How redesigning your syllabus can transform your teaching, your classroom, and the way your students learn
Generations of teachers have built their classes around the course syllabus, a semester-long contract that spells out what each class meeting will focus on (readings, problem sets, case studies, experiments), and what the student has to turn in by a given date. But what does that way of thinking about the syllabus leave out-about our teaching and, more importantly, about our students' learning?
In Syllabus, William Germano and Kit Nicholls take a fresh look at this essential but almost invisible bureaucratic document and use it as a starting point for rethinking what students-and teachers-do. What if a teacher built a semester's worth of teaching and learning backward-starting from what students need to learn to do by the end of the term, and only then selecting and arranging the material students need to study?
Thinking through the lived moments of classroom engagement-what the authors call "coursetime"-becomes a way of striking a balance between improv and order. With fresh insights and concrete suggestions, Syllabus shifts the focus away from the teacher to the work and growth of students, moving the classroom closer to the genuinely collaborative learning community we all want to create.
"The syllabus is one of the central documents of academic life, the one thing every teacher needs to write and every student needs to read. Most syllabi begin with a course description, a statement of what the course is about. But how do we get there? How will our students get there? And where is there? This book by William Germano and Kit Nicholls is a field guide to, and collegial chat concerning, this fundamental but often overlooked document. It describes how syllabi work and don't work, offers advice and encouragement to the professor trying to finish yet another syllabus, and reimagines our students' encounters with our syllabi by reconsidering our own relationship to them. Sampling syllabi from a range of disciplines across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Syllabus asks such questions as: what is a reading list, and what is it for? how do we build human time into the semester's clocktime? and can a syllabus be a living thing? Germano and Nicholls argue that at its heart, a syllabus is not really about what students have to know, or what the instructor will do, but what the students will do. A syllabus designed around doing is not only a faster and more effective way to move students toward knowledge, they contend, but also, importantly, an invitation into a community of practice-one that includes the students, the instructor, and countless others who will enter the classrom through readings, images, designs, and theories. Reimagining the syllabus as a sort of constitution-a founding document that creates a community out of a group of disparate individuals-they show that a syllabus is, above all, a privilege and a responsibility, as one of the few forms of writing that can quite directly call others to act"--
"A passionate book about teaching well, using the syllabus as a framework within which to discuss how to embark with students on the joint endeavour of learning. I like its philosophy. . . . One for all who value teaching."
---Diane Coyle, Enlightened Economist
