Eastern Michigan University Syllabus Checklist2015

Syllabus Checklist July 20151

Eastern Michigan University Syllabus Checklist2015

Provided by the Bruce K. Nelson Faculty Development Center

Originally developed and assembled by Debi Silverman, MS, RD, FADA

For further assistance, review, or consultation on syllabi, please contact Director Peggy Liggit;

Updated: July, 2015

Your syllabus represents a significant point of interaction, often the first, between you and your students.When thoughtfully prepared, your syllabus will demonstrate the interplay of your understanding of students’ needs and interests, your beliefs and assumptions about the nature of learning and education, and your values and interests concerning course content and structure.When carefully designed, your syllabus will provide your students with essential information and resources that can help them become effective learners by actively shaping their own learning.It will minimize misunderstandings by providing you and your students with a common plan and set of references. From Grunert O’Brien, J, Millis, B, and Cohen, M (2008). The Course Syllabus, 2nd edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

“Every instructor has a persona, and every syllabus has a persona” – Dr. J.S. Dunn, jr., Ph.D. EMU First-Year Writing Program Director

Why a guide?

Many people at EMU have been designing and using syllabi for years. This guide is not a policy manual and it is not intended to enforce a format or insist on certain content. Times change, however, as do styles of learning, preparation levels and expectations, not to mention media and tools. We offer this as an opportunity to think afresh about syllabus form and function.

Table of Contents:

1. Planning: course design first
2. What is a syllabus for?
3. Checklist for syllabus content
4. EMU policies and syllabus texts for your EMU syllabus
5. Samples, guides and templates of syllabi

1. Planning: course design first

This checklist is not intended to assist with course design, but because an effective syllabus depends on it, planning should start with thoughtful course design.

Resources

When doing program development and curriculum planning, make use of the resources offered by the FDC,

The Faculty Development Center also provides selected readings and consultations for designing or re-thinking courses and programs
We find L. Dee Fink’s work particularly useful:

Also consider Wiggins and McTighe’s “Backwards Design” and ADDIE
This web page offers a number of other starting points:

In thinking about course design, consider the following queries (ideally before you begin writing the syllabus itself):

Flow and sequence of learning in a program

• What is the position of the course in programs of study (Gen Ed, Minors, Majors, etc.)?
• Have you fully conceptualized how your course fits into a student’s educational path at EMU?
• How does learning in this course develop from or augment learning in other courses?
• If this course is a prerequisite, what outcomes are expected of students enrolling in those subsequent courses?

Starting Competencies:

• What specific knowledge, skills, attitudes, or abilities are prerequisites for this course (including learning technologies)?
• How will you assess whether students signing up for your course have these starting competencies?
• What will you do if a few or a significant number of students are lacking in one or more of the competencies they will need for your course?

Learning Outcomes:

• What will students know and as a result of having successfully completed this course?
• What perspectives or ways of thinking will students be able to apply?
• What learning skills and attitudes will the students develop?

Note about learning outcomes: Learning outcomes should consist of explicit statements about the ways in which students are expected to change as a result of your teaching and the course activities.Write learning outcomes using action verbs such as “synthesize,” “create,” “teach,” or “solve”. If you find yourself writing “to understand,” “to learn” or “to know” ask yourself, “how will I tell that they understand/learned/know?” and use the answer to that question as the outcome. This site from Kansas State University offers some verbs to help prompt your thinking about how students show learning:

Instructional approaches

• Starting from the learning outcomes, what instructional strategies (lectures, projects, reading, homework, etc.) are most appropriate to elicit them?
• Given the level of learning fostered in this course, are the instructional interactions mainly teacher-student, or student-student?
• Taking into consideration that students have varied preferences, skills sets, learning styles and levels of preparation,can you offer variety of ways to challenge and elicit student learning?
• Have you taken principles of Universal Design into account?

Assessment

• Starting from the learning outcomes, what assignments, tests or other strategies are the most appropriate to assess them?
• Do assignments, tests, and other strategies elicit the level of learning students are expected to master in this course?
• How will the syllabus provide students with an understanding of this alignment between outcomes and grades?

Recommended Reading

Fink, L.D. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Dee Fink offers a taxonomy of learning: foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimensions, caring, and learning how to learn.This taxonomy goes beyond Bloom’s familiar focus on content knowledge by including additional features that faculty identify when they envision students who have completed the course.

