However, the "D-s" omit goals and/or objectives, schedules, and vital information about teaching methods.

The "C" syllabus will offer a few general course goals (but no specific student learning objectives), clear grading criteria and course policies, academic dishonesty statements, an assignment calendar, and a somewhat more thorough course description. The basics are covered, but no sub-text stretches the student intellectually.

"B" syllabi, however, begin to illustrate the intellectual rigor of a course and reflect the instructor's seriousness of purpose. With good planning and effort, they model detailed specificity and conceptual complexity. "B" syllabi may incorporate objectives with action verbs to state what students are expected to do to fulfill the objectives. Quite at ease with linear thinking, "B+" syllabi may even integrate their goals and objectives into Bloom's Taxonomy, leading us to critical thinking. These dense, high-performance documents convey high expectations for both teacher and learner.

The "A" syllabus takes us one step further as we move into the realm of creativity and risk. Authors of "A"syllabi ask the "why" questions that truly matter. They personalize the document and make it simultaneously user-friendly and detailed. They experiment with new process and content in ways guided by their teaching philosophy. Often their syllabi place the course in a larger context by exploring how it meshes with the world we live in. (see Bruce Clemens' "Sustainability" and my "Global Issues" in Best Practices Box).

BENEFITS FOR STUDENTS

Well-designed syllabi send a variety of messages conveying a business-like and professional atmosphere. And the first order of business in most courses, the syllabus, sets the tone for the semester. Teaching and learning require effective communication, and a syllabus that fails to do so cannot auger well for what follows. Studies report that many students fear the unknown when entering a new course-which a clear and comprehensive syllabus helps to alleviate. If it remains a touchstone, referred to often by teacher and learner, then its benefits continue to accrue.

As we revise our syllabi and think creatively, we also move toward a learner-centered model, which has profound implications for how we conduct our business. Judith Grunert (1997) illustrated this approach in her comprehensive "learning-centered syllabus." A study by Ana Serafin found that a "more detailed and informative syllabus" improved student grades. Since using a maxi-syllabus for my introductory course, I have found that "A" grades have jumped from 10% to 20% and "B" grades from 20% to 30%, although students below the class median have not shown comparable improvement.

Business Professor John Lough employed what his discipline calls "best-practices bench-marking" in analyzing the behavior of Carnegie Professors of the Year to see what makes them tick. Above all, he concludes that these great teachers are well-organized, which manifests itself in the "detailed precision" of the syllabi written by those he interviewed. Many favor active learning, and a few even use lesson plans.

In stalking creative syllabi, nothing has surprised me more than the value of lesson plans for courses taught every semester. They reflect the actual what and how of our teaching. Lesson plans also save chunks of time in the future, prevent backsliding by recording what works and what does not, and motivate us to share our best work with others. Good examples can be found at Discovery School.com. While intended chiefly for grades 9-12, many include applicable concepts and methods.

OTHER BENEFITS

Another benefit of sophisticated syllabi is their use in the evaluation of teaching. In this brave new accountable world, nothing produces such a rich harvest of soft data, enabling better evaluation of teaching and learning, as detailed syllabi. Soft data equals information, and serious syllabi contain plentiful and relevant information. Nevertheless, human nature seems inherently prone to the numbers fallacy: because hard data communicates in numbers rather than words, it is assumed more rigorous than soft data. We often need encouragement to do the right thing. In this context, instructors can encourage administrators to recognize the limitations of standardized student evaluation instruments of teaching and to use soft data like the syllabus more prominently in evaluating teaching.

The value of an assessment-oriented syllabus also extends beyond the classroom. In the 1990s, higher education responded to demands for accountability from oversight bodies with a pervasive assessment movement led by professional (non-teaching) Institutional Researchers. A major study concludes that these efforts relied on standardized out-of-classroom testing of student skills which produced hard data that the majority of faculty and administrators found lacking in relevance. Solid course syllabi provide concrete tools enabling us to ground qualitative assessment where it belongs: in the classroom experience. At least one accrediting body apparently agrees with me. The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) evaluates programs with "an assessment-oriented syllabus model for business courses," and its implementation at Grambling is described by Cunningham and Omolayole.

Researcher Robert Diamond points to cracks in the curricular foundation at three levels of the academy-individual courses, departmental programs, and general studies-each said to proceed randomly, rather than in concert. Academe can pursue a broader vision by using the exemplary syllabus as a fulcrum to unite the three academic levels in common pursuit of institutional mission statements.

