Chapter 4. Conceptualizing Your Course

This section offers tips and strategies on course design, with particular attention to constructing and using learning goals to select readings, shape assignments, and plan activities. We offer suggestions for logistical preparation, and guidance for designing a syllabus.

Chapter Outline

Before You Conceptualize

• Creating a Course
• Adapting a Course
• Receiving a Course
• Being a Teaching Assistant
• Who’s taking your class, and why?

Course Design

• Learning Goals and Outcomes
• The Syllabus
• Course Calendar or Schedule
• Planning How You’ll Prepare for Class
• Course Policies
  • Attendance Policies
• Selecting Readings

Teaching Your Research (or Not)

• Getting Feedback

Before You Conceptualize

Creating a Course

When designing a course, you’ll need to budget time to consider how you will organize readings and assignments to satisfy learning outcomes, either those mandated by the department or that you create yourself. Planning a course from scratch is time-consuming, but also rewarding, as it offers you an opportunity to teach your interests and research (more on this later).

Adapting a Course

You may be assigned a course that has certain required components—including textbooks, particular lessons or units, or assignments—but that also may allow you space to teach topics of your choosing. Any requirements should be clearly communicated to you by your departmental contact. If not, ask for clarification about what kinds of flexibility you have in the course.

If you are adapting the course from one previously taught in your department, it’s especially important to try to get a copy of the existing syllabus and reach out to any colleagues who taught it in its previous iteration. What worked, and what didn’t? Consider asking them about what they might change, if they had the chance to teach the course again.

Receiving a Course

Some departments will require you to teach a syllabus using course materials that are already set in stone, or that allow very little space for modification. Ask other faculty in the department why the course is organized the way it is, and when the syllabus was last revised. Read through the assigned readings and see if the logic aligns with your understanding of the discipline, or whether your approach to the topic is in tension with the one currently represented by the course.

If you are receiving your course rather than constructing it yourself, it’s important that you understand the implicit assumptions the course is making about how knowledge is constructed in your field. If you disagree with the argument—say, for instance, if you are teaching a literature course where diverse voices are underrepresented, or a psychology course where students are expected to uncritically engage with theories you find problematic—you might raise your concerns with a trusted colleague at the Graduate Center, or on the campus where you’re teaching, or with TLC staff.

Being a Teaching Assistant

If you have been appointed as a teaching assistant for a course, you may have little say in determining the structure or contents of the course, but you can (and should) engage with the instructor about their choices, and how you might best support the instructor and the students in the class and perhaps take a lead on designing the structure of your discussion section.

For more information about teaching in specific disciplines and at different course levels (introductory, intermediate, advanced), see our TLC Guide to Teaching in the Disciplines.

Who’s taking your class, and why?

It’s important to think about the “audience” for your course. Why are students taking your class? Is your course a requirement? Are there prerequisites students need to complete prior to taking your course? Many courses are built upon prerequisites and it can be helpful to acquire some knowledge about what courses your students may have already taken before enrolling in your course. Remember, though, that while a course may presuppose that students will have a certain skill set, it’s not always the case that they do. For this reason, it’s a good idea to consider prerequisites as you plan, but also to anticipate how you’ll support students with different levels of preparedness for your course. You should also consider how your department is situated within the college to develop a sense of what students may expect to get from their time in your course and/or in your discipline.

• Does the department where you are teaching offer a major, and if so, how many students are in the major?
• Or is it one that’s often referred to as a “service department,” which offers introductory or skills-based courses to students who will then major in other disciplines?
• Will the majority of students in your course pursue careers in other different fields?

Another other reason that students may find themselves in your class is because of when it’s scheduled. CUNY students are busy. Many work at least part-time, and squeeze coursework in between jobs and responsibilities at home. As such, CUNY’s classrooms tend to look different at different times of day: if you teach early in the morning or after 5 p.m. you may have more older students who work full-time. If you teach during the day, your class may consist mainly of younger students who recently graduated from high school.

