Advice Guides from: “The Chronicle of Higher Education”

1. How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive .................................... 3

2. How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging................................... 15

3. How to Teach a Good First Day of Class .......................................... 27

4. How to Hold a Better Class Discussion ............................................ 39

5. How to Create a Syllabus ................................................................. 53

6. How to Be a Better Online Teacher ................................................. 73

7. Small Changes in Teaching............................................................... 87

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Want to Reach All of Your Students?
Here’s How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive
ADVICE GUIDE

By VIJI SATHY and KELLY A. HOGAN

Common Questions ............................................................................................................................................... 4

3 Key Principles of Inclusive Teaching ..................................................................................................................... 5
Principle No. 1: Inclusive teaching is a mind-set. ............................................................................................................5
Principle No. 2: The more structure, the better for all students. ....................................................................................5
Principle No. 3: Too little structure leaves too many students behind. ..........................................................................5
5 Ways to Interact Inclusively With Students .......................................................................................................... 6
Get comfortable with periods of silence in your classroom............................................................................................6
Add structure to small-group discussions. ......................................................................................................................7
Allow anonymous participation.......................................................................................................................................7
Counteract self-perceptions that stunt student learning. ...............................................................................................8
Connect with students personally. ..................................................................................................................................8
Ideas for Inclusive Course Design ........................................................................................................................... 9
Design courses in which you speak less. .........................................................................................................................9
Give lots of low-stakes quizzes and assessments. ...........................................................................................................9
Incorporate TTQs — typical test questions. ..................................................................................................................10
Assess them before and after class, not just during......................................................................................................10
Reduce the stakes of major papers and tests. ..............................................................................................................10
Set clear expectations....................................................................................................................................................10
Connect with students through course content............................................................................................................11
How Will You Know If Your Efforts Are Working? .................................................................................................. 11
Survey your students. ....................................................................................................................................................11
Ask a peer to observe your class. ..................................................................................................................................12
Collect data. ...................................................................................................................................................................12
The Universal Benefits of Inclusive Teaching ......................................................................................................... 12
Resources ............................................................................................................................................................ 13
Books .........................................................................................................................................................................13
Journal Articles ..........................................................................................................................................................13
Podcasts and Websites ..............................................................................................................................................13
Training Opportunities...............................................................................................................................................13

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In many courses, the days after the first exam can be stressful. Some students might feel worried about the
results, or even doubt their abilities. So at the end of one challenging exam, a professor took a few minutes of
class time to reassure her students.

Her brief remarks led to the kind of email that every faculty member should want to receive: “The speech you
gave post-exam was something I needed to hear. Thank you for reminding me that I belong here and have the
potential to succeed.” The student’s words tell you a lot about the instructor’s teaching style.

You may wonder: Is the role of a college instructor to help students feel included and ready to thrive? Is that
something I should be doing? As champions of inclusive teaching, we say — emphatically — yes.

Besides teaching content and skills in your discipline, your role is to help students learn. And not just some
students. The changing demographics of higher education mean that undergraduates come to you with a wide
variety of experiences, cultures, abilities, skills, and personalities. You have an opportunity to take that mix and
produce a diverse set of thinkers and problem-solvers.

Teaching inclusively means embracing student diversity in all forms — race, ethnicity, gender, disability,
socioeconomic background, ideology, even personality traits like introversion — as an asset. It means designing
and teaching courses in ways that foster talent in all students, but especially those who come from groups
traditionally underrepresented in higher education.

Traditional teaching methods do not serve all students well. This guide is for any faculty member who believes,
as we do, that education can be an equalizer. We share tips here that any instructor can use to minimize
inequities and help more students succeed. We’re not suggesting a complete redesign of your courses, but more
of an overlay to your current teaching practices.

Common Questions
If you’re still skeptical at this point, you’re not alone. Here are some quick answers to typical questions we hear
about inclusive teaching.

I don’t teach about diversity. What does diversity have to do with my course, and why should I care?

Some instructors make the mistake of equating inclusive teaching with introducing current events or “diversity
issues” into, say, a math course. Of course you should offer diverse content, texts, guest speakers, and so on,
where they’re relevant, and there’s been plenty of talk about that in academe. But when we talk about teaching
inclusively, we choose to focus on the teaching methods that apply to all courses.

Are the tools of inclusive teaching just hand-holding? Shouldn’t students be expected to learn on their own?

Instead of hand-holding, we prefer the word “structure.” Without structure in any situation, you leave it up to
chance whether your goals are accomplished. For example, say you threw a party to bring together your single
friends. They are far more likely to meet a variety of people if you plan icebreakers and activities (high structure)
than if you simply provide space and time for the event (low structure). The same is true of learning: More
structure means more students will engage and learn from you and their peers.

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I understand these methods help certain students. But don’t they harm the ones who don’t need this kind of
assistance?

Coming back to our party analogy, the extroverted party lover is going to mingle and meet people in either a
low- or high-structure event. But the introverts (like us) who aren’t comfortable with random mingling won’t.
Helping those who need the structure doesn’t harm those who don’t.

My course has a lot of content I need to get through. Can I really adapt these teaching methods to my
discipline?

You’re not alone in believing that your course is unique in having too much content to make any changes. We’re
not advocating a total redesign — just that you consider making some tweaks that can be the difference between
retaining a more diverse population of students in your discipline, and not.

This all sounds good, but does it actually work?

Yes. We and others have seen positive changes on all kinds of metrics, including narrowed achievement
gaps, increased interest in our disciplines, fewer students off-task in our classrooms, and more students
expressing their thanks at the end of a semester.

3 Key Principles of Inclusive Teaching

We’ll get to the specific strategies shortly, but first the theory. All three principles convey the same message:
You, as the instructor, have the control to create experiences that level the playing field in your classroom.

Principle No. 1: Inclusive teaching is a mind-set.

For every teaching decision you make, ask yourself, “Who is being left out as a result of this approach?”
Consider: When you lecture, students vary in their ability to stay focused, pull out key ideas, and organize the
information. Is it “hand-holding” to provide a skeletal outline of your lecture in advance? Critics might think so.
But the result is that all students leave class with a set of minimal notes, a clearer idea of the main points, and an
expert’s example of how ideas fit and flow together. And in the process, your students now have a good structure
for how to take notes.

Principle No. 2: The more structure, the better for all students.

It’s worth repeating: More structure works for most undergraduates, without harming those who don’t need it.
Students come to your classroom today with different cultural backgrounds, personalities, learning differences,
and confidence levels. Their very diversity may seem overwhelming at times, but you can reach more of them by
sharpening the structure of your syllabus, assignments, tests, and pedagogy. In our experience, all students
appreciate and thrive from additional structure, and some benefit disproportionately.

Principle No. 3: Too little structure leaves too many students behind.

Some of the most traditional and common teaching methods — lecturing, cold-calling — aren’t very inclusive,
at least as they are commonly done. Certain faculty members even take pride in using the classroom to cull the
“weak” students from the “strong.” This is especially true in STEM fields, as we know from experience, since
one of us teaches biology and the other statistics.
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When we run faculty workshops on inclusive teaching, we advise participants to envision the types of students
who get left behind by low-structure teaching methods. To illustrate that here, let’s think about two hypothetical
students:

 Vanessa is a gifted student in a class with a Socratic approach — a low-structure method of class
participation. But she’s uncomfortable raising her hand or blurting out answers the way other students do.
The result: Her discomfort might be distracting her from learning, and her ideas are not part of the
conversation, so others aren’t learning from her. Vanessa would benefit from varied opportunities for
participation.

 Michael is an engaged student who is comfortable in class and in discussions, but he’s feeling like a fraud
because he received a failing grade on his first paper. Up to this point, he was able to do well by
memorizing a lot of content. Now he’s in a required course for his major that involves more analytical
writing and expects him to apply concepts. It’s a low-structure class in which his entire grade will be
based on how he performs on two papers and one exam. Michael would benefit from more practice —
that is, more low-stakes writing assignments and quizzes, and more-frequent feedback. The discipline
might miss out on an engaged student because he may feel that he needs to change majors.

Both cases show how a lack of structure can inhibit student learning and development. Conveniently for our
purposes here, Vanessa and Michael also illustrate the two main areas in which you can be more inclusive in
your teaching — via classroom interactions and course design.

5 Ways to Interact Inclusively With Students

Here are some tips that work for us. We teach small-sized courses as well as large ones filled with hundreds of
students seated before us in neat little rows. So don’t even try pulling out excuses like “My course is too large to
do any of this” or “My classroom space is not ideal for these techniques.” We hear you, but we’ve seen these
strategies pay off in all types of courses and classrooms.

Get comfortable with periods of silence in your classroom.

Think-pair-share is a gateway technique to active learning. It’s the versatile little black dress of inclusive
teaching. Yet we often shudder when we see it in practice, as faculty members tend to skip right over the
thinking part.

There it is, prominently in the name of the technique: think-pair-share. The thinking time is crucial for students
to form and own their individual thoughts before pairing off and sharing. Otherwise, you risk seeing some
students monopolize the discussion and others, like Vanessa, overwhelmed and left behind. That could cause
quiet students to prematurely accept other people’s ideas before considering their own, and lead those
dominating the discussion to think their contributions are more valuable. As the instructor, you know that good
ideas can come from any student.

Some instructors rush the “thinking” part of this exercise because they get nervous about too much extended
silence. Even five seconds of silence in a classroom can feel like an eternity. Back when one of us (Kelly) was
trying out new ways to break up a long lecture, a colleague observing the course said, “You use silence in the
classroom so well. I never thought about this as a tool before.”

We urge you to get comfortable with the silence so that all students have the time they need to think. Tell the
class, “I’ll give you two minutes to think or write silently, and then I’ll prompt you to pair up with your
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classmates.” Be prepared to repeat that every time you use this technique. If you know that you feel discomfort
with silence (most of us do!), you may want to use a timer to regulate it.

Add structure to small-group discussions.

A classwide discussion has its benefits, but not all students have the desire, confidence, or chance to participate.
Small groups give students a low-pressure way to vet their ideas with peers. Both of us use this time to walk
around the classroom and eavesdrop, often with the goal of affirming the work of a few students who could use a
confidence boost.

Yet this technique is not as inclusive as it could be, if you leave it to chance that the teams will function well
(low structure). Here are some ways to add structure to small-group discussion:

 Assign and rotate roles. Students who are at ease in class discussion, like Michael, have a tendency to
take over. By assigning and rotating roles (reporter, skeptic, facilitator), you increase the structure and
level the playing field a bit.

 Take time to teach students how to participate in small groups. Be explicit about some of the “rules,”
such as exchanging names before they get started and putting away their cellphones or laptops.

 Provide clear instructions on a screen or worksheet. We’ve observed many faculty members give a single
oral prompt, but that leaves behind students who have hearing loss, who have learning differences, or
who simply need to be reminded about the task at hand. Principle No. 2 about structure applies here, too:
Some people need visual cues, but offering them certainly won’t harm the other students. For more
advice on this front, read about “universal design for learning.”

Allow anonymous participation.

Not all participation and engagement in your course needs to be spoken. In a recent essay in The Chronicle,
Sarah Rose Cavanagh reminds us that anxiety is a huge barrier to learning. Students who are introverts, who feel
that they don’t belong in a college classroom, or who hold a minority opinion on some issue may need to engage
with the class in other modes besides public speaking. For example, some students with conservative viewpoints
may be reluctant to participate in a class discussion if they perceive that nearly everyone else has a liberal
viewpoint.