In some states the syllabus is a legal covenant, which also behooves us to take these documents seriously. However, pedagogical imperatives should be the more compelling reason for taking pride in our syllabi. One apt metaphor suggests thinking of fine syllabi as doses of preventive medicine bound to save us time and reduce frustration in the future.

So what can we do individually and collectively to enhance syllabi? Some campuses have syllabus templates available for faculty members to use. Chairpersons and evaluation committees can encourage faculty to assess and improve their syllabi. One idea for a faculty development project might be to recruit someone from each department to engage in syllabus assessment and then to post exemplary syllabi on a website.

The importance of the syllabus may have gone unnoticed in our past. Now, however, as we pay better attention to teaching and learning effectiveness, we can indeed realize the significance of this "humble" document and raise it to its rightful place in our thinking.

I'm pleased to highlight some exemplary syllabi which can be reviewed on the Internet.

"Issues to Consider":

• Quality - Studies assessing syllabus quality indicate that many faculty members do not take the syllabus, or the act of constructing it, very seriously. It is all too easy for us to resist change, and we may not recognize the importance of the syllabus in communicating to students a sense of structure. Apparently, some of us also discount it because it seems destined for students eyes only. However, the call for accountability in the academy is now loud and clear, and seeking ways to improve our syllabus is one good way of responding to that call. What other document demonstrates tangibly our willingness to be held accountable?
  
  
• Stylistic Guidelines - No universal formula exists to construct a fine syllabus, and approaches vary by discipline. However, the more detailed, personal, interesting, and comprehensive it is, the better its prospects for success. Sloppiness in writing mechanics or style, carelessness in construction, and bare-bones brevity are common deficiencies. One evaluator decried the frequency of "listers and scolders." It behooves us to remember that the syllabus' tone sets the course's tone, and that we never get a second chance to make a first impression.

• Student Use - If we make a serious effort to enhance the syllabus to improve our teaching and the student's learning, then we are entitled to expect students to use it. A good syllabus becomes a dog-eared document. We encourage its use when we make it a working document with activities such as small discussion of certain parts, written syllabus critiques by the students, or quizzes on its content. Some might even feel tempted to nail the syllabus to the lectern with a 4" spike!

• Perception of Relevance - In general, we know that students put more effort into studying when they understand how a course's content is germane to their life experience. Therefore, well-conceived syllabi are able to transcend course boundaries by contextualizing it in ways that address how this course helps to prepare them for some corner of their world.

• The Web and Super Syllabi - Almost everything advocated in this essay is facilitated by the Internet. No longer are we educators limited to the resources of our own institutions. We can peruse syllabus templates from those cited below as references; we can examine exemplary syllabi referred to above as best practices. Enhancing syllabi involves better communication between teacher and learner--a goal worthy of the Web's miracles. Soon we may be putting our syllabi online rather than passing them out in class, or, designing them more graphically than verbally. And if that aids communication, why not?

References:

Altman, H. & Cashin, W. (1992). Writing a syllabus. Manhattan, KS: IDEA Center, Kansas State University, IDEA Paper No. 27.

Cunningham, B. & Omolayole, O. (March/April1998). An assessment-oriented syllabus model for business courses. Journal of Education for Business, 73 (4), 234-40.

Diamond, R. (1998) Designing and assessing courses and curricula: A practical guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2-6.

Grunert, J. (1997) The course syllabus: A learning-centered approach. Bolton, MA: Anker.

Hammons, J. O. & Shock, J. R. (1994) The course syllabus reexamined. Journal of Staff, Program, & Organizational Development, 12 (1), 5-17.

Lough, J. R., in Roth, J. K. (Ed.), (1996) Inspiring teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year speak. Bolton, MA: Anker, 212-25.

Serafin, A. G. (1990). Course syllabi and their effects on students' final grade performance. Caracas, Venezuela: Pedagogical University of Caracas (ERIC document 328 202).

Additional Resources:

Institutional Syllabus Templates:

Honolulu Community College
[www.hcc.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/writesyl.htm]

University of Minnesota
[www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/syllabus/]

University of Pittsburgh
[www.pitt.edu/~ciddeweb/FACULTY-DEVELOPMENT/FDS/syllabus.html]