You’ll be able to glean a lot of this information from looking at your class roster on CUNYFirst, but this is also a great thing to ask students about directly during the first week of class. As part of class introductions, it’s often revealing to ask students why they chose the class, what they’re interested in learning, or other casual questions connected to their goals for the semester. This helps you get to know the class and also provides an opportunity to make some adjustments to what you cover based on student interest. Consider creating an anonymous survey using a tool like Google Forms or PollEverywhere to collect this information. For more information about using digital tools in your course, see chapter 8.

In order to best prepare to support your students, you might ask yourself the following questions:

• If yours is the one foreign language or political science course students will take on the path to becoming an accountant or a physical therapist, how might that affect the design of the course?
• If you are teaching a composition or writing-intensive course, how might the likely majors and career paths of your students influence the types of writing assignments you design?
• If you are teaching in a STEM field, is this a required course that students will need to apply to graduate programs and will they need to earn a certain grade to get accepted?

Course Design

There are a number of ways to approach the process of designing a course; regardless of which approach(es) you use, it is helpful to keep in mind the core aspects and work back and forth across them. These should each be included on your syllabus:

• learning goals and objectives,
• course narrative or argument,
• calendar/schedule, and
• course policies.

If you are teaching a course, such as a language or math course, where certain units need to be completed by certain points in the semester, you might start your planning by plotting those dates on a course schedule. Doing so may help you get a sense of the pacing that will be required, and help you begin to identify where you may have some flexibility in assignment design or instructional method.

Examining and considering your learning goals and working back from those goals to make decisions about content and assignments is known as backwards planning (or design). Backwards planning can help you sequence and scaffold the class, as it invites you to think not only about what you want to cover in the course but also how you will know that students have engaged with or learned the material being covered.

Some questions to consider in backwards planning:

• How will students demonstrate their progress? In other words, what kind of assignments or activities will they be asked to accomplish and how will that work help students satisfy each learning objective?
• How will you evaluate whether or not students reach the objectives? What assessment criteria will you use?
• How can you create space for students to set and pursue their own goals within the context of your class?

Learning Goals and Outcomes

A learning goal is a statement of what an instructor or program aims to do in a class, during a particular class session, or by completing an assignment. Learning outcomes are expectations of what students will be able to do after they’ve completed a learning sequence. Think of learning outcomes as the skills or set of competencies that students will take away from your course. These can be tied to big conceptual understandings and skills that are important to students who are taking required courses as well students majoring in the discipline alike: outside of the content and information of the course, what skills, processes, methodologies, etc. will students learn that can be applied across fields?

The following guidelines can help you create strong learning goals:

• Goals should be formulated to be as specific to your course and discipline as possible.
• If you are going to assess student learning goals separately, then list them separately.
• Use active verbs that represent a student’s ability to do something related to the course.

The verbs “understand” and “know” may be too broad. “Define,” “develop,” “build,” “explain,” “compare,” and “utilize” are examples of more active verbs that place the student in the role of the producer of knowledge.

When you clearly communicate learning goals to students, not only do you make assessment and course design easier, but you also give students a map and a clear sense of what’s expected of them, and introduce multiple ways and motivations to engage activities and material.

The Syllabus

A syllabus is both a practical document and a pedagogical one. Practically, the syllabus communicates key information and course expectations. It should let students know what will be expected of them, what policies they need to be aware of, and how they will be evaluated and supported. Pedagogically, your syllabus makes explicit the structure of the course, offers your students an arc for the semester, and highlights guideposts to help your students navigate along the way.

In general, your syllabus should include:

• basic information (course name and number, where and when the course meets, campus, semester, and year);
• your name and contact information (how and when to contact you);
• course description (your own and/or the department’s);
• learning goals;
• course materials;
• grading breakdown;
• course policies (attendance, late assignments, technology, etc.);
• campus policies (plagiarism, accessibility accommodations, sexual misconduct, etc.); and
• course schedule (a calendar with readings and assignment due dates).

Below are two model syllabi which represent two approaches to crafting this document. One is a straightforward, text-based document which lays out of the structure and expectations for a class. This approach will be familiar to most readers. The second model is what is called a “visual syllabus,” an approach to syllabus design which some students may find more inviting, absorbing, and accessible than familiar blocks of text. No matter which approach you choose, ensuring that your syllabus is clearly organized and readable is crucial to making sure that all students have a chance to begin the semester with an understanding of how the work of the course will proceed.

Figure 3. Sample Syllabus TemplateImage created by The Teaching and Learning Center and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To download this syllabus, click the green box above.Figure 4. Syllabus for Introduction to LanguageCreated by Instructor Inés Vañó García using Piktochart. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To download this syllabus, click the green box above.

Beyond covering the essential components and logistical information about your course, your syllabus should also articulate your course’s narrative or argument.

In addition to thinking about the syllabus as a practical document, you can be intentional by developing your syllabus as an artifact that establishes the narrative or argument of the class. This argument may be presented directly in the syllabus in a “course description” paragraph or may be communicated through structural elements like unit titles, thematic or conceptual considerations, the reading list, etc. The more specific and explicit you can be about the rationale behind your choices and intentions, the better. The course description can also give students a sense of what your values are and what makes your course distinct, as well as introduce elements of your teaching philosophy. Thinking through the syllabus as an argument for and of your course can be especially helpful when selecting readings. A syllabus with a strong narrative can also form the basis of a study guide for your students.

You might also consider inviting students to help shape or contribute to the trajectory of the course by soliciting their input. For instance, you might offer choices for when students complete an assignment, or offer students the opportunity to select topics or readings for a unit. The more students feel connected to the course’s narrative, the more likely they are to actively participate and learn. Welcoming student input on class content and policies can cultivate for students a sense of ownership over the course that enhances the experience for everybody, and makes a transformative learning experience more possible.

Make your syllabus as accessible as possible, in as many ways as possible. Hand it out in class, and post it to your course website or on Blackboard. If you make any changes during the semester, be sure you distribute and upload the revised version. Consider keeping parts of the syllabus as a “live document” or creating a system where students might write notes or make other annotations to it—built-in exercises or invitations to return to the syllabus can help keep both course policies and the course narrative fresh in everyone’s mind. It’s also important to ensure that your syllabus is accessible to students who use screen readers or other assistive technologies. Further information and resources are available through CUNY Assistive Technology Services (CATS).

To help make your syllabus readable, carefully consider what information you want to include and be mindful of the length of the document. Use headings to break up a long document, and be sure to keep in mind a clear purpose for the syllabus by asking yourself what belongs on your syllabus (class policies, structure, and expectations), and what might work better as a separate document (supporting documents, assignment details, resources).

Designing a course is often as much a process of taking away or cutting down material as it is adding readings and assignments. Being specific and intentional in what you select and why can help you decide what to pare down. When looking at the assigned readings for a given day, ask yourself, “What does each of these readings accomplish? Why am I assigning it? What would happen if I omitted this reading?" There are other workarounds like assigning different readings to different subgroups; or enfolding material into a lecture rather than assigning it to the students to read.

Course Calendar or Schedule

Write down the dates that your course meets during the semester (usually twice or three times a week for fifteen weeks, though some of the community colleges have a different schedule). Refer to the campus’s academic calendar to make sure you note when you won’t meet (holidays, breaks, a Wednesday that becomes a CUNY Tuesday, etc.) From this calendar, you can begin to plug in your major assignments (and any scaffolded steps and due dates) and readings.

Using the calendar as a guideline, begin to think about how you want to divide material, taking note of how the experience of the class flows through the calendar:

• Are you teaching in units or modules? (Sometimes dividing the semester into smaller, discrete chunks can help with your planning.) If so, pencil them in.
• Are there any extended breaks as the result of holidays? If so, how could you plan your course to make best use of that time? How can you include flexibility for holidays some students but not all students observe, like Rosh Hashanah, Eid, or Lunar New Year?
• What are the likely times your students will have major due dates in other classes, or may need a break from high stakes assignments?
• How might you distribute feedback and graded work throughout the semester so that you remain in varied and regular communication with your students?
• What are key times during the semester to check in with students who are struggling or haven't been present often or at all?

Once you have the dates penciled in, return to the goals you have for the course: what do you want students to walk away with, and how will you incorporate it into your class?