Here are two ways to use unspoken, anonymous participation in class:

 A low-tech approach: Offer a prompt and ask students to write an anonymous response on a notecard.
Ask them to swap cards, and then swap again. Start a class discussion with a few students reading aloud
the card in front of them.

 A high-tech solution: Choose a classroom-response system (clickers,web-based polling) or a discussion

board in which students are anonymous to one another but not to you as the instructor.

Note that both approaches would help Vanessa (our hypothetical student who is reluctant to participate in class),
as well as a student with unpopular political views. We recognize that speaking up may be a skill you are trying
to cultivate, and these techniques provide a way to build trust and help students gain confidence. Perhaps you are
starting to see how the same strategy in an inclusive-teaching toolkit can work to reach a diverse mix of students.

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Counteract self-perceptions that stunt student learning.

Two such self-perceptions that we frequently encounter are a fixed mind-set (versus growth mind-set)
and impostor syndrome.

A fixed mind-set reveals itself in comments like “I’m not a math person” (uttered more than a few times in the
history of higher education). To counter it, one of the simplest things you can do is talk about a growth mind-set
in class. Your goal: Help students to see that intelligence is not a fixed, predetermined quality but something that
can be developed via learning. Students may be particularly receptive after a challenging assignment or a
midterm exam. Share in class a task that you found difficult — maybe learning how to speak a foreign language
or play the guitar. Convey that learning is hard yet not impossible. One of our favorite words to use on this front
is “yet,” as in: “I haven’t learned how to do X well yet, but I’ll get there!”

One of us (Viji) recalls the first time she heard about “impostor syndrome” — the feeling that you don’t belong
on a college campus and might be found out as a fraud despite your accomplishments. How reassuring it was to
find out that the feeling was common, and even had a name. You don’t have to experience it to sympathize with
it. You don’t even need to understand it. You simply need to remind students: “You belong here.” If it feels
comfortable to do so, share a time when you felt like a fraud. It might help students like Michael who are
struggling with the rigors of college, and it won’t hurt those who aren’t. If you’re uneasy discussing your
personal experiences in class, consider other ways to communicate that message, such as through your syllabus,
emails, or study guides. The key is to be explicit about it.

Connect with students personally.

This is a skill you may need to practice. Even if making personal connections with students comes naturally to
you, it can be tricky to find the time, identify the appropriate words, and establish boundaries. But it’s worth the
risk. Here are some things that work for us:

Use their names. It’s an easy yet powerful way to connect. A few years ago, when we led a campus discussion
on how to create an inclusive learning environment, we were struck by the simplicity of the requests from
students. Many described how meaningful it was when an instructor made eye contact or called them by name.
You can try simple hacks like having students use name tents or hang folders over desks with their names in
large print. Don’t assume that, just because you won’t learn the names of all of them, you don’t need to
learn anyof them. Having trouble pronouncing some names? Ask for a phonetic spelling or a recording — a
request that is deeply appreciated by those of us with difficult names to pronounce (“How is Viji pronounced?”).

Model sharing pronouns. On the first day of class and on your syllabus, share your pronouns and invite students
to share theirs with you and with peers if they feel comfortable doing so. Students who identify
as LGBTQIA will appreciate this welcoming gesture, and all students will see you modeling inclusive methods
to avoid assumptions about students’ gender identities.

Fire off a quick note. We use this technique early and often throughout the semester. Send a note congratulating
students who were successful on an early exam or paper or who substantially improved. Reach out to those who
didn’t do so well and express your willingness to help them. Check in with students who have missed a class or
two. Whether through a mass email (now’s a great time to learn how to do a mail merge incorporating a
preferred name from your pre-course survey) or individual notes, reach out. The same principle behind learning
their names applies here: Just because your notes won’t reach every student doesn’t mean you should abandon
sending any.

Share some of who you are as a person. In his essay on “How to Teach a Good First Day of Class,” James M.
Lang reminds us, “We do not teach brains on sticks.” Similarly, students are not taught by brains on sticks.
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When you talk content, and only content, you run the risk of losing a human connection with them. Be careful
not to overshare or sidetrack your class sessions, but it’s OK to strategically place a photo of your pet
somewhere that students can see, or to offer an insight about yourself that is relevant to a class topic. Such small
gestures help students see you as a whole person. Both of us have found that students devour anything we share
about our home lives, favorite TV-show binges, and the like.

Acknowledge hard times. Viji started one recent class by saying how grateful she was for her time with students
that day because she was experiencing something personally challenging and appreciated the respite.
Surprisingly, several students contacted her afterward to express concern. Even more poignantly, they thanked
her for not feeling that she had to mask being sad — it provided a model, they said, for how to do the same with
their peers. Likewise (and unfortunately), there are events during the academic year that touch our students’
lives. Some are personal and some are societal, and you may feel uncertain how to express concern without
taking a side that may alienate some students. Here’s a useful phrase you might keep in your back pocket: “I
know this can be a tough time, and I want you to know I’m thinking about you.”

By adding structure to your teaching and by taking steps to connect with your students personally and
emotionally, you confirm for apprehensive students like Vanessa and academically struggling students like
Michael that they are not invisible. They belong in your classroom, and you care about them.

Ideas for Inclusive Course Design

Unfortunately, taking steps to interact with students more inclusively in your classroom might not be enough to
reach students like Michael who are at risk because of the way a course is organized — too much emphasis on
lecture, too few assignments, too much of the grade based on a single paper, midterm, or final exam. So the
second major question to ask yourself is: Who is being left behind by my course design?

Here are some ideas to bring more structure to your course design, and we hope, more success to all students,
including Michael.

Design courses in which you speak less.

A mistake that many rookie instructors make (and plenty of experienced ones, too) is to talk through an entire
class meeting. As a result, whenever they pose a question to students, it seems like an afterthought rather than
something intentionally baked into the course design. But you may object, “How will they understand if I don’t
explain it to them?” Our response: “How will you know they understand if all they’ve done is listen?” These
strategies have worked in our courses and align with best practices in pedagogy:

Give lots of low-stakes quizzes and assessments.

Your goal here is to evaluate the learning of every student in every class — preferably multiple times. Students
like Michael might not realize that they are struggling to retain the material until they fail the first exam. With
multiple assessments in class, students practice asking themselves metacognitive questions such as, “How do I
know I understand something?” As the instructor, you also benefit by learning immediately how many students
are having trouble with a particular concept or skill. For example, how will you change your approach if you
learn that only 60 percent understand a concept? By speaking less and asking more of all students, you avoid
allowing your impression of the course’s progress to be set by a few students who appear to understand the
material. Rather, you are obtaining evidence about the learning of all students, equally. If you teach a class with

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a large enrollment, don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea of multiple assessments. Many technologies can assist
you with grading, and you very likely can find help from your institution’s teaching-and-learning center.

Incorporate TTQs — typical test questions.

This simple technique came from one of our high-school calculus teachers. Since then we’ve shared the idea
with many instructors who found the tip useful. TTQs help students identify the caliber of questions they are
likely to encounter in a forthcoming assessment, and give you an opportunity to assess the learning of every
student. When a student like Michael has difficulty with the course TTQs, he has evidence that he doesn’t yet
understand the material and needs extra support. You can identify the Michaels earlier in the semester, and reach
out to them before the first exam.

Assess them before and after class, not just during.

The assessments should be low-stakes, yet required. For example, a vocabulary quiz before class will acquaint
students with terminology, while a short essay after class might emphasize deeper work with a concept. Pre- and
post-class assessments distribute learning over time and help all students build study habits that avoid cramming.
The most important aspect here is that the work is not optional. Why? Simply put: How often do you do optional
work in your job? When assignments are optional, compliance will vary and you risk exacerbating differences in
study skills, background knowledge, and the like. For example, if Michael has a false sense of confidence about
his understanding or is not managing his time well, he may decide not to participate in an optional study guide.
Some students have been trained to seize every attempt to practice, while others haven’t — and that, in turn, can
contribute to achievement gaps.

Reduce the stakes of major papers and tests.

When a single exam or a paper carries a lot of weight, you risk letting that one experience or day wreak havoc on
a student’s grade. You can downplay high-stakes work by: (1) allowing students to drop one or two of their
worst scores on exams, assignments, or quizzes; (2) letting students replace an earlier score with a cumulative
final grade; and (3) replacing some of the weight of high-stakes work with smaller, more frequent assessments.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen many students like Michael, who experience an early setback in a pivotal course and
feel their only option is to drop the class and change majors. Ask yourself: Is my grading scheme allowing
students to grow?

By relying less on lectures and more on activities that you can assess, you increase the validity of your grading
while helping students cultivate a sense of hope in the face of a single setback. As faculty members we often
emphasize the importance of resilience in the face of failure (learning requires making mistakes, right?). It’s
important that, in course design, we practice what we preach.

Set clear expectations.

Imagine you were asked to be part of a grant-writing team in which you had only a vague idea about how much
time it would take and what a successful proposal would look like. Fitting that task into your already busy life
would stress you out, right?

Similarly, a lack of clear expectations in course design can induce stress among your students. They need
dependable structure around due dates. They need to know what success looks like in your class. If those things
are lacking, that will be a source of anxiety and tension for some students (for example, those who work, are
parents, or have learning differences) more than others. You as the instructor can remedy their stress, while at the
same time getting kudos for being “organized” from the students who need less structure.

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Here’s a checklist of ways to set clear expectations — and avoid unnecessary stress and miscommunication —
around what it takes to be successful in your course:

 Write a syllabus that sets both semester goals and provide daily objectives. Those daily objectives
become a study guide for your students.
 Set deadlines for major assignments and exams at the beginning of the semester and try to stick to them.

 Provide clear instructions for each assignment. Be transparent about how students will be graded (i.e., use
a rubric) and what mastery looks like.
 Write exam questions that align with your daily objectives. If you come up with a good question that
doesn’t match one of your stated objectives, you have misalignment. Skip that question this semester and
use it next semester, after you have revised your objectives.
 Follow those “rules” and you might have students actually thank you, as ours have, often along the lines
of, “I never wondered what I would be tested on or how to write a good paper, because it was clearly
laid out. I just had to put the work in.”

Connect with students through course content.

Of course, not all students will have an immediate passion for your discipline, and you will have trouble
attracting and/or retaining some groups of students more than others. Consider how Harvey Mudd
College reached gender parity in its computer-science and engineering majors within just a few years. One way
was to focus on content. For example, many women had an interest in biology, so the computer-science
department added a section of its introductory course related entirely to applications in biology.

As you introduce content in your course, constantly ask yourself: “Why should a student care about this?”
Consider your own material and the diversity of students in the class. Choose a few student personae and come
up with links to content, readings, and skills that might be compelling to them. For example, in a biology course,
a student from a farming town might be interested in how research in the discipline transformed pest control in
crops. In a statistics course, a military veteran might be interested in how data can be analyzed to compare
civilian and military life. Putting yourself in students’ shoes and asking, “Why should I care?” can lead to deeper
learning in your course and your discipline.

How Will You Know If Your Efforts Are Working?

Just as you assess students on their learning, you should assess your teaching practices and course design for
inclusiveness. How?

Survey your students.

This one is the easiest. And we always learn something when we survey our own students. At the beginning of
the semester, ask students what makes them feel included in a course. Check in again midsemester to find out
what they think could be improved, so that you can make a few meaningful changes for the second half of the
course. At the end of the semester, both of us have an added question on our student evaluations of teaching that
reads: “In what ways did I (the instructor) convey that I cared for all students’ learning?”

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Ask a peer to observe your class.

Because there is only so much a peer can focus on in a single class session, ask your colleague to comment
specifically on whether you offer students a diversity of ways to participate, and whether your “instructor talk” is
as inclusive as it could be. If you have an instructional team (co-instructors, teaching assistants, or undergraduate
assistants), your teammates may have insights on the inclusivity front.

Collect data.

Given that one of us is a statistician, we hope you aren’t surprised by the suggestion that you collect and analyze
some data. Talk with folks in your campus teaching-and-learning center about data you might want to track and
how to analyze it. Start small by seeking to answer a particular question you care about.

The Universal Benefits of Inclusive Teaching

If you need any further motivation, consider a comment one of us received from a first-generation college
student: “Believe it or not, when I walked into the start of this class, I was defeated and didn’t believe in myself.
With your help, I started believing that I could achieve the things I wanted to achieve.”

Or this one from an international student and person of color: “In one class, you presented one of my answers
(anonymously) to the whole class, and it was such a huge encouragement for me. I am proud to let you know that
because of your inspiration, I switched my major.”

You will have your share of Vanessas, Michaels, and plenty of other types of students. They are different
students with different needs, yet many of the solutions are universal. Again, inclusive-teaching methods won’t
harm students who don’t need the additional structure, but will help level the playing field for those who do.

We hope the concrete steps we’ve outlined here provide a road map to make sure your classroom interactions
and course design reach all students. When we as faculty members include more students in the learning, we
empower them to achieve and show that we care about them and their sense of belonging. If we’re really
fortunate, they’ll make a home in our disciplines and help tackle the biggest challenges. Who knows? They may
come to love our disciplines as much, maybe even more, than we do and to pay it forward.

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Resources
Books

 Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, by Thomas J.
Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling.
 How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, by Joshua R. Eyler.

Journal Articles

 “Inclusive Teaching,” published in April 2019, by Bryan Dewsbury and Cynthia J. Brame, as part of
the CBE—Life Sciences Educationseries of “Evidence-Based Teaching Guides.”
 “Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate
Classroom Equity,” published in CBE—Life Sciences Education, by Kimberly D. Tanner.
 “Getting Under the Hood: How and for Whom Does Increasing Course Structure Work?,” by Sarah L.
Eddy and Kelly A. Hogan, published online in 2017 in CBE—Life Sciences Education.

Podcasts and Websites

 On the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, a 2018 episode featured the two of us discussing how
“interactivity and inclusivity can help close the achievement gap.”
 The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has a web page on
“inclusive teaching resources and strategies.”
 Brown University’s Center for Teaching and Learning offers a helpful web page on inclusive teaching.
 For information on introverts and introversion, try Susan Cain’s website, The Quiet Revolution. She is
the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Training Opportunities

 Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching, offered regionally.

 “Mental Health First Aid,” an eight-hour course on how to help someone who is “developing a mental
health problem or experiencing a mental health crisis.”
 The Safe Zone Project, a free online source of curricula and other activities related to LGBTQ identities,
gender, and sexuality.

Viji Sathy is a teaching associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and an administrator in the office of
undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her Twitter handle is @vijisathy.
Kelly A. Hogan is associate dean of instructional innovation and a STEM teaching professor in biology at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is on Twitter@DrMrsKellyHogan. Their website on inclusive
teaching is here. They are writing a book on the topic with West Virginia University Press.

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14
How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging
ADVICE GUIDE
By Sarah Rose Cavanagh

Who Is This Guide for?....................................................................................................................................... 16

First: Why Care About Engaging Students at All? ................................................................................................ 16
The 4 Principles of Engagement ......................................................................................................................... 17
Principle No. 1: Cognitive Resources Are Limited. Emotion Trumps. ........................................................................ 18
What It Means ....................................................................................................................................................... 18
How to Do It ........................................................................................................................................................... 18
Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Candy, Candy, Candy ............................................................................... 19
Principle No. 2: Your Persona and Performance Matter, Like It or Not .................................................................... 20
What It Means ....................................................................................................................................................... 20
How to Do It ........................................................................................................................................................... 20
Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Nonlecture-y Lecturer .......................................................................... 21
Principle No. 3: We Are Intensely Social Creatures, Motivated by Community ........................................................ 22
What It Means ....................................................................................................................................................... 22
How to Do It ........................................................................................................................................................... 22
Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Bonding Over Brains ................................................................................ 23
Principle No. 4: Stories Are Our ‘Most Natural Form of Thought’ ............................................................................. 24
What It Means ....................................................................................................................................................... 24
How To Do It .......................................................................................................................................................... 24
Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Story-Centered Course ......................................................................... 25
The 4 Principles in Practice ................................................................................................................................ 26
Helpful Resources ............................................................................................................................................. 26

Consider a student in an introductory math class — let’s call him Alex. Alex had some unpleasant experiences
with math in high school. When he got to college, he tested into a math course below the level that would
count toward his general-education requirements. He is thus feeling wary about the semester, and resents
having to “waste” expensive college credit on a course that he is unlikely to enjoy and that won’t get him any
closer to his degree.

To have any hope of learning the material, Alex needs to actually involve himself in the course. He needs to
direct his attention to the lecture and the problem sets. He must be willing to use his working memory to
attempt solutions rather than daydream about his life outside the small windowless room full of equations. He

15
needs to decide the information is important enough to commit to memory and then be motivated to grapple
with it later, on his own time, to prepare for the exams.

Alex can do all of that — but he could use your help. As his instructor, you can stimulate his curiosity with an
inspiring and energizing presentation style, with activities and assignments that maximize his sense of control
over the material, and with expertise that helps him reach just a bit beyond his current abilities.

The psychologist Todd Kashdan writes, “If you want people to be interested, committed, and willing to devote
effort to learning, mastering, and using these skills for the long haul, then you can’t avoid the initial step of
stimulating excitement.” In short, if you really want a student like Alex to learn and succeed, something needs
to happen first: You need to engage him.

Who Is This Guide for?

Welcome to The Chronicle’s guide on how to make your teaching more engaging. This guide is for anyone
who wants to introduce energy or enthusiasm to their classrooms using methods that have been tried — and
found true — through research and in classrooms.

“Some teachers are naturally compelling and intuitively spark a zest for learning in students.
But most of us have to work at it.”

Certainly some teachers are naturally compelling and intuitively spark a zest for learning in students. But most
of us have to work at it. You can energize your classroom for Alex and every other student by using principles
familiar to both emotion scientists and pedagogical experts — principles available to any faculty member
willing to investigate and apply them.

Here’s what you’ll find below:

 A brief argument for why academics should care about engagement in the first place, and answers for
skeptics who believe that efforts to enliven the college classroom are frivolous and/or doing a
disservice to the solemn work of higher education.
 An explanation of four key principles of student engagement.
 Concrete suggestions on how to actually put each of those principles into practice.
 Anecdotal evidence from instructors in a variety of disciplines who have used the principles to teach in
creative ways.

First: Why Care About Engaging Students at All?

Let’s put an old misunderstanding to rest: “Engagement” is not a synonym for “entertainment.”

To care deeply about whether students are actively involved in class and interested in the content does
not mean you advocate coddling students or treating the college classroom as a free-for-all fun zone. In fact,
anyone who conflates engagement and entertainment is not only mistaken but also quite in conflict with the
psychology and neuroscience underlying how human beings learn, which demonstrates that learning requires
the motivated application of attention and working memory.

“When educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, they fail to appreciate a critical force
in students’ learning,” wrote the neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio in

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the book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. “One could argue, in fact, that they fail to appreciate the very
reason that students learn at all.”

Engagement is a necessary first step for learning — which is one reason why efforts to enliven your
classroom can’t be dismissed as empty entertainment. But beyond that, deep engagement in a course actually
requires hard work. “Engagement means setting up challenges for students that are meaningful beyond getting
a grade,” argues the writer and speaker John Warner, “challenges which encourage risk without unduly
punishing failure so they may experience the pleasure of resiliency and be enthused about trying again.” It is
less work for Alex if he remains unengaged — sitting passively in class not really absorbing the material and
only half-heartedly attempting to study.

Engaging Alex using a variety of methods to attract his interest and excitement doesn’t mean that you are
taking on the work of learning for him, or somehow cheapening your material. Instead, it is an invitation — to
take the initiative, to apply effort, to risk the daunting possibility of failure.

It is an open hand.
It is good teaching.
Here’s how to do it.

The 4 Principles of Engagement

I have organized some related strategies and research evidence into four core principles that you can use to
foster student engagement in your classroom. Readers will no doubt expect one of the four to be “active
learning.” This term has been repeated so often in recent years that it has started to lose its meaning. It is
pretty much canon now that an engaging classroom is one that incorporates active learning at least some of
the time. For that reason, I’ve threaded active learning throughout each of the four principles rather than
having it stand alone.

“ ‘Active learning’ has been repeated so often in recent years that it has started to lose its meaning.”

At its most basic level, active learning means getting your students involved in activities in class rather than
just passively listening. Jennifer Gonzalez, editor of the teaching blog Cult of Pedagogy, summed up the
concept quite nicely in the title of a blog post: “To Learn, Students Need to DO Something.”

It isn’t that lectures can’t be dynamic and engaging in and of themselves. Some lecturing is always going to
be required, especially in fields like the sciences and history. But to engage your students most effectively,
you should, wherever possible, try to involve them in their own learning.

Any number of popular techniques will do the job, including:

 Think/pair/share.
 Debates.
 Scavenger hunts.
 Jigsaw activities.
 Fishbowl discussions.
 Concept mapping.
 Polls and clicker-style questions.
 Class presentations.
 Peer teaching.

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For instance, Kimberly N. Russell, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, teaches
“Evolution of Sex and Gender in Animals.” Rather than lecturing on common misunderstandings about sex
and gender in nonhuman species, she divides students into groups and asks them to imagine discovering a
new alien species. They must sketch out male and female versions of the alien. After collecting the sketches
and examining them together, she and her students discuss the assumptions they made about the evolution of
sex in creating the sketches. They also talk about why science-fiction authors often assume that alien species
will be mammalian in appearance — for example, giving the female versions breasts, even when they are
otherwise fishlike or birdlike species. The students participate in both the activity and the resulting discussion
enthusiastically, Russell says, demonstrating more energy and engagement than on other days.

The well-established effectiveness of active-learning strategies is why they are threaded throughout the four
principles below.

Principle No. 1: Cognitive Resources Are Limited. Emotion Trumps.

What It Means

Decades of psychological science have shown that cognitive resources (like attention and working memory)
are sharply limited — you have only so much to go around. If you pay selective attention to a complex game
of ball passing, the odds are good that you will miss a man in a gorilla costume walking through the scene and
thumping his chest. Your ability to maintain focused concentration has its own strict limits. Working memory
can handle only the infamous seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information at a time.

All of these cognitive resources are required for effective learning in a classroom. Cognitive load
theory argues that in trying to grasp new material, students face several related demands: intrinsic
(understanding the task and how it is presented — e.g., reading and following lab instructions), germane
(those involved in the process of learning — e.g., acquiring new knowledge and skills in completing a lab
assignment), and extraneous (distractions — e.g., your lab partner cracking jokes while you are trying to
focus). To help our students learn, we must direct their limited cognitive resources to the tasks at hand rather
than to classroom distractions.

“Once you’ve hit the groove in your semester where everything’s running smoothly, shake things up”

One of the best tools we have to achieve that is emotion. We know that emotions evolved in order to motivate
behavior — to tag certain things as important either to approach (e.g., tasty food, attractive mates) or to avoid
(e.g. venomous spiders, rotten food). Emotional stimuli draw our attention and are more likely to
be remembered, much the way an angry face stands out from a crowd of neutral faces.

