An experiment
To test this, I abandoned the controlling syllabus. I now go to the first class with only a tentative timeline of readings and writing assignments. A few weeks into the semester, when students have a better sense of what kind of person I am and what the course is about, we discuss what might be the best way of assigning meaningful grades. We collectively decide what goes into a good paper or talk, what good participation means, and together create rubrics to assess them. While I make the judgments about performance, I give the students maximum flexibility and choice in what we do and how we do it—within the broad constraint that the course has to have integrity and coherence and that the grades have to be good measures of the level of student performance in the course.
I have done this for four years now, and it has been a wonderful experience. It is what I thought teaching should be like when I entered the profession. What is interesting is that the more I delegate decision making about course structure and rules to the students, the more discretion and leeway they give me to make judgments about their performance. For example, they consistently reject creating detailed marking schemes for things like participation (of the kind found on authoritarian syllabi), saying that they trust me to make a fair holistic judgment.
Faculty are often skeptical when I tell them about my experiment. They are quick to claim that it would not work for them because their particular situation is special: their students are different, their subject is different, their institution is different, and so on. No empirical justification is ever provided for these objections, and I suspect that they are grasped at because we have become deeply conditioned to think of the controlling syllabus as the only way to do things and are nervous about giving it up.
Completely abandoning a syllabus may not be possible for everyone. What replaces the controlling syllabus will undoubtedly depend on the subject matter, size of the class, nature of the institution, and the like, and there can be no universally prescriptive solutions. What should be universal, however, is the goal of moving away from an authoritarian classroom. In doing so, we need to be mindful that students have become accustomed to the controlling syllabus. Taking it away suddenly can disconcert them unless they are reassured that they can trust us, that our assessments measure important learning, that we have the competence to make judgments about their performance and meaningful criteria for doing so, and that we have the impartiality to be honest and fair. Accordingly, I spend a great deal of time and effort building such trust and creating a sense of community in the classroom among the students and between them and me. This is a harder but more pleasant task than creating a watertight syllabus, but it results in a much more rewarding experience for both the students and the teacher.
College faculty are fortunate in that we still have some level of autonomy in teaching. We should use that freedom to show our students how wonderfully rewarding true learning can be. Aristotle said that “all men by nature desire to know,” but we seem to assume that today’s students do not want to learn and have to be bludgeoned into doing so. The club we teachers use is the controlling syllabus. It is time to throw it away.
Mano Singham is director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education and adjunct associate professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University.
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the author’s name on the subject line.
การทดลองการทดสอบนี้ ฉันละทิ้งสอนควบคุม ตอนนี้ไปเรียนครั้งแรกมีเฉพาะเส้นเวลาแน่นอนของการอ่านและการเขียนกำหนด ไม่กี่สัปดาห์ในภาคเรียน เมื่อนักเรียนมีความรู้สึกอะไรของฉันบุคคลหลักสูตรคืออะไรเกี่ยวกับ เจรจาเรื่องอะไรอาจเป็นวิธีที่ดีสุดให้กับเกรดที่มีความหมายดี เราเรียกตัดสินใจอะไรไปเป็นกระดาษดีหรือพูดคุย หมายถึงการมีส่วนร่วมอะไรดี และร่วมกันสร้าง rubrics ประเมินเหล่านั้น ขณะที่ฉันทำคำพิพากษาเกี่ยวกับประสิทธิภาพ ผมให้นักเรียนมีความยืดหยุ่นสูงสุดและเลือกในสิ่งที่เราทำและวิธีที่เราทำซึ่งภายในข้อจำกัดกว้างที่มีความสมบูรณ์ และศักยภาพ และเกรดได้จะ วัดระดับของประสิทธิภาพของนักศึกษาในหลักสูตรที่ดีหลักสูตรฉันได้กระทำนี้สี่ปี และได้รับประสบการณ์ สิ่งที่ฉันคิดว่า ควรสอนเช่นเมื่อฉันป้อนอาชีพได้ สิ่งที่น่าสนใจคือยิ่งฉันมอบหมายตัดสินใจเกี่ยวกับโครงสร้างหลักสูตรและกฎนักเรียน การพิจารณาและกอจะให้ฉันทำการตัดสินเกี่ยวกับการปฏิบัติการ ตัวอย่าง อย่างปฏิเสธสร้างรายละเอียดโครงร่างสำหรับสิ่งที่ต้องมีส่วนร่วม (ของชนิดพบในประเทศ syllabi) การทำเครื่องหมาย บอกว่า พวกเขาเชื่อใจฉันต้องตัดสินแบบองค์รวมเป็นธรรมFaculty are often skeptical when I tell them about my experiment. They are quick to claim that it would not work for them because their particular situation is special: their students are different, their subject is different, their institution is different, and so on. No empirical justification is ever provided for these objections, and I suspect that they are grasped at because we have become deeply conditioned to think of the controlling syllabus as the only way to do things and are nervous about giving it up.Completely abandoning a syllabus may not be possible for everyone. What replaces the controlling syllabus will undoubtedly depend on the subject matter, size of the class, nature of the institution, and the like, and there can be no universally prescriptive solutions. What should be universal, however, is the goal of moving away from an authoritarian classroom. In doing so, we need to be mindful that students have become accustomed to the controlling syllabus. Taking it away suddenly can disconcert them unless they are reassured that they can trust us, that our assessments measure important learning, that we have the competence to make judgments about their performance and meaningful criteria for doing so, and that we have the impartiality to be honest and fair. Accordingly, I spend a great deal of time and effort building such trust and creating a sense of community in the classroom among the students and between them and me. This is a harder but more pleasant task than creating a watertight syllabus, but it results in a much more rewarding experience for both the students and the teacher.
College faculty are fortunate in that we still have some level of autonomy in teaching. We should use that freedom to show our students how wonderfully rewarding true learning can be. Aristotle said that “all men by nature desire to know,” but we seem to assume that today’s students do not want to learn and have to be bludgeoned into doing so. The club we teachers use is the controlling syllabus. It is time to throw it away.
Mano Singham is director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education and adjunct associate professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University.
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the author’s name on the subject line.
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..