I need to remember to explain my reasoning behind assignments. That made a HUGE difference when I was teaching cross-cultural English and when I was teaching how to express abstract thoughts well.

Hopefully it will encourage students to engage with the class if they know why an assignment has been made. Which means, of course, that I will need to have a reason for my assignments.

I am looking for good questions to improve my teaching… What are some good questions?

Describe one very specific lesson from the … classroom that you’ll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

This question is from A personal inquiry into the scholarship of teaching by Mike Arnzen.

1. Remember to use graphics within the syllabus.

2. Review online syllabi for ideas.

3. Review business writing ideas.

from Doctorating

Though we all have to teach the “same” course in terms of the structure of the writing assignments and learning objectives, the content is up to us….

Since the learning objectives are about arguing and writing, I want them to argue and write about things that they’ll find . . . well, fun.

In the classroom, I try the best I can to flatten the power hierarchy. Of course I know that there are always extreme explicit and implicit power differentials at play, but we talk about them openly. I also talk about my role as a grad student, about the work I do, about how even I miss deadlines. They understand that I understand that the end of the semester is busy for everyone, and that we all have other things to attend to besides this class, but we still have to do it. Besides humanizing me—not always an easy task—the other upside is that they cut me a little slack if I’m late getting papers back.

In class, I’m fully invested, not only mentally, but bodily. I flail a bit more than I should, shout for emphasis, and generally run about the room like a maniac when it will make a point. In my class I have no shame and the kids know it. If I can embarrass myself a bit, they might be less afraid of embarrassing themselves.

…I always come to class early and talk to the students as they come in.

Pedablogue

Blogenspiel

Doctorating

Homework

Write everyday outside of class.
–Journal prompts online once a day and then removed.

Blog once a week.
–Give two days to write a blog post.

Comment three times a week.

Since I have worked on a paper on this, I thought this post was an interesting one.

There is something about the language of “valuing” working-class culture or approaches to education/learning that always strikes me as posing the danger of keeping the unwashed masses in their place …

as academics who come from working-class backgrounds, we have a set of class-based assumptions (that come from both the class affiliation of our upbringing as well as the class affiliation that we have acquired) that influence our ideas about how to educate our students, particularly if we’re educating students with backgrounds similar to our own. In other words, we come to the party with a set of assumptions based upon where we come from and where we’ve gotten to that on the one hand seeks to validate experiences that in our own quest for success were not necessarily validated, while at the same time we also believe in the system and we have acculturated ourselves into that system (even as we realize the constructedness of it), which means that a competing set of middle-class values are ultimately working in concert with our working-class values of origin. We stand in between the two value systems, and so our ideas about how to change education reflect that ambivalence.

I think it’s important, for those of us who’ve traveled from one class into another, to acknowledge that we, too, have assumptions based on that subject position that are traceable back to issues of class.
…
At the end of the day, I don’t think that I’m a class traitor by showing my students (or trying to show them) how to navigate middle-class-ness.

How does this relate to what I’m doing?

I said, in a paper proposal that we need to

understand the value patterns that these students’ communities have historically championed and call upon those values to encourage our students’ participation in building their fluency in composition. Instead of expecting them to immediately understand the preconceptions and presuppositions from which most of academia operates, we can learn their value patterns and invoke those as a means of engaging them in their own educational development (Sza).

This was in my “ensuring information literacy” proposal.

I agree with this.

What such syllabi often omit is any mention of learning. They list the assigned readings but not reasons why the subject is worth studying or important or interesting or deep, or the learning strategies that will be used in the course. The typical syllabus gives little indication that the students and teacher are embarking on an exciting learning adventure together, and its tone is more akin to something that might be handed to a prisoner on the first day of incarceration.

But I am repelled by 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.

from Death to the Syllabus!

Then there is this:

Include supplementary material to help students succeed in the course. For example consider providing one or more of the following:

Helpful hints on how to study, take notes or do well in class
Glossary of technical terms used in the course
References on specific topics for more in-depth exploration
Bibliography of supplemental readings at a higher or lower level of difficulty, in case students find the required text too simple or too challenging
Copies of past exams so students can see at the beginning of the term what they will be expected to know at the end
Information on the availability of videotapes of lectures
A list of campus resources for tutoring and academic support, including computer labs
Calendar of campus lectures, plays, events, exhibits, or other activities of relevance to your course
Online Resources that may be helpful to students
Provide space for names, telephone numbers, and email addresses, of two or three classmates. Encourage students to identify people in class they can contact if they miss a session or want to study together. (Source: “What Did You Put in Your Syllabus?” 1985)

which comes from Tools for Teaching from Berkeley

Then there is this:

Other Information That Can Be Included

lab use or safety procedures
additional support services
writing centers
tutoring centers
computer centers
library hours
strategies for success in your class
how to take good notes
sample test questions
detailed assignment expectations
guidelines for papers or reports

which comes from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching