Syllabus design: an occasional series. Part 4: Learning Outcomes Continued

by JG

In the last installment of this very occasional series, I talked about learning outcomes in a big-picture, ‘what are they and what’s the point?’ kind of way. Today I want to look at the issue more concretely, using an example from some of my own courses to make a few points. There are also a few ruminations about the point of graduate courses. So join me below.

A bit of background: this semester I’m teaching a graduate course for the first time. Two of them, in fact: one on Plato, one on Aristotle. And while this is an amazing opportunity (especially for someone who was a grad student themselves not very many months ago), it brings some interesting challenges with it.

As I was planning the class, I had to think about what the value for my students would be in taking these classes. I mean, there’s some intrinsic value in learning about the content of the classes (soul and immortality in Plato, and Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, respectively) but that could be said about any graduate course. And 'Hey, come be a captive audience to talk about my favorite things!' is a bit self-indulgent. It's great for me, sure, but what do the students get out of it?

The easy answer, and the one I presume we’re all most familiar with from our own time in grad school, is that we take graduate courses to learn to do what professional philosophers do regarding that topic. This would involve having two learning outcomes, something like: (a) fluency with primary/secondary literature on topic, and (b) ability to write professional paper contributing to scholarly debate on topic. And for students who want to do research in ancient, that makes sense.

But not every grad student wants to claim an AoS in your course topic. Some are just there to fill a distribution requirement, or to prep for a qualifying exam. And writing a research paper isn’t the best way to prep for this, because a research paper is typically going to address a very narrow topic. I also have a number of students who are aiming for teaching-focused jobs rather than research-focused jobs(note focused ≠ exclusive; see here), which let's be honest is the most likely outcome for most of us anyway. But there’s almost nothing in a typical graduate course to help grad students learn to teach the topic you’re covering (see here). Hence I don’t think it makes sense to have a one-size-fits-all approach to the class.

So, I thought a bit about how to design a graduate-level course that could accommodate the various aims your students might have. What I came up with was to give students three choices for their assignments, which reflect the three sets of learning outcomes I could think of for graduate students. Everyone has to do a couple reviews of the secondary lit from class, but the bulk of their assignments will come from one of three groups:

AoS Track: Give an APA-style presentation based on a 3000-word first draft of a research paper. Comment on another student’s APA-style presentation. Submit a revised 5000 draft of paper.

AoC Track: Give two 30-minute lectures on primary course content. Design a lower- division survey course syllabus and an upper-division topic- or figure-centered syllabus based on course content.

Exam Track: Write one additional article review. Take three mini-area exams, in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.

Corresponding to these three tracks would be three distinct learning outcomes:

AoS: Ability to write professional paper contributing to scholarly debate in ancient philosophy

AoC: Ability to teach upper- and lower-division courses in ancient philosophy

Exam: Ability to pass the ancient philosophy component of qualifying exams

This way of designing a course is a bit experimental, so we’ll see how it goes (it makes sense in principle, but principles of good teaching are hard to discover a priori). But I think it helps illustrate a few things worth thinking about.

First, the notion that learning outcomes are just a bureaucratic hurdle to jump through is, I think, wrong and unhelpful. It makes sense to think about learning outcomes across the board, even at the graduate level. A little forethought and creativity can go a long way.

Second, it’s important to think through the connections between the kind of assignments you’re using. As I suggested above, research papers make sense for some outcomes, but not for others, because they only require a subset of philosophical skills. Ditto for other kinds of assignments. Whatever you take the learning outcomes of your course to be, you should think through what assignments are conducive to those outcomes. Conversely, if you’re dead set on using a certain kind of assignment, then be aware that your students might only develop the skills involved in that assignment, not others.

Third, there is a variety of different learning outcomes even at advanced levels, and those outcomes might pull in different directions. Maybe you only care about some outcomes. That’s fine, so long as you design the class accordingly. Or, if you want to try to help your students develop all of them, then you might have to make them do many different kinds of assignments (rather than, say, hoping the relevant skills will develop on their own). Or, you can decide that you can’t have all your students meet all the possible outcomes for your course, so you need to decide how to pick and choose (or let the students pick and choose).

Like I said, this is my first time trying out this idea, so we’ll see if the execution works the way I hope. But the underlying ideas are, I think, on the right track. So hopefully this gives a more concrete example of the principles I discussed in my last post, about how to think through the connections between outcomes and class activity.