Some things to keep in mind as you fill out your calendar:

• Be aware of your own deadlines, and stagger due dates when you can. Staggering due dates is especially important when teaching multiple classes.
• Think about how long it takes to respond to student work (and how heavy it makes your bag if you are using paper submissions/exams).
• Keep in mind the requirements of the assignment and how much time you want to offer students to complete it. If you introduced the material on a Tuesday, do students have enough time to understand and implement that material for an assignment due on Thursday, or would they benefit from the weekend?
• Build in time (and due dates) for the scaffolded steps leading up to your big assignments (see next section).

Planning How You’ll Prepare for Class

Once you’ve decided on your course schedule, think about when and how you’ll prepare for individual class meetings:

• How much can you get done before the semester starts?
• When will you make time each week to set aside for class preparation?
• Can you schedule office hours directly before or after the class period? This way, you can either use them to prep for class, or get a head start on responding to and grading student work.

Keep in mind that course preparation has a tendency to expand and fill as much time as you have available to do it. You will be planning the structure of each class session in addition to doing the assigned readings, grading, managing student communication, and designing activities and assignments. However, as a graduate student instructor balancing many commitments, you may not always have as much time to prepare for class as you might like. Alternatively, you may find yourself over-preparing, running out of time in class, and not being able to cover all that you had planned. Be realistic and flexible about the amount of reading you ask students to complete, and adjust if needed. If students are overwhelmed by the reading, they may be less enthusiastic about participating in class discussions and activities.

Managing your time includes balancing class preparation with your own research and coursework. When you plan out your work time, you may find it useful to identify what your goals are for particular class meetings. Some use a time management tool like the Pomodoro/Marinara method to help track their time on task. You might also consider creating a focused work environment by checking your email only at scheduled times during the day and/or using social media blocking apps or timers limiting the time spent on these apps.

Course Policies

Course policies help establish the tone and expectations for your class. As you begin to think about the policies central to your class, be sure to consider your (or your department’s) expectations about the following:

• Will you accept late assignments? If so, is there a penalty for submitting material late?
• What are your goals for students’ use of technology in your course? How will you balance the need for technology in the class and protection of your students’ privacy?
  • In-class Policy Example: Laptops and cell phones can be used to take notes and participate in class activities. Personal use of devices in class is discouraged and will decrease participation grade.
  • Online Policy Example: Cameras are not required for online class meetings*, but you are encouraged to turn your camera on to participate in class discussions and breakout rooms.
    • * It is best practice to allow students to leave their cameras off if desired when they are attending an online class. We cannot require students to turn on their cameras when in personal spaces.
• What does a student need to do to be marked as "present” in your class?
• What counts as “participation”? Will that be graded separately and, if so, using what criteria?
• Do you have specific policies for exam days or paper submissions?
• Do you have any classroom etiquette policies?
• Is there space for inviting students into the process of determining policies and expectations for your class?

These policies should be clearly stated on your syllabus so that students know what to expect. Policies should also be uniformly implemented as they are written. Avoid stating one thing on your syllabus and doing another, as this is unfair to students and can cause anxiety and confusion.

Attendance Policies

If you teach in-person or online synchronously, there are many different ways you can choose to handle student attendance. Here are a few options to consider, though they each come with their own set of benefits and disadvantages.

1. Mandate attendance. A common version of this approach is to allow students a grace period of a certain number of missed classes (perhaps one or two weeks’ worth of classes), after which each additional missed class lowers the student’s grade by a certain number of points. Some instructors with this policy permit extra “excused” absences with no penalty (e.g. absences that the instructor deems are for a good reason, with required proof, such as a doctor’s note). This policy can be implemented, for example, by calling out names at the start of each class, by passing a sheet of paper around on which students write their names, or by using entrance/exit tickets (students complete a short assignment or written activity at the beginning or end of class, and turn it in in order to be marked as present for that day).
2. Incentivize attendance. For example, you might offer students extra credit for perfect or near-perfect attendance, or give students points for each class attended, which can or cannot be made up in other ways. Alternatively, this article titled, "Time to Make Your Mandatory-Attendance Policy Optional?" suggests allowing each student to choose at the beginning of the semester whether they would like to follow an incentivized attendance policy or a mandatory attendance policy, and then holding that student to the policy they chose for the rest of the semester.
   