Liven your course content by connecting it to the emotional lives of your students and they are more likely to
dedicate their cognitive resources to their classwork than to the phone buzzing in their pocket or to their
anxieties about a calculus exam that afternoon. Present the material in the context of an arousing controversy.
Use a quick demonstration or a brief video clip to hook their emotions. With more cognitive resources on
deck, their understanding and future recall should benefit.

How to Do It

Chunk your class up into smaller time periods. Each one could be 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the
overall class time). Assign each chunk of time a subtopic and introduce it with an “emotional hook.” The
educational psychologist Kentina Smith describes emotional hooks as “brief lesson content teasers, relevant
activities, stories, songs, provocative questions, headlines, current events, images, demonstrations, videos, or
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case studies designed to stimulate interest, curiosity, and active interaction with information that can be
connected to course concepts.” Those hooks should not replace the day’s lesson, she says, but rather serve as a
trailer of sorts for it, to spark student interest and curiosity.

Choose activities and assignments that are clearly relevant to your students. That doesn’t mean you have
to be an expert on their personal lives or on contemporary pop culture. You can also make class activities
relevant to contemporary social movements, to future careers in your major, or to some transcendent
purpose. James Hauriteaches an introductory chemistry class for nonmajors at my home institution,
Assumption College, and aims to make the entire course relevant to students’ daily lives. All of the labs center
around chemicals and materials that students interact with regularly. For instance, they evaluate bottled water
versus tap water, test both for pH, conductivity, and taste, and then debate why so many people choose bottled
over tap. His nonmajors do the same sorts of labs and practice the same skills learned in a traditional
chemistry lab, but their curiosity about the material is aroused because of its direct relevance to their lives.
Relevance attracts interest and motivates engagement.

Invite students to solve a mystery of your field. Present a persistent puzzle in your discipline. Mysteries, as
the writer Ian Leslie put it, “inspire long-term curiosity by keeping us focused on what we don’t know. They
keep us ‘alive and active’ even as we work in the darkness.” Presenting unsolved mysteries also sends a
message that students could have a hand in creating new knowledge in the world.

Interrupt the routine. Especially once you’ve hit the groove in your semester where everything is running
smoothly and students now can anticipate everything that is going to happen in your classroom, shake things
up. Keith Johnstone, an actor and teacher, writes of the power of interrupting routines in his book Impro. All
storytelling (more on that in a bit) involves describing a routine and then interrupting it. Two families are at
war and hate each other — but their children fall in love. A little girl visits her grandmother — who has been
replaced by a wolf. It is the interruption of the routine that arrests our attention. If you find that certain
successful strategies prove less effective as the semester progresses, try a dramatic shift in routine.

Make it funny. Course-relevant humor is a good way to liven up the classroom, because in order to
understand the joke, you have to process material twice — once to understand the frame of the joke, and then
again to understand the sudden reversal that triggers the humor. An entire body of research called
the “instructional humor processing theory” supports the value of cracking quips in the classroom to improve
student learning. So use your own humor if you are naturally funny. And if you’re not, use someone else’s
humor, via memes and videos that are easily found on the web.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Candy, Candy, Candy

Every October, Heather L. Urry, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, focuses her
“Experimental Psychology” course on a topic that is on everyone’s mind as Halloween approaches: candy.
When discussing research study designs, she has her students evaluate the evidence behind a friend’s
“Hierarchy of Candy Goodness Model,” which organizes types of candy into tiers of deliciousness. Tier 1 has
Reese’s, Kit Kats, Twix, and Snickers, while way at the bottom on Tier 4 is candy corn and “anything with
marzipan.”

In a prototypical semester she might have students taste-test Reese’s (Tier 1) versus Hershey’s (Tier 3) and
rate their feelings of enjoyment and gustatory pleasure. Students design a mini-study, collect the data in class,
run the statistics, and make conclusions about whether or not their data support the Hierarchy of Candy
Goodness. They can also debate theoretical constructs like: Do students’ pre-existing biases about candy
influence the results? Does knowing the hierarchy ahead of time affect the results?

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She has two aims here — to teach students about this type of experimental design and to give them some
hands-on practice with it. Her candy activity achieves both. Conveniently for our purposes, it also illustrates
an effective use of an emotional hook — students begin immediately debating the merits of the Hierarchy
(“How dare they put Almond Joys on Tier 3?”) and are eager to find out whether or not their data support the
model.

The free chocolate doesn’t hurt, either.

Principle No. 2: Your Persona and Performance Matter, Like It or Not

What It Means

In a compelling 2016 profile in The Atlantic, Teller — the silent member of the magic act Penn & Teller —
shared his insights on teaching, having taught high-school Latin for six years before turning to a life on the
stage. He argued that, before anything else, the job of a teacher is to help students fall in love with the subject
matter. “That doesn’t have to be done by waving your arms and prancing around the classroom,” he said in
the interview. “There’s all sorts of ways to go at it, but no matter what, you are a symbol of the subject in the
students’ minds.”

“You may have a knee-jerk reaction against the idea that college teaching is, in some sense, a
performance art.”

Teller’s ideas about teaching are consistent with scholarship on several fronts:

 Research on “emotional contagion” suggests that emotions and moods are likely to spread among
members of a social group. That phenomenon is at work in the college classroom, too. For
instance, research indicates that your enthusiasm as an instructor is indeed contagious and helps
predict variables like student motivation in the course.
 An 8-year longitudinal, qualitative study of undergraduates and alumni at Hamilton College found that
students quite often reported choosing their major based on taking introductory courses with
particularly dynamic professors.
 Research studies on various aspects of pedagogy — on teaching evaluations, on student learning
outcomes, and on student “reactance” (defensive, negative reactions to a course that can spread from
student to student) — all show that one of the best predictors of good course outcomes is an
instructor’s use of something called “immediacy cues” — primarily nonverbal social behaviors like
eye contact, gestures, varied vocal tone, and movement. Students “read” such cues to decide if you as
the instructor are enthusiastic, effective, and in the moment.

You may have a knee-jerk reaction against the idea that college teaching is, in some sense, a performance art.
But as an instructor, you are using your words, props, and actions to try to get students involved in and excited
about something you are involved in and excited about. The degree of effort and enthusiasm you invest in
your presentation will be evident to your students and may, in part, determine how much effort and
enthusiasm they will invest in your class.

How to Do It

Observe yourself in action, or get someone else to. People who do any form of public speaking are often
advised to record themselves and then watch the video to spot areas for improvement. Try videotaping one of
your classes. Do you sway back and forth in a distracting way? Say “um” too frequently? Talk to only one

20
side of the classroom? If the idea of watching yourself teach is a bit too nauseating, you can always ask a
colleague to sit in on your class and give you feedback. Many teaching centers or faculty-development
programs offer this service. A colleague’s evaluation of your videotape might reveal a few behavioral tics that
tend to discourage student engagement, and you can work on avoiding them.

Focus on your immediacy cues. A videotape of your teaching might also reveal a lack of behavioral cues
that would encourageengagement. It is probably best to work on one at a time so you don’t appear distracted
or awkward. Focus one week on making more eye contact, another on moving around the room, and another
on being sure that you’re not lapsing into a monotone. An easy immediacy cue to adopt is to use language that
invites students to see the course as a communal effort (“today we are going to …” versus “today I am going
to have you …”).

Watch good communicators in action. In his widely viewed TED talk, “Teach Teachers How to Create
Magic,” the Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin recommends visiting places where people are
already skilled at the art of public performance and audience interaction — like rap concerts and the black
church — and taking notes on the techniques people use to enliven their performance and energize the
audience.

Take risks, and freshen up your material. In my own teaching, I’ve seen certain activities that used to
reliably induce enthusiasm fall flat over time. I’ve realized that it’s probably because an activity loses its
ability to hook student interest as I smooth out all of the rough corners and present it with more polish and less
raw enthusiasm. As Kevin Gannon, a historian at Grand View University and director of its teaching center,
writes in his Teaching Manifesto: “If I want my students to take risks and not be afraid to fail then I need to
take risks and not be afraid to fail.” Inject new material. Try new things. Experiment.

Jazz up before class. My go-to, for better or worse, is coffee. A friend of mine ramps up for large lectures
with loud heavy-metal music. Some people need to be sure they have a full belly; others work better on an
empty tank. Whatever puts you in an energized state, do it before you teach.

Get enough sleep. I am a bit of a sleep evangelist. I won’t belabor the point, but to have good energy in any
area of your life, I believe you need to be well rested.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Nonlecture-y Lecturer

As part of a recent research project on student learning, I observed some of my colleagues teaching in various
disciplines. One such course was “Introduction to Art History,” taught by Elissa Chase, a lecturer at my
campus. On paper, her lesson plan would look like a straight lecture via PowerPoint for a solid hour, sending
a shudder down the spine of diehard advocates for flipped classrooms and active learning.

But in practice, her “lecture” was instead a lively, enthusiastic, energetic tête-à-tête. She began each class with
a music video related — often very tangentially — to the day’s topic and played loudly over the classroom’s
speakers. She then invited students to guess its relevance. For instance, one day she played Taylor Swift’s
“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” because they were covering the Reformation. The result:
Students started the class curious and thinking ahead to the topic of that day’s lecture.

Chase proceeded to conduct the class like a vibrant conversation. She spoke quickly and energetically, in a
way that made you sit up and pay close attention in order to keep up. She moved quickly around the lecture
hall. She knew all of her students’ names and would often query them or make sarcastic quips that set them
laughing. They knew they could be roped into the lecture at any moment, and so seemed at attention and eager

21
throughout the class. Time passed quickly, and at the end, I leaned over to one of my research assistants and
murmured, “I’ve never been interested in art — but I really wish I could take this class!” And I meant it.

Teaching with gusto, whatever strategy you use, is key to student engagement.

Principle No. 3: We Are Intensely Social Creatures, Motivated by Community

What It Means

Human beings are not just a social species — we are an ultrasocial species. We crave community and form
groups easily. Our ideas, emotions, and theories about how the world works spread as easily as cold viruses in
midwinter. Michael Tomasello, a psychology professor at Duke University, believes we are so ultrasocial that
even when we’re alone in our own head, thinking our own thoughts, our sociality is still stamped all over the
moment. “Thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room,” he writes.
“It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of
playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for
an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a
sociocultural matrix.”

A college course is a group of human beings working together for up to 15 weeks on a mutual enterprise.
There, the sharing and influence is explicit, baked into the very structure of the endeavor. Establishing a sense
of community in the classroom helps predict whether your students will participate in class discussions, have
high or low levels of anxiety, and even have better grades.

“Learn their names. You’ve probably heard that a million times, but it doesn’t make it any
less true.”

It is particularly important to make sure that all of your students feel equally welcome and equally valued in
the conversation. Students whose identities and backgrounds vary from those of the rest of the class (in terms
of gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability status, social class, etc.) may feel less able to easily
join the community, and so it is critical that you plan carefully how to help them feel included.

In How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, Joshua R. Eyler, a
historian and director of the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence, provides an extensive review of
the research supporting three fundamentals for a social classroom:

 A sense of belonging.
 A classroom-management philosophy that privileges community building.
 An instructor who effectively models intellectual approaches.

How to Do It

Learn their names. You’ve probably heard that a million times, but it doesn’t make it any less true. If it is at
all feasible given your class size, learning your students’ names is a powerful first step in establishing a warm
social climate in the classroom. See some names on your roster that you aren’t sure how to pronounce?
Consult Google before the first day of class.

