A beginning university instructor often struggles at first to organize the content of a course in a way that allows it to be communicated. With experience, university instructors tend to cover less content in order to... Click for more
A beginning university instructor often struggles at first to organize the content of a course in a way that allows it to be communicated. With experience, university instructors tend to cover less content in order to allow more time for students to practice disciplinary thinking. To focus the course on "how students think" rather than simply on "what students know" requires considerable realignment of an instructor's own thinking about what a course really is and how it might function. The "backward design" process for planning a course means stating as precisely as possible how you want your students to be different at the end of the course from how they were at the beginning (including what you want them to know, how you want them to reason, what attitudes you want them to adopt, etc.). These are the "learning objectives" for the course. Sometimes the departmental curriculum dictates the objectives, and at other times you will have to generate them yourself. Once the objectives are in hand, the next step is to figure out how you will measure student progress toward these objectives (testing, papers, portfolios, etc.). From here the planning proceeds to creating the activities and assignments that will allow students to practice on the way to meeting the learning objectives. It is at this point that your are ready to develop a calendar of events, assignments and deadlines. Finally, you will need to establish the course policies and rules that make sense given the objectives and the way you intend to manage the course. Click for less