3. Don’t take attendance. This approach does not reward students for coming to class, nor does it penalize students for missing class. You may still choose to discuss class attendance with students, explaining when and why it is or is not important to come to class. You may even ask students to agree to come to class as often as they can, using an honor system like a class contract or agreement. Make clear to students ways that they can “show up” to class besides their physical presence, such as participation and engagement in online activities or discussions.

Selecting Readings

As an instructor, you may have the opportunity to choose both what your students read, how much they read, and what they do with that reading. Steve Volk, director of the Center for Teaching, Innovation and Excellence at Oberlin College, offers some questions to guide your selection process:

• What do you want the reading to do?
• Where does the reading come in the course, and will this affect your students’ ability to complete it?
• Can less reading be more useful?
• If students are novices in our field, how should that impact our expectations for their reading?

There’s no magical number of pages that’s perfect for each and every course or class meeting. As you consider how many pages of reading to assign, make sure you’re clear–both in your planning and when you communicate with your students– about what kind of reading you expect students to do. If you’re assigning a brief reading, you might ask students to engage in close reading—carefully examining the language and rhetoric of a text—and annotating carefully.

If you’re assigning something a bit longer, like a book chapter, you might ask them to skim for the main ideas, or isolate 1-2 things they were curious about. If you’re assigning a whole book or particularly long reading, you might ask students to develop discussion questions, or you might assign subsets of the material to different groups of students and then put it all together in class.

Don’t assume your students know how you expect them to engage with different kinds of texts. During the semester, it could be beneficial to model the reading practices you expect, or to give students guidelines that encourage those practices. One possibility is to share a text you’ve annotated, or to annotate a text together using an overhead projector or online annotation tools, like Hypothes.is.

Figure 5. This is a snapshot of how students are able to collaboratively engage with selected readings using Hypothes.is. Image created by Inés Vañó García and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Click here for more examples of Hypothes.is in the classroom.

When selecting readings, make sure that students have the access and time necessary to fully engage with them—though also be prepared for some of your students not to have completed the readings before class. You should also consider:

• the type of text (theory, novel, textbook chapter, philosophy, poetry, etc.);
• whether the readings you’ve selected are inclusive of a diverse array of voices.
• what you want students to do with that text before, during, and after engaging with it;
• what you want the text to do (provide background context, be the basis for class discussion, supplement the lecture, etc.);
• what types of assignments might grow out of the readings
• whether the texts offers opportunities for place-based or problem-based assignments that would allow students to take a more active role in their learning;
• the cost of and access to the texts. High-cost textbooks can create access issues
  • Read more about designing a zero-cost textbook course and using open educational resources in Chapter 3.

Teaching Your Research (or Not)

Academics often conceive of research and teaching as two separate practices competing for time. It is never too soon to start thinking about how these activities can feed each other since they are at the core of our professional practice. Could your research (or an aspect of it) provide an underlying narrative for the course? Do you want your students to learn a methodology or a specific approach to your discipline? How would your research fit within a module or sequence?

To reach and engage students outside your discipline, you’ll have to introduce concepts that in your field may be taken for granted. What kinds of operations and adjustments will you need to make to present your research in accessible ways? What is the level of your students’ familiarity with your discipline?

As scholars, we spend a lot of time confined within very specific boundaries: a period of time, a geographical area, or a conceptual/theoretical frame. Gaining expertise and confidence talking about your research is a skill and is a major reason you should pursue chances to teach it. Many opportunities (of publishing, funding, or creating professional connections) depend on your ability to explain both the nature of your research and its value. You need to present your research as part of the big picture of your field or discipline, while conveying what is unique about your work. Teaching requires you to find a balance between the general and the specific as you consider students as your audience.

Even if you don’t see an apparent overlap between your research and your teaching, bringing them together when and where you can is a win-win-win situation. Make room to create that connection; it will be worth the effort.

Getting Feedback

It’s always a good idea to let a friend or a trusted colleague review your syllabus and give you feedback on both the sense of the course it conveys and how it reads as a document. The TLC offers opportunities for this feedback in the weeks and days before the semester starts; we strongly encourage you to make use of it. Even the smallest tweak to a syllabus—increasing the font size of a heading, clarifying the wording of a policy—can improve the experience for your students.