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Make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute. A variety of techniques can be used to that end:

 Mix classwide debates with small-group discussions, since introverted students might feel more
comfortable speaking up in a small group of peers.
 Don’t call on someone too quickly after you’ve asked a question. Waiting a bit allows those
who require more time to gather their thoughts (and courage) to participate.
 Question stacking — a practice in which students indicate by some gesture or nod that they have
something to contribute and get added to a list that you work through during discussion — can also
allow for a greater number and variety of students to participate. While it can be
controversial, progressive question stacking, in which the professor prioritizes marginalized voices
that traditionally get silenced, can help you establish that diverse voices are valued in your classroom.

Work as a class on a shared project. Rather than asking students to work alone or in a small group, unite the
entire class on a major project. In a beautiful example of this, a biology instructor recently replaced his final
exam with a class project that developed a children’s book on the topic of the course.

Diversify your curriculum and your teaching strategies. Mix up the voices that are included in your course
content so that students hear from people with a variety of backgrounds and life histories. Vary your teaching
strategies and assessments so that students with different skill sets and different strengths have an opportunity
to shine. Rather than offer separate policies for students who need learning accommodations,
practice universal design, so that all students have access to policies that benefit students with disabilities. As
the prototypical example of universal design goes, having sloped curbs doesn’t just help people using
movement aids like wheelchairs, but also helps the elderly, parents pushing strollers, etc. The same is true
of universal design in the classroom. As an example, you might provide captioning and transcripts for any
films or videos you show in class. This practice will benefit not just hearing-impaired students but all students
in understanding and taking notes on the material.

Build community in small ways. Instead of a traditional roll call, do a question roll where you take
attendance that day by having everyone answer a fun question about their favorite movie or food. Or offer
a two-stage exam, in which students complete the test on their own first and then have an opportunity to work
together to earn more points. You don’t have to wait for the first exam to begin building community, either.
As James Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College who writes regularly on teaching for The
Chronicle, reflects here, the first day of class is a great time to begin laying the foundation.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Bonding Over Brains

Many colleges have attempted to ease the transition from high school with the introduction of learning
communities for first-year students. The models vary but involve some mix of shared classes, dorms, and
extracurricular activities.

As a professor, I was part of a freshman learning community with a colleague, Michele Lemons, who teaches
biology at my college. The same group of new students took both my “Introductory Psychology” course and
Michele’s “Introduction to Biology” course. To demonstrate that true knowledge spans disciplines, we
dovetailed our topics at several junctures — talking in both courses about neurons and brains, eating and
motivation, the biology of vaccination and the psychology of why some people opt out of life-saving
vaccines. Outside of class, we met with our students for occasions that were both social and intellectual — for
instance, we all had breakfast together one morning before class while a nutrition expert answered student
questions about healthy eating. Michele took the lead on a community-building project in which students
worked together to craft a miniature science fair on basic aspects of neuroscience, which they presented to
local middle-schoolers during Brain Awareness Week.
23
It was delightful to get to know these students on a deeper level than I usually do, and to joke with them in
settings outside of class. I think it was also valuable for them to see their professors socializing. As these
students continued in their studies over the years, and occasionally showed up in some of my more advanced
courses, I would always smile when I saw their names on my roster. I like to think they felt the same.

Principle No. 4: Stories Are Our ‘Most Natural Form of Thought’

What It Means

You might notice — as the psychologists Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson once did — that some
words, with just a handful of syllables, seem to contain entire storylines. Words like “betrayal” and
“crucifixion.”

Schank and Abelson argued that stories are our “most natural form of thought.” A narrative weaves together
otherwise isolated bits of information into a meaningful whole, linking them in important ways but also
chunking the information so that it takes up less space in working memory and connects to existing threads in
long-term memory. The causal relations in stories and the use of reliable narrative structures are also thought
to benefit understanding and remembering.

“The stories you tell in your classroom can be about your own intellectual path, about people
who have lived through different historical eras, about patient case histories. Whatever their
type or shape, tell stories.”

Clearly stories are a way to engage students. The stories you tell in your classroom can be about your own
intellectual path, about discoveries in your field, about people who have lived through different historical eras,
about patient case histories, or about previous students who went on to succeed. Whatever their type or shape,
tell stories.

How To Do It

Share your own stories. Research confirms that, when it’s done well, disclosing anecdotes from your own
personal history can motivate and inspire your students. As David Gooblar, a lecturer in rhetoric at the
University of Iowa and author of the blog Pedagogy Unbound, wrote, “When you talk about yourself to your
students, you signal to them that you trust them and see them as worthy confidantes. That, in turn, encourages
students to feel more at ease, to open up themselves and commit more fully to the class.” Obviously, sharing
too much and too often is inappropriate and likely to detract from your credibility, but qualitative
research suggests that students appreciate, in particular, hearing stories of their instructors dealing with
academic obstacles and overcoming them.

Share your field’s stories. Perhaps you teach in a discipline like math, where the subject matter seems very
divorced from the idea of personal stories. But every field has its stories of frustration and discovery, of
accidental solutions and sudden new insights. So share the stories of how specific scholars or entire fields
traveled a path to discovery. In fields like psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and health sciences,
considering or attempting to solve case studies of people who have struggled with disease, brain injury, or
mental illness can engage, reduce stigma, and spread awareness all at once. You could even elicit the help of
advanced students or alumni to come back and tell stories about how their early training benefited them on
internships or working in the field.

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Create stories in the classroom. Immersion games like the famed Reacting to the Past in history have
enviable track records of student engagement, with students volunteering to come in for extra class time. Even
if you don’t have time for an extensive immersion game, brief role-plays can also energize the class.

Focus on the whole journey. To really maximize the stories you use in class, don’t just include a narrative
with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, include a story that includes both a goal and an obstacle. In
his book on science communication, the actor Alan Alda describes how, in giving a talk, he often asks for a
volunteer to carry an empty glass across the stage and place it on a table. He then asks the volunteer to fill the
same glass to the brim with water and carry it back across the stage. He tells members of the audience that
their entire village will die if even a single drop of water is spilled. It’s nonsensical — the audience doesn’t
even live in a village, never mind share one, and who will do the smiting? — yet people are on the edges of
their seats watching that second glass. The point here: Students want to be a part of the story; give them a
reason, even contrived, to be invested in the outcome.

Your students have relevant stories to tell. Inviting them to share those stories can do double-duty for
engagement and inclusion. “Teachers can devise activities for students to share their diverse
experiences,” writes Dena Simmons, assistant director of education at the Yale University’s Center for
Emotional Intelligence. “These could include spoken-word performances, written pieces, podcasts, videos,
other multimedia and art projects, or even simply one-on-one lunch conversations with classmates or
educators.” By inviting your students’ stories, you demonstrate your interest in them and their potential for
contribution to your class and to your field.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Story-Centered Course

James Lang, the English professor and Chronicle columnist on teaching, recently structured his entire upper-
level British literature seminar around stories. The course covers four major historical time periods, and he
began each with a set of true historical narratives that set the tone for the rest of the unit.

For instance, he introduced the unit on the Romantic Period (1789-1832) with two contrasting stories that
sharply illustrated the socioeconomic divide that would inform all of the literature they read next. One story
was of George IV’s lavish ball that included such extravagances as exorbitant amounts of food and
champagne and an artificial river complete with bridges and greenery and cavorting fish. The juxtaposing
story concerned a 5-year-old boy who worked as a chimney climber. Chimney climbers were small boys sold
to chimney sweeps by their parents to climb up inside chimneys to clean them of accumulated soot. In short,
they were sold into a painful, dangerous life that often ended in death from cancerous tumors, suffocation, or
being trapped in the chimney. One chimney boy was beaten to death by his master while witnesses failed to
intervene.

The contrasting lavishness and penury, excess and grime, frivolity and tragedy provide a frame for all of the
works that the students will encounter for the rest of the unit, and help set the historical stage. The emotions
and moral imperative suggested by the stories are also likely to light a motivational fire under the students,
create an itch to address the problem — even if just by reading and writing about it.

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The 4 Principles in Practice
I received my Ph.D. in psychology in 2007, but I became a psychologist over a decade earlier, as a teenager in
Cheryl LePain’s Advanced Placement class in psychology. At the time all I knew was that her course was
highly engaging and deeply motivating. But reflecting on the experience now, I see that she practiced all four
of the principles outlined in this guide:

 Emotions: She engaged our emotions with one part intimidation (horror stories about the difficulty of
the AP test) and one part inspiration (how much psychologists had unlocked about the human mind,
how much remained to unravel).
 Performance: She was a charismatic and passionate lecturer, who put a lot of thought into her
classroom performance, and who frequently employed humor.
 Community: With only eight students, LePain had us pull our desks into a semi-circle around hers —
all the better for developing a community atmosphere for considering high-minded subjects. She also
had us meet after school for fun study sessions.
 Stories: And she enthusiastically told stories about prison experiments and dream theories, and invited
us to see the material through her own lens of sophisticated understanding.

Most of us aced the AP test. More important, we learned deeply. In college, I would have to get to at least the
three-quarters mark of any upper-level psychology course to hit material that I hadn’t already mastered at
LePain’s feet. Several of us formed deep friendships that would endure both the passage of decades and our
scattering across the globe. A few of us, myself included, found a vocation. Cheryl LePain’s teaching may
have been informed more by intuitive artistry than intentional design, but anyone can learn and apply some of
the principles that informed her teaching — the same principles that informed this guide.

Helpful Resources
 Plenty of polling websites are available to help you ask “clicker” style questions in class or set up
discussions.
 Use concept-mapping software to illustrate connections among ideas or pieces of information.
 My favorite screen-capture software, for capturing internet videos or creating “flipped” lectures,
is Shiny White Box.
 Try attending a conference on Reacting to the Past to understand immersion game tools.
 You can find all sorts of classroom materials — discussion activities, icebreakers, and the like — on
the Cult of Pedagogy website.
 The podcast Teaching in Higher Ed, led by the warm and wonderful Bonni Stachowiak, provides
accessible, fun advice from some of the best thinkers in higher education.

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is an associate professor of psychology and associate director for grants and research in
the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. She is the author of The Spark of
Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotion and the forthcoming HIVEMIND:
Thinking Alike in a Divided World. You can find her on Twitter @SaRoseCav.

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How to Teach a Good First Day of Class
Advice Guide
By James M. Lang

Four Key Principles ............................................................................................................................................ 28

Principle No. 1: Curiosity............................................................................................................................................ 28
Principle No. 2: Community ....................................................................................................................................... 29
Principle No. 3: Learning ............................................................................................................................................ 29
Principle No. 4: Expectations ..................................................................................................................................... 30
The Syllabus Components .................................................................................................................................. 31
The Students .............................................................................................................................................................. 31
The Space ................................................................................................................................................................... 31
The Technology .......................................................................................................................................................... 32
The Wardrobe Question ............................................................................................................................................ 32
The First Day of Class ......................................................................................................................................... 33
English Composition .................................................................................................................................................. 33
A History Survey Course............................................................................................................................................. 33
An Upper-Level Psychology Course ........................................................................................................................... 34
A Mathematics Course............................................................................................................................................... 35
After the First Day ............................................................................................................................................. 35
The Learning Management System ........................................................................................................................... 35
The Next Class and Beyond........................................................................................................................................ 36
The Last Day of the Semester .................................................................................................................................... 36
The First Day Online ................................................................................................................................................... 36
A Lasting Impact......................................................................................................................................................... 37
Resources ......................................................................................................................................................... 38
Books...................................................................................................................................................................... 38
Articles ................................................................................................................................................................... 38
Online Guides From Teaching Centers .................................................................................................................. 38
Videos .................................................................................................................................................................... 38

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I was 21 years old when I first stepped into a college classroom as an instructor. My master’s program had
assigned me to teach a composition course and gave me a brief orientation to teaching the week before the
semester began. I was so close in age to my students, so nervous about how they would perceive me, and so
uncertain about what I was doing that I had precisely one goal for the first day of the semester: Get through it.