Anderson L.W., et al (eds). (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing – A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is still a backbone for describing a hierarchy of cognition related to formal learning.

Ohio State’s web page on Universal Design:

For books on Universal Design, search the library catalog for “universal design” OR “inclusive education” AND higher education

More links for Student Learning Outcomes and Assessment from the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation:

2. What is a syllabus for?

Historical

Originally, a syllabus was just a list.The term was coined in the 1650s to describe a table of contents or index. "syllabus, n.". OED Online. June 2011. Oxford University Press. (accessed July 27, 2011)..

In American academia, a syllabus was at first just a list of topics or subjects addressed in a course or exam.Since the advent of mass education and particularly after the adoption of reproduction technology (mimeograph and photocopy), new elements were added: at first just the reading list and class schedule, and then everything from grading rubrics to elaborate behavior policies.

By the 1990s a new academic genre was born, laden with official policies and classroom rules that in some cases attempted to acculturate students to behavioral expectations right down to covering mouths when yawning (see: The Syllabus becomes a Repository of Legalese By Paula Wasley

Syllabus as Prospectus

These days, a syllabus is a key element in any college course. It often functions as a course roadmap or model so that students may make informed choices when selecting one course over another and be forewarned about the project they will be undertaking. Such a syllabus usually includes a teaching philosophy, context of the course subject, key questions or problems addressed by the course, justification for the relevance of the course, list material readings, all assignments and expected outcomes.

The prospectus syllabus is not just for students. It is also a record of the professor’s work, sometimes a basis for evaluation of a professor, and sometimes used to represent a course for program accreditation or for inclusion in programs such as General Education or Writing Across the Curriculum. In such cases, the teaching philosophy, outcomes and activities (readings, assignments, exams) are all necessary elements.

Syllabus as Contract

As syllabi became essential elements of every course, they became a convenient vehicle to set out rules, expectations and consequences, including everything that students are thought to need to know about a course and all the behaviors that a professor would like students follow.

The syllabus as contract is convenient, because it is one place to document the ever-growing number of statements about everything from immigration law to weather policies that faculty are required to supply to students.As Paula Wasley put it in an oft-quoted essay, “With its ever-lengthening number of contingency clauses, disclaimers, and provisos, the college syllabus can bear as much resemblance to a prenuptial agreement as it does to an expression of intellectual enterprise.” ( Section: The Faculty Volume 54, Issue 27, Page A1)In fact, syllabus texts are not legal contracts (some professors even add a syllabus statement noting “this syllabus is not a legal contract” for example but they are still considered a reliable document to preclude many student complaints and arguments.

Like the software that requires an “I agree” click before downloading, the legalese is unlikely to be read let alone absorbed by students until the moment when they are already contesting something. Faculty sometimes complain that it’s redundant to print them, as they are almost always part of published policies such as the Student Conduct Code. The reason these university policies stubbornly survive and multiply, however, has little to do with whether they are read by students or desired by faculty and more to do with fears of litigation.

While the syllabus may not be a legal document, those who teach at EMU arerequired to follow other legal documents, primarily university policy ( and their labor contract, and these include statements that could relate to syllabi, such as Policy Chapter No. 6.2.1 “Attendance and Class Schedules” and many others.

Enculturation, contracting a relationship

Many faculty turn to the contract syllabus not only as a repository for statements of university policy, but as a place to document their own priorities and expectations both for student academic work and for acceptable behavior. There is a blurry line between “one-inch margins on all essays” and “please wear a shirt.” The practice of spelling out rules and expectations no doubt began as instructions for assignments and rules about grading, and became elaborated in an effort to forestall students taking shortcuts. Such policies about make-up work and class participation easily progress to injunctions against tardiness, perceived rudeness and everything else.

Chat on blogs and sites such as the Chronicle of Higher Education ( and Inside Higher Ed ( frustration and dismay over classroom behavior. As the gap between student preparation and faculty expectations grow, faculty find themselves increasingly challenged. The syllabus may seem like the only place that an educator can set the tone and lay out explanations of what is desired and why.

While the list of rules and behavior policies grow, however, it seems clear that some students, and particularly those students for whom the rules are meant, are not taking it seriously( This leads us to ask whether there might be too many rules and not enough communication and whether a syllabus can ever really be the solution to the problem of unprepared students or students with different expectations

Are we really litigants?

