Download your own copy of this page as a Google document.
The Task
Drawing on the discussion of Atmosphere and Ideal Impact Resources, we invite you to draft a generative memo in which you set out course and learner contexts, a working or existing course title, a new, revisited, or ideal course description, and a preliminary set of 3 student learning aims. These aims might relate to cognitive or affective components of the course, or in academic speak, to learning or developmental aims.
The Audience
Your main audience for this memo - even as you’re writing the memo now for your own first review, is students who will be enrolled in the course you're planning or revisiting. Write for your students, speak directly to them as the learners who will be present in your course rather than as consumers or idealized students. In writing for students as our audience, we move away from writing for just peers, just a curriculum committee, and we are called to avoid using past tense constructions that speak abstractly about what “the course" does or provides. It’s the teachers and the students who are the agents doing the work of the course. The course itself provides nothing as it is not an agent that does work.
Memo Organization
As you reflect and write, know that many drafting this reflective memo regularly move iteratively among the three components, and others take a 1, 2, 3 approach to making a first draft.
1. Create a Course Title, and follow it up with two short paragraphs setting out contextual information about:
These paragraphs are mainly for you as the writer and reader, an opportunity to consider the many contextual components that inform and impact the courses we design.
- Institution where will be teaching the course.
- For new teachers, this might require learning more about the type of institution - research one university, liberal arts or regional or community college, as well as the specific school or department where they will or hope to be teaching.
- Curricular context for your course
- Course level - general education, required sequence for department majors/minors, graduate or professional course.
- Course format - online (a)synchronous; inperson, which might include field, lab, internship, or community aspects; special room set up? elective or requirement for more than one major? is or has a prerequisite? is linked to other courses (labs, recitation sections, studios, practicum) during the semester it's offered?
2. Course Description (not less than 75 words, not more than 300 words)
Commonly, course descriptions are pulled from online course catalogs, or from earlier syllabuses that pulled those descriptions from catalogs, with an emphasis on disciplinary language that a peer or experienced scholar would recognize. More seriously, those passed along descriptions likely represent content that was covered in earlier instances, rathe than what you are expecting and supporting students to learn.
So, as you draft this reflective segment, please do keep your potential students in mind as your primary audience. Research on teaching and learning, course and syllabus design frequently notes that learners want to hear from us “what the course is about,” what they will learn because of taking the course, how they will learn, and how that learning will be practiced, assessed/evaluated. In thinking through “what the course is about” we have an opportunity to reflect on our courses as learning-centered - rather than primarily curriculum- or teacher-centered.
As a springboard for your thinking, do consult the “Sample Learning Syllabus Course Descriptions” pdf as composed by University of Minnesota instructors.
3. Write Student Learning Aims
- Draft 3 student learning aims - with these guiding points in mind:
- Write learning-centered aims rather than teacher-centered goals. You’ll find examples of converting aims to goals in the “Writing Aims” google document.
- Select verbs wisely so that you’re conveying to students what sort of actions they can expect to take as they prepare, practice, and demonstrate learning. The acronym SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Result-oriented, and Time-bound - provides a basic template for reviewing a course aim. “The Smart Aims/Objectives for Learning” pdf describes SMART aims, and includes examples linked to learning taxonomies offered by Dee Fink and Bloom.
- Aim to NOT use the infinitive version of verbs commonly linked to learning and teaching activities; for example: to understand, to know, to learn, to cover, or to appreciate. Infinitive verbs work as general descriptors, but are often too imprecise when it comes to naming specific levels and types of learning in writing course learning aims that serve as the foundation for assessments students will complete to practice and demonstrate learning.
- The Iowa State University webpage that summarizes the “Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy” model acknowledges that learning spans four dimensions of knowledge - Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, Metacognitive. These dimensions can inform us as we develop aims while working with Bloom’s seven cognitive process dimensions - Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create. For example, a Factual Understand aim will require a different precise verb than will a Conceptual Understand aim.
4. Share Your Draft
Consider using the “Revision Memo” google document to provide context and seek specific feedback from readers, who might include colleagues in your department, instructors you’ve met in teaching professional development programs, as well as recent students. You’ll also become your own follow up responder and reader as you work through the next stage of Course and Syllabus Design, which focuses on the role of Aims in course and syllabus design.