I managed to achieve that modest goal. But over the course of the next couple of decades of full-time
teaching, I have become much more aware of the extent to which the first day of class sets the tone for
everything that follows. In her book, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the
Science of Emotion, the psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh explores how humans quickly make initial
judgments of people, on the basis of thin slices of evidence. “On the first few days of class,” she explains,
“students will be forming their impressions of you, and this impression may be more important than much of
what you do later.”

On that first day, I would argue, your students are forming a lasting impression not just of you as a teacher but
of your course, too. Their early, thin-slice judgments are powerful enough to condition their attitudes toward
the entire course, the effort they are willing to put into it, and the relationship they will have with you and
their peers throughout the semester.

So that first class meeting is a big deal. You want to give students a taste of the engaging intellectual journey
they will undertake in the coming weeks — and you have great flexibility in how you go about it. Helping you
to make that opening session as effective as possible, whatever your discipline, is the goal of this online guide.
What you can expect to find here:

 I’ll start, as we academics so love to do, with a little bit of theory — specifically, four core principles
that can help shape your planning for the first day of your course.
 Next, I’ll cover the logistics of a successful first day, including managing the space and technology as
well as getting to know your students.
 To show you how to put the principles and the logistics into practice, I will provide examples of what
a good set of first-day activities might look like in four disciplines.
 I’ll finish with some suggestions for how to support the good work you have done on the first day with
some follow-up activities.

Four Key Principles

As you devise your plan of attack, these four principles can help you decide which activities and approaches
will best draw your students into the course and prepare them to learn.

Principle No. 1: Curiosity

Too many college courses are presented to students as boxes of content: “British Literature From 1800 to the
Present,” “Inorganic Chemistry,” “Principles of Sociology.” We walk into the room on the first day of the
semester, open this box of knowledge and skills for the students, hand it over, and expect them to give it back
three months later in the form of a final exam. The first class meeting usually affirms that approach. We tell
students all about what we will cover throughout the semester, even though they might have no particular or
prior interest in our subject matter.

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The first day is the best day to spark your students’ curiosity.
Instead, consider the first day as your best opportunity to spark students’ curiosity and invite them into a
fascinating intellectual journey. In his book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain argues that
instructors should build and present learning experiences around deep questions and problems. Highly
effective college instructors recollect what first fascinated them about their discipline, pay attention to what
fascinates students today, and make a connection with those issues at the opening of the semester. Such
instructors reflect upon why the course should matter, and work to convey the significance of its content to
students as well as to their world beyond the classroom.

All of which is why I can’t recommend strongly enough: Do not begin the first day of the semester by
immediately handing out the syllabus. Instead, spark their curiosity about the content first, and then
demonstrate — with a review of the syllabus — how the course content can help satisfy that curiosity. (I’ll
offer some examples of how to do that in various types of courses below.)

Principle No. 2: Community

We do not teach brains on sticks. We teach human beings who are inspired by wonder, driven toward
community, beset by fears and anxieties, and influenced in countless other ways by aspects of their lives
beyond the purely cognitive. For both you and your students, those emotions will be at a peak on the first day
of the semester, and they can have a significant influence on what happens in your classroom.

You can support those emotions on the first day by fostering a sense of community in the room — even one
filled with several hundred students. The intellectual journey you are taking together comes in the form of a
caravan, and while you might be the leader, you want all of them to contribute to the learning experiences you
will be creating for them. How do you convey that?

 Humanize yourself to the students. Talk with as many of them individually as you can, and provide
opportunities for them to meet and communicate with one another. Humanizing yourself can take the
form of humorous asides, occasional self-disclosure, or a more formally narrated description of your
own intellectual journey.
 Greet each student, if you can. That’s impossible if your course has an enrollment of 200, but it’s
easily done in a class of 20 or 30. Instead of standing at the front of the room and calling out students’
names from the roster sheet, get to class early and walk around, asking students for their names and a
fact or two about themselves: class year, major, hometown. Let them know you’re glad they have
joined you for the semester.
 Giving students the opportunity to communicate with one another does not have to take the
form of the dreaded icebreaker. Instead, divide students into pairs or small groups, give them a
simple task to complete, and offer a brief injunction before they start: “Make sure you introduce
yourself before you start talking.”

The more comfortable the students feel with you and with one another from the beginning, the more
comfortable they will be participating throughout the semester.

Principle No. 3: Learning

You don’t have to wait until the second class meeting for students to start learning in your course. But that
doesn’t mean you have to jump right into content delivery on the first day. Here are two ways to get them
learning on the first day.

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  Ask students to try a cognitive task before they are ready. That’s one of the most effective ways to
spark learning, according to excellent evidence. This trying-before-they’re-ready can take many forms:
It might involve attempting to solve a problem before they have the skills they need to be successful,
or working to complete a challenging task that they will face again at the end of the course. The idea is
to require students to draw upon whatever knowledge they might bring into the room. As they retrieve
and work with that knowledge, they are creating what the authors of Make It Stick: The Science of
Successful Learning call “fertile grounds” for new knowledge and skill acquisition. Moreover, the
students’ partial or unsuccessful attempts to complete the task will give you a clear view of the current
state of their understanding — knowledge you can use to shape the opening weeks of the course.
 Invite students to think about the course from a metacognitive perspective. (But don’t freak them
out by using the word “metacognitive.”) In other words: What kinds of learning strategies will they
have to use in order to be successful in the course? What kinds of support will they need from you to
make those strategies work? Which strategies have been effective, or ineffective, for them in the past?
For example, ask students on the first day to reflect upon the best and worst classes they have taken in
your field (or related fields), and to describe what made those courses successful for them, or not. Put
their responses on the board. Then invite them each to draw up a list of individual actions they will
need to take to do well in the course, and a list of actions they would like to see taken by you and their
peers. Those lists can be shared and discussed in class, or afterward on the learning-management
system.

Don’t mistake content delivery with teaching and learning. Find ways to engage
students in activities that cause them to reflect and process.
Whichever approach you use, the most important element is basic: Set aside a chunk of class time on that first
day for students to engage in cognitive work of some kind. Writing class? Have them write on the first day. A
problem-solving course? Have them work on a problem. A discussion-based class? Get them talking. The
point is that if you want your students actively engaged in learning throughout the semester, actively engage
them in learning on the first day.

Principle No. 4: Expectations

The previous three principles will guide you in devising creative, engaging activities for opening day. But
you can’t ignore the fact that students will bring a host of expectations — things they will want to know right
away — into the room with them. What shape will the course take? What materials will they have to buy?
What tests, projects, and other assignments will they be required to complete? Are there any special
obligations (such as field trips or community service) that might differentiate your course from a typical one?

An important practical reason for answering those questions on the first day is that not all students who show
up will remain enrolled. Although you might be tempted to take it personally, my experience as an academic
adviser suggests that students tend to switch in and out of courses during the first week because of logistical
issues in their academic and personal lives. A student might discover on the first day that three of her courses
require extensive amounts of writing, and decide to postpone one of them until next semester, so as not to be
overwhelmed with deadlines. Or a student might switch into another section after he discovers that you have a
required field trip that conflicts with a family wedding.

So allot at least some time of Day 1 to outlining the parameters of the course beyond subject matter: materials,
assessments, policies, key dates and deadlines. You’ll have all of that information handily available to you in
the form of your carefully constructed syllabus. I don’t recommend reading the entire syllabus aloud in the
first class. Give students copies in print and online, and then highlight the major elements. Set aside time for

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questions. Some instructors give students a no-points or low-stakes syllabus quiz on or immediately after the
first day of class, ensuring that they get familiar with the most important aspects of the course.

The Syllabus Components

To put the four core principles into practice requires a few practical considerations before the semester starts.
Doing some advance work to familiarize yourself with the students, the space, and the technology available in
the classroom will support the activities you have planned.

The Students

I often teach English composition, a class designed for first-year students at my college. Some years ago, I
planned a first-day activity that asked students to think about what they had learned in their high-school
writing classes. When I arrived in the classroom, however, I discovered — while looking over the roster for
the first time — that more than half of the students were sophomore and juniors who had put off taking
composition until now. My first-day planning fell apart, and I had to devise another strategy on the fly.

I learned from that experience the importance of taking a close look at the roster in advance of my planning,
and uncovering whatever I could learn about the students before the semester began. At my college, the roster
lists only the class year and contact details of each student. But even that basic information helps me
understand the level at which I should pitch the opening of the course, and the kinds of first-day activities or
examples that will resonate with the actual students in the room, instead of the ones I imagined would be
there.

Before you walk in the room, you should have looked over your class roster, including
reviewing names and photos if possible.
Your institution’s learning-management system offers you opportunities to gather information about your
students. You can send a message, or post an announcement, before the first class asking them to introduce
themselves — via a discussion post, a short video they make with their phones or laptops, or an email sent
directly to you with some basic information about themselves.

Being able to recognize and make connections with students on the first day will go a long way toward
creating that strong sense of community in the course.

The Space

When I was a new teacher, still suffering from an excess of first-day jitters, a senior faculty member gave me
some advice that had always worked to calm his own nerves. He would go to his new classroom a few days
before each semester and get to know the space. He would make a full walking circuit of the room, getting
himself comfortable with every corner, every angle, every perspective. That allowed him to teach more
confidently on the first day.

I’ve been following that practice myself ever since — not only in my courses, but also when I have to give
presentations at conferences or on other campuses. This ritual not only helps alleviate those first-day nerves
but also informs me what kinds of adjustments I am going to have to make that semester for group work or

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other class activities. I see how much board space I have, whether the seats and chairs or table are fixed or
have wheels, and whether I happen to be teaching in a space that has a thick column in the center of the room
(as was the case on my campus until a few years ago until that classroom was, thankfully, closed).

Get a preview of the room before the semester begins. Stand at the front and say a few words. Write
something on the board, then walk to the back of the room or sit in a seat. Envision yourself in the shoes of
your students.

The Technology

If you plan to use any technology in support of your teaching — either on the first day or during the semester
— you will, of course, want to test it in advance. How many times have you sat groaning inwardly while a
conference presenter stands at the front of the room flummoxed by some technological issue that should have
been addressed before the start of the presentation? Spending the first class session exclaiming in frustration
at a confusing control panel won’t set the stage for an effective semester.

Get into the classroom before the first day and test everything you might conceivably use throughout the
semester. Plug in your laptop and make sure you know how to ensure it will appear on the classroom screen.
If you’re going to show a video, check the volume. If you’re going to use polling or other activities that
require students to use a connected device, ensure that the room has good wireless connectivity.

And remember that teaching technologies are not just digital — any tool that will support your teaching
counts as technology. Make sure the board erases, the chairs can be moved, and that you have a space for your
materials at the front of the room.

Do all of this well enough in advance so that you can contact your IT department or buildings-and-grounds
office to resolve any problems before the semester starts.

The Wardrobe Question

Like it or not, students will notice what you are wearing and how you present yourself on the first day of
class. If you wear casual clothes, encourage students to call you by your first name, and put the desks in a
circle, you are forming a different impression than if you wear a three-piece suit, refer to yourself as “Doctor,”
and stand at a podium. Neither of those impressions is necessarily right or wrong, but they do have
implications for the level of authority you project in the classroom.

Your appearance is your first impression; make sure it says what you intend for it to
say.
Some faculty members wish to project a strong sense of authority, emphasizing their expertise and leadership.
For them, more-formal attire and forms of address will support that perception. Others wish to present
themselves as informal guides or companions on the course journey; casual dress and a relaxed manner can
help convey that. New and younger instructors often feel compelled to emphasize their authority early in the
semester, while this 49-year-old, in his 20th year of full-time teaching, feels pretty comfortable wearing jeans
on the first day of the semester.