In a backlash against policy-laden syllabi and the antagonistic relationship that they anticipate, some educators are questioning the values and expectations such documents imply, not so much by their content as by their tone. The syllabus as contract implies that the professor fears or even expects that students will be short-cutters and game-players if not outright cheaters. Embedded in all the rules and consequences is the implication that the class is indeed a kind of game where students strive for points and the professor is not even a referee but a fellow contestant (albeit one who controls more of the game’s parameters) from whom the student must wrest the points. Easily lost in this struggle is the reason we all came to the classroom in the first place: intellectual engagement and learning.

Syllabus as a learning tool

What would happen if we took a step back from the contract syllabus and re-thought the goals of this enterprise?It’s possible that better solutions might be found for the problems that a contract syllabus is intended to address.

Faculty sometimes complain that students are not socially prepared for college. Even if we avoid a debate about blame, class bias and the nature of high school education, and accept this complaint at face value, this still does not reduce the educator’s responsibility. If we posit that a lot of students are indeed unprepared socially for college, then what is the solution? A list of rules and explanations in a syllabus is one possible solution, but obviously one that does not work well. A curious educator would be likely to explore what it is that students are expecting from their college classes and to use that information as a basis for recognizing what is going to surprise or challenge them. In other words, If we start where the students are, we can better explain where we are taking them.

This approach echoes back to the prospectus model, but with one difference. While the old-fashioned prospectus assumed that students and educators shared culture and social expectations, a syllabus as learning tool offers a road map to the class that acknowledges the many different starting places of students these days, and (without pandering or condescension) communicates receptivity to their various experiences as legitimate starting places for learning.

Setting class ethos: this is not a game!

We would like to think that the goal of a class is indeed those outcomes that are dutifully listed, or perhaps more broadly the intellectual development of our students, or minimally the transmission of some facts or skills. But what does the syllabus tell most students? A typical contract syllabus tells students exactly the opposite: by foregrounding expectations and requirements, grades and deadlines, office hours, and rules and consequences, such a syllabus screams, “I am setting the rules here, and I am using the grade as the reward.” Thinking about people who find themselves in such a situation, some portion of them will react not with obedience but with strategy: “the rules that prof is putting in all caps don’t seem so important to me, but the reward is, so I’m going to figure out how I can most efficiently get that reward while ignoring the rules as much as I can, and in so doing I’ll know that I’m smarter and more efficient than my dutiful classmates.” Since the educator has already been framed as both the rule-setter and the rule-enforcer, any chance for dialogue is reduced to negotiation of the rules and outcomes.

If the class is not a game, then what is it? Scholars such as Ken Bain, Parker Palmer, L. Dee Fink and many others have explored methods to reset student expectations for hard, satisfying work and authentic learning. Approaches differ, but the key elements include: commitment to fostering learning rather than solely transmitting knowledge; a “willingness to take their students seriously and to let them assume control of their own education,” and a willingness “to let all policies and practices flow from central learning objectives and from a mutual respect and agreement between students and teachers.” (Bain 2004 p78-79 italics in original omitted).

There are many ways to reflect an expectation for authentic learning in a class other than in a syllabus, and it’s possible that the syllabus is not even needed in order to do so. For those who are interested, however, the syllabus as learning tool could include these elements:

• In addition to the usual contact information, a brief statement of research interests to let students see how this class is part of a larger intellectual endeavor
• Learning outcomes described as something offered to students, an invitation for them to commit to the outcomes rather than submit to them
• Assignments presented as invitations or challenges, with explanation of how the assignments will lead students towards their goals
• Assumptions about class ethos spelled out and the policies, timelines and rubrics presented in a tone of respect and trust.Some educators invite students to work together to set and agree on certain behavior policies and deadlines for their class. This ensures awareness of the rulesand creates significant commitment to them.

3. Checklist for syllabus content

Begin by checking with your Program, Department/School and College for any specific policies, statements, or formatting that must be incorporated into the syllabus. Various units on campus have specific required content, and some prefer a uniform style. Once the syllabus is completed, be sure to provide a copy to the Department Head before the beginning of the term.

There is no single model or template that would be appropriate for every program, class and professor. Syllabi reflect the professor’s teaching philosophy and intellectual approach to a subject, and as such they are an intellectual product that cannot be forced into a generic mold. This checklist recommends the basic content that students expect, and offers some suggestions to enhance learning. Links to samples and templates are available in the next section.