I’ll end with some questions, because I always like hearing what other people have tried. On either the student or teacher end, have you seen any interesting examples of the assignment-outcome relationship I’ve described? Tried something that failed in an instructive way? Or that worked better than expected?

Past Entries in this Series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Comments

[anonymous]

Jerry,
Your approach to the class is very creative, allowing students with different goals to pursue different projects, all of which have some significant value for the student. Further, it is an innovative way to do assessment guided by worthwhile learning outcomes.
I am curious if some students may perceive this to be unfair, given that others will be doing or not doing things they are doing. I do not think it is unfair, but I am curious how it looks from the student perspective.

[Jerry Green]

Good question, anonymous, and thanks! From what I can tell, the students seem to be on board with the different kinds of work involved, though of course they may have their own thoughts that I don't hear. But I have a pretty friendly, informal relationship with most of the grads here, and we all talked through the set-up in advance, so I think (hope) they'd tell me if there were any major problems.

From what I've seen so far, there are two complications to this way of doing things:
1) Its complicated. You have to sign up for different tracks, and different things are going on all the time. So you have to be more concerned with due dates and the like than you normally would. And you can't rely on your peers to remind you 'oh yeah, we all have a paper due in 2 weeks' or whatever.

2) Its not clear that the tracks are equally difficult. I did my best to make things come out roughly equal, but I won't really know if that succeeded until after the term is over.

Re: (2), I will say that the AoS track looks more difficult than the rest, but that's a least partially misleading. The AoC track requires teaching 2 classes, effectively, and that's more work than it looks. And I'm picky about good syllabi, so that assignment will also take more work than it could (i.e. you can't phone it in). FWIW, I have one student who was pretty upfront about trying to pick the least demanding track, and they went with the exams.

But even if the workload isn't quite even, I think that they think its OK. If you're an ancient specialist, you're going to put in more work anyway, so might as well have that codified. Same goes mutatis mutandis for the others. Tying the differences in work to different, self-selected goals I think helps justify those differences a bit.

But like I said, to some degree we'll just have to wait and see.

[anonymous]

Do report out at the end of the semester when you get student feedback. I am not so much interested in the evaluations, but the comments from students on the experiences they had. You may find that one group is more enthusiastic or vocal (or both) about how the course went. If I understand correctly, all the students will "endure" the lectures of those who go for that option. That is, the rest of the class will be the "test-audience" for the lectures. Is that correct? That will implicate them in to the others' experiences and assessment.

[Amanda]

I think this sounds great! A lot of professors never give a second thought to the question, "What are my students getting out of this class?" In fact, I think if most professors had that thought there would be far more classes like yours.

[Jerry Green]

Thanks Amanda!

Anonymous, I will do my best to remember to post an update. And you're right, the teaching sessions will be delivered to the rest of the class. I usually do a detailed course evaluation on my own at the end of class, so I'll be able to use that to see whether there are any big differences between how people thought about the class (though the combined sample size for both classes will only be about 20)

[Michel X.]

That's a really cool and interesting take on assessment, and I look forward to hearing more about how it goes/went. I especially like the fact that this kind of course design can go a long way towards helping to foster the kinds of skills/prep/professionalization we're supposed to glean along the way (e.g. having sample syllabi, learning to present at and write for conferences/publication, determining AOCs, etc.). I think I would have benefited a great deal from those kinds of exercises.

With respect to the AOC track, do you have any plans to sit down with the student (or have her submit another document) and have her explain/defend her selections, consult with you/peers about how to go about it, revise/refine her work, etc.

[Recent phd]

I just wanted to say that this sounds really, really cool! Especially having students in the AOC track write syllabi and practice teaching sections. I would think that the other students could also learn a lot from observing their classmates teaching sessions both pedagogically and in terms of thinking about diff levels at which to approach and pitch the material. The AOS track is also really practical in terms of giving students the opportunity to do what we do which is present papers and then turn them into articles. I hope the semester goes really well and I look forward to hearing more about how it went!

[Jerry Green]

Michael X: Exactly right about the AoC track. The title of this series is a bit of a give-away that I have some thoughts about good syllabus design, so I want to make sure folks at least have the right questions on their radars. I think one-on-one meetings to talk over their choices is the only way to do that.

Recent phd: Thanks!