Of course, this question is an especially pressing one for female and nonwhite faculty members, whose
authority tends to be subject to more criticism than that of white men. Across higher education, we should all
be working to dismantle the prejudices that would lead students to question the authority of professors based

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on these aspects of our identities. But if you are concerned that some aspect of your identity might cause
students to question your authority or take you less seriously as an expert in your field, you can find advice on
how to proceed via the links in this paragraph.

The First Day of Class

Don’t think you have to hit all four of the core principles in the first 50 or 75 minutes of the semester
(although doing so is less difficult than you might imagine). Some well-designed activities can allow you to
hit two or three at the same time. The following four models — for courses in English composition, history,
psychology, and linear algebra — demonstrate how a set of well-designed first-day activities can put the
principles into practice.

English Composition

This model draws from my own experience in teaching a composition course that has a “community-engaged”
focus — my students interact with a local nonprofit organization throughout the semester, producing written
material for its website. Here’s how I spend the first day of class:

 I arrive 10 minutes early. Roster in hand, I walk around the room and introduce myself to students,
asking them questions about their major/intended major, hometown, and any previous writing courses
they might have taken.
 I make a brief introduction to the grounding principle of the course — that writing has the power to
change their lives for the better, both in their academic work and in their lives outside of the
classroom. Indeed, writing probably has already helped determine their future, in the form of their
college application essays.
 Students spend 15 minutes writing a paragraph in response to the following prompts: “When has a
piece of writing, something you either either wrote or read, made a significant impact on your life?
What qualities or context made that piece of writing so significant?”
 Next, I ask students to introduce themselves to two or three people sitting near them, and to work in
small groups to create a list of qualities of powerful writing. After 10 minutes, I shift the activity to a
classwide discussion. We use the whiteboard to list and categorize the qualities they have identified,
noting along the way the ones that connect with our learning objectives.
 The class finishes with a review of the syllabus, with a focus on how the community-engaged learning
they will complete has the power to make an impact.
 After students leave, I take a picture of the board, with the intention of showing students the images on
the last day of the semester and inviting them to consider how their perspectives have changed.

A History Survey Course

This model comes from an excellent blog post by Cate Denial, chair of the history department at Knox
College, on how she conducts the first day of the semester in her lower-level history courses.

 After introducing herself, she offers students the opportunity to ask any question about her they would
like. “I do this,” she explained to me in an email, “because I will be asking so many questions of them
during the term, it only seems fair to let them start by asking a whole lot of questions of me! Those
questions vary wildly — from whether I have pets to what we’ll be covering in the course, from my
favorite binge-watch on Netflix to how long I’ve been at Knox.”
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  Then she hands out a “document packet” of sources related to a single historical event. The content of
each packet varies from student to student; some items are in every packet, others are not. For this
exercise, Denial chooses a historical event that she will not cover in the course, in order to ensure that
all students — including those who might have signed up for the course because of existing interest or
expertise — will have to struggle with unfamiliar sources.
 Students are put into random groups — selected in advance by the instructor — and asked “to put the
sources in the order that makes the most sense to them, and tell the story the sources supply.” This
activity, Denial says, takes 15 to 20 minutes. Afterward, each group is asked to share their story with
the class.
 No two stories end up alike, and Denial then leads a discussion about that, which allows her to
introduce a core theme of the class: “History changes as more sources are found, old ones are re-
examined, and new theories suggest new interpretive frameworks. For the duration of the term, every
student in the class will be a working historian, putting sources together to understand one part of our
collective past.”
 She finishes the day by distributing the syllabus and assigning students their first homework
assignment: Annotate the syllabus with comments and questions. This serves dual purposes: allowing
her to introduce the skill of annotation and encouraging a close reading of the syllabus. She and the
students discuss their annotations in the next class session.

An Upper-Level Psychology Course

Sarah Rose Cavanagh, an associate professor of psychology at Assumption College and author of The Spark
of Learning, uses a slide presentation to guide students through the first day of her upper-level “Brain and
Behavior” course. Here’s how it works:

 First she introduces herself, with a focus on her academic background and research, along with some
personal (dog-related) information.
 Knowing that many students in this course are there only to fulfill a mandatory “biological”
cornerstone of the psychology major, she announces that she is, nonetheless, determined to convince
them that the subject matter is fascinating. She presents some philosophical puzzles (What does it
mean that we’re using the organ we’re studying in order to study ... the organ we’re studying?). She
talks about remarkable cases of brain injury and recovery. And she shows a trailer for a popular movie
suggesting that we could become cognitively limitless through neuroenhancement.
 Working in small groups, students anonymously complete an assignment aimed at testing their
background knowledge of the brain — their ability to label its parts and functions, the parts of a
neuron, and other foundational concepts. This exercise provides both a refresher for students and a
benchmark of where this particular group stands in terms of previous preparation.
 Next, Cavanagh collects information about her students. They each fill out a sheet, listing their name
and major and answering two key questions: “What one topic do you hope you will learn about this
semester?” and “What is one weird thing that your brain does?” The latter question is always good
for some memorable tales. Brains are weird.
 Discussion in her course happens in a variety of ways, some of which involve students moving around
the classroom. To demonstrate how this works and to set it as the norm on the first day, she shows
students slides with “You Must Choose” statements on them. Then she asks students to move to the
side of the room concordant with their views and explain their choice to people standing near them.
Some of those choices relate to course content (“True or False: You use only 10 percent of your
brain”) and some are simply designed to loosen up and engage the students (“Star Wars or Star Trek”?
“Cats or Dogs”?).
 She finishes with a final set of slides featuring highlights of the syllabus and previews of the course
content to come.
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A Mathematics Course

This model comes from a blog post by Derek Bruff, director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching,
who wrote a book on the use of personal-response systems (often called “clickers”) and peer instruction in the
classroom. Since those tools form an essential part of his teaching, he gets students using them on the first day
of his linear-algebra course.

 Before the first class, he identifies a math problem that students should be able to solve by the end of
the semester, and phrases it as a multiple-choice question. One such problem gives students
information about changes in the spotted-owl population and asks them to consider the following
question: “Given these rates, in the long run does the population increase, decrease, or level off?”
 Students work in small groups to come up with an answer, and then register it via their clickers. By
displaying and discussing their responses, he guides them to the correct answer.
 Then Bruff proposes another question, this one more complex than they are prepared to answer.
 He concludes by noting that the course content will fill the gap between what they were capable of
doing on the first day and what they could not yet master: “This [exercise] allowed me to make the
point that we’ll have to develop some mathematical modeling tools in order to analyze this situation
accurately and make valid predictions. This, I hope, provides students with some motivation to learn
about those tools later in the semester.”
 By engaging students in this kind of activity on the first day, Bruff is shaping their expectations about
the kinds of in-class activities they will experience throughout the semester. He finds that students
often expect a “chalk-and-talk” math class, which isn’t how he teaches. They’re more open to active
learning pedagogies if they know from the first day that that’s how his class operates.
 And what about the syllabus? Bruff hands that out to students at the end of the first session, asking
them to read it and bring questions to the next class. He finds the syllabus discussion less inviting than
his problem-solving activity, particularly for the nonmajors who typically take his math courses, so he
saves all the syllabus talk for Day 2.

One more issue to keep in mind as you plan for the first day: Context matters. What works for first-year
students might not work as well for seniors. Obviously you can’t ask students new to college to reflect upon
their previous college science courses. Likewise, students in a senior seminar might already know one
another, so icebreaker activities will be superfluous for them.

After the First Day

Whatever you do on Day 1 will require some follow-up. Here are three pathways you can use to extend the
reach of your first-day activities.

The Learning Management System

A quick and easy way is via your institution’s learning-management system. Record a brief, informal video to
convey your impressions of what students produced or discussed in class. Show your enthusiasm for a great
start, remind them about any conclusions drawn, and point them to aspects of the course that will connect to
the first-day activities. If you don’t like making videos, do it in writing. You could supplement both
approaches with links to relevant resources, articles, or videos.

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In either case, finish your response, recorded or written, by pointing forward. How does what you
accomplished on that first day set the stage for what will happen on the second day, the third, and beyond?

The Next Class and Beyond

Or, you can do all of that in person on the second day of class. Produce a PowerPoint with the key findings
from your first meeting, or a word cloud with their impressions of the course content. If the students created a
list of activities that would help them succeed in the course, pull their ideas together into a one-page handout
for successful learning.

As the semester continues, find small ways to link your opening-day activities to the current course content. In
a senior seminar I teach on 21st-century British literature and culture, we watch a segment of the 2012
London Olympics on the first day, and analyze what it tells us about the British values that the
organizers wanted to project to the world. As the semester continues, I refer back to those values whenever we
can. Occasionally students, too, will refer back to that video in our class discussions, a connection I always
affirm.

The Last Day of the Semester

I always like to close the course by pointing students back to where we started — in part, because I like to
show them how far they have traveled in their learning. In my survey course on British literature, on the first
day we do a group brainstorming session in which I ask students to tell me what associations they have with
the word “British.” Their impressions are always woefully limited — they always mention the royal family,
for example, and never say a word about the enormous impact that immigration has had on Britain in the past
half-century. On the final day of class, when I show them images of the board from the first day, they can see
how deeply their knowledge of British history and literature has grown.

From the start think about how to connect the first day to the last day, and vice-versa.
Your efforts to link back to Day 1 will have the greatest impact if you can show students visually what they
did. So put that on your agenda, too, for the first class. Take pictures of the board that day. Make copies of
worksheets or surveys they filled out. Keep discussion-board posts or videos preserved throughout the
semester. Now pull those bits of evidence together into a quick presentation.

The First Day Online

The four core principles that will guide you to an effective first day in a face-to-face classroom will do the
same work for you in an online course.

In the opening module of an online course, you can still identify and emphasize a problem or question to
spark the curiosity of students, and you can still begin a content module by asking students to engage in some
task before they are ready. But in the online environment, you face larger challenges in terms of building
community and outlining expectations for the course, especially if you are teaching students who aren’t
accustomed to taking online courses.

Online classes offer some of the same challenges and opportunities, but abstracted
through the technology. Find ways to maintain the intimacy of an in-person class.
36
Quick videos and discussion boards offer you great opportunities to build community. Some options:

 Introduce yourself through a brief opening video and describe yourself more formally in a “Meet the
Instructor” page included in your course pages. Present your formal credentials and intellectual
journey on the page, and speak more informally in the video.
 Follow the lead of the historian Cate Denial and invite each student to ask you a question about
yourself.
 Have students introduce themselves to one another in a discussion post, through either writing or a
video. Post a comment or question in response to each student, just to let them know that you are
present for them and interested in their learning.

How to navigate an online course will not always be evident to your students, especially if they are adults
returning to education after an absence or are students taking an online class as a supplement to their face-to-
face courses. So it is especially important to provide another video or document that outlines how they can
find the assistance they need, how to proceed through the course, and how to make sure their questions get
answered. You can use an online annotation tool like hypothes.is, or an equivalent tool in the course-
management system your college uses, to have students annotate the syllabus with questions and comments.

Online courses can easily become bloodless transactions of brains behind screens. In the opening of the
course, establish your presence as a teacher who cares about their learning, and invite students to help you
create a vibrant community of learners.

A Lasting Impact

Whatever you do on the first day of class, get beyond the goal of just getting through it. A little time invested
in first-day planning can have a lasting impact. Start the semester off by fostering students’ curiosity,
supporting their learning, and giving them a preview of how they will be engaging with you and one another,
and with the course content, throughout the semester.

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Resources
Books

 On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, by yours truly. See
especially the chapter on “Week One.”
 McKeachie’s Teaching Tips ( 14th edition). See Part One, Chapters 1-3.
 Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, by Linda B. Nilson. See
especially Chapter 7.

Articles

 “The First Day of Class: A Once-a-Semester Opportunity,” published in Faculty Focus by Maryellen
Weimer on August 21, 2018.
 “Ten Tips for Dealing With Nervousness on the First Day of Class Faculty,” published in Faculty
Focus, by Delaney J. Kirk, on August 14, 2018.

Online Guides From Teaching Centers

 “Make the Most of the First Day of Class,” posted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center
Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation.
 “First Day of Class,” posted by the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

Videos

 “First Day of the Semester: Good Activities,” posted by Discovering the Art of Mathematics, a group
that offers ideas for teaching math to liberal-arts majors.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption
College. You can reach him by email at lang@assumption.edu. Follow him on Twitter @LangOnCourse. His
latest book is Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning.

38
How to Hold a Better Class Discussion
ADVICE GUIDE
By Jay Howard

Why Discussion Matters .................................................................................................................................... 40

7 Strategies to Change the Norms of Class Discussions ....................................................................................... 41
Norm No. 1: Civil attention ........................................................................................................................................ 41
Norm No. 2: Consolidation of responsibility ............................................................................................................. 42
How to Disrupt Those Norms .................................................................................................................................... 42
No. 1: Ask better questions ................................................................................................................................... 42
No. 2: Set the stage on the first day ...................................................................................................................... 42
No. 3: Use a syllabus quiz to show that you value participation ........................................................................... 43
No. 4: Try a discussion about discussion ............................................................................................................... 43
No. 5: Don’t give up on discussion in a large class ................................................................................................ 43
No. 6: Have students pair up ................................................................................................................................. 44
No. 7: Take the conversation online ...................................................................................................................... 44
How to Keep a Discussion on Track .................................................................................................................... 44
Slow down the dominant talkers ............................................................................................................................... 44
Quizzes are good for more than just the syllabus ..................................................................................................... 45
Use discussion questions to focus their reading (and the resulting debate.............................................................. 45
Shine a light on the “muddiest” point ....................................................................................................................... 46
Encourage comments from students of varied backgrounds.................................................................................... 46
Common Challenges: Participation Grades, Bad Answers, Divisive Topics ........................................................... 47
Should You Grade Class Discussion? .......................................................................................................................... 47
What If a Student’s Remark Is Wrong or Misguided? ............................................................................................... 48
How to Handle News Events and Controversial Topics in Class ................................................................................ 49
When to raise controversial issues ........................................................................................................................ 49
Should you stake out a position?........................................................................................................................... 49
Be clear about the ground rules ............................................................................................................................ 50
Ask students to take sides ..................................................................................................................................... 50
Resources ......................................................................................................................................................... 51
Books...................................................................................................................................................................... 51
Journal Articles ...................................................................................................................................................... 51
Advice and Opinion Columns ................................................................................................................................. 51
39
It should have gone well. You crafted provocative discussion questions. You chose compelling and relevant
texts. Yet your every attempt to get the students talking fell flat. Question after question was met with a
silence that seemed to last hours.

Why the blank faces? Did the students fail to read the assignment? Was it the early hour? Perhaps you were
the problem. Did you make interesting material seem dull? Did you misjudge what they would find engaging?

You have plenty of company. Most every college teacher has experienced that anxiety-producing moment
when a promising class discussion fizzles out. It’s important for professors to use active-learning strategies,
but why does accomplishing that task sometimes feel so difficult?

Faculty members often assume it’s a matter of serendipity. The reality is that effective class discussions —
much like effective lectures — are the result of careful planning. Students must do their part by coming to
class ready to participate. But there are ways to increase the likelihood that they will be prepared, and to avoid
the frustration of a sea of impassive faces.

Who is this guide for? Whether you are a new faculty member or a teaching veteran, if you’re looking for
advice on how to hold a better class discussion, you’ll find it here in The Chronicle’s guide. You’ll learn how
to structure your course and particular class sessions in ways that will get students actively participating —
and will enhance their learning.

Why Discussion Matters

Class discussion involves risk-taking — on the part of the students and the professor.

For students, there’s always the risk of embarrassment: What if I raise my hand and I’m wrong? How will the
professor and my classmates see me? Am I talking too much? If I haven’t finished the assigned reading, will
speaking up expose my lack of preparation? Many students will decide it’s safer to stay silent, and leave the
floor to the handful of classmates who are eager to talk.

For you, as the instructor, opening up class for discussion means you risk losing at least some control over
what happens. Your efforts may succeed wonderfully or lead to tense and awkward moments. What if their
responses are all misleading or incorrect? Worse, what happens if a student makes a comment that is sexist,
racist, homophobic, or otherwise offensive? Isn’t it safer just to stick to lecturing and keep control firmly in
my own hands?

Don’t let the uncertainties dissuade you. There are good reasons to engage students in class discussion. First,
as studies have shown, discussion leads to greater student learning and the development of critical-thinking
skills. If you had to summarize the findings of more than 30 years of research on teaching and learning in
higher education (as Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini have handily done), you could safely
conclude that students learn more when they are actively engaged with the material, the instructor, and their
classmates. Perhaps the most common way to engage them is via discussion.

In any college classroom, as Elizabeth F. Barkley wrote in her 2010 teaching guide, the people doing the most
work are also the ones doing the most learning. If you, the instructor, are doing the most work as you design
and present a compelling lecture, you may be relearning a lot, or at least solidifying your understanding of the

40
course material. However, it’s the students who should be learning the most in class, and so they need to be
doing the most work.

Discussion is one strategy for shifting the work from instructor to students. Rather than being vessels into
which you pour information, they become co-creators of knowledge and understanding.

Sometimes as novice learners, students are better able than the instructor to clear up confusion and identify
next steps in logic or problem-solving. Because of your expertise, you might view those steps as so obvious
that you don’t think about them anymore; they go without saying to you. Students have an easier time seeing
the steps that an expert takes for granted and, as a result, can clarify them for one another. Your role is to
guide them in the endeavor.

So how do you go about creating the kind of class discussion that will lead to greater learning?

7 Strategies to Change the Norms of Class Discussions

As a starting point, you must recognize that the college classroom is a social environment. Whenever humans
get together, our behavior is guided by social norms — patterned and unspoken ways of interacting that are so
ingrained they go unnoticed until someone violates them.

The college classroom is full of norms that guide student and faculty behavior. For instance, there’s a seating
norm: Wherever students sit on the first day of class tends to be where they will sit for the entire course. Few
faculty members assign seats or stipulate on the syllabus that students must sit in the same spot all semester.
Yet they do. But imagine your surprise if, during the sixth week of the term, you arrived to find that they had
all switched seats. You would suddenly become aware of this norm because students were violating it.

Likewise, student participation — or lack thereof — is influenced by two key classroom norms. First
identified by sociologists in 1976, the two norms work together to keep most students from speaking up in
class. As an instructor, you will have to take deliberate steps to counter both:

Norm No. 1: Civil attention. In a typical classroom, students aren’t required to “pay attention,” only to
pay “civil attention.” What that means: So long as students appear to be listening, they can expect that the
professor won’t call on them unless they signal a willingness to participate. How do students demonstrate civil
attention? By nodding their heads, taking notes, chuckling at the instructor’s attempts at humor, or making
brief eye contact. And by the things they don’t do: sleeping, texting, whispering to classmates. Students who
are paying civil attention aren’t necessarily listening: They may, in fact, be daydreaming or deciding on their
lunch plans. They may be writing a paper for another course when they appear to be taking notes. But by
paying civil attention, students perceive that they have met their obligation to the course and to you, the
instructor. Engage in discussion? They see that as optional.

Student participation — or lack thereof — is influenced by two key classroom norms.

This norm also allows students to avoid accountability for failing to come to class prepared. Because they
know that the instructor will not question them unless they volunteer, their silence may be hiding a lack of
preparation.

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Norm No. 2: Consolidation of responsibility. Regardless of class size, only a small number of students
— typically five to eight — will account for 75 to 95 percent of the comments made in a discussion. It’s easy
to be deceived into thinking that you helped facilitate a great discussion when, in reality, you had a great
discussion with five students, while the majority were spectators. The “consolidation of responsibility” norm
means that a few students assume responsibility for most of the discussion.

How to Disrupt Those Norms

The good news is that social norms can be changed. They exist only because we implicitly comply with them.
Here are seven strategies you can use to change students’ behavior and disrupt the norms that get in the way
of a good discussion.

No. 1: Ask better questions. That’s more complicated than it probably seems. Most faculty members know a
poor question when we hear it. “Are there any questions?” is typically an ineffective way to start a productive
discussion. Yes-or-no questions rarely lead to a thoughtful exchange. Asking questions for which there is a
single correct response may be a good way to check whether your students did the reading, but it’s not an
effective discussion starter.

A good question is one that allows for multiple perspectives. It shows that the topic can be viewed from a
variety of angles, even though they may not all be equally relevant or helpful. Here are four ways to do that:

 Frame the question to inspire a range of answers. Don’t ask, “When did President Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation take effect?” — a question with a single correct answer. Instead, ask:
“Why did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862 but make it effective on
January 1, 1863? What explains the delay? What factors led to the choice of these dates?”
 Ask students to apply a variety of theories or perspectives to a particular example. In a criminology
course you might ask, “We’ve covered five theories that offer explanations of why people commit
crime. Take the case of Bernie Madoff, the financier convicted of running the largest Ponzi scheme
and the largest financial fraud in U.S. history. Which of the five theories helps us understand a white-
collar crime like this one? How does the theory help us make sense of Madoff’s crime?”
 Conversely, after illustrating a topic or concept, ask students to provide their own example: “We’ve
just covered social-learning theory, and I provided you with an illustration. Give me a different
example of someone learning new behaviors through observing and imitating others. Where and when
have you have observed this in your experience?”
 Ask about process, not content. In some fields, like science and mathematics, there often is a single
correct response. So instead of asking questions that seek the correct answer, ask about the process:
“Here’s a new differential equation on the board. What is a good first step in solving this equation?
Where do we begin?”

No. 2: Set the stage on the first day. Many faculty members spend the first day of class checking names
against the class roster and going over the syllabus in hopes of clarifying expectations and procedures. The
professor’s voice is the only one heard that day.

If you spend your first class session in that manner, you’re signaling that the norm in your course will be civil
attention. If you try to change students’ expectations after, say, the first three weeks, they are likely to be
surprised and may not adapt well. Instead, establish on the first day that you want them participating regularly
in class — that civil attention will be insufficient. For more advice on how to teach a good first day of
class, read this Chronicle guide.

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No. 3: Use a syllabus quiz to show that you value participation. Rather than reading the syllabus to
students on the first day, create a multiple-choice quiz of 10 to 20 questions on key elements of the syllabus.
Divide the class into small groups (five to eight students in each) to work on the quiz. Afterward, ask the
groups to provide the correct answer to each question in turn, and check to see if further clarification is
needed. The quiz sets the norm in your course: Student participation in discussion is required.

Ask the members of each group to exchange names and contact information. That helps to build a sense of
community and gives students a peer-contact list should they miss class or have a question about the
homework. In high-enrollment courses, small groups can make large classes feel smaller and safer. Students
leave class on the first day understanding that you expect more than civil attention. (Read this Chronicle
guide for tips on how to craft an effective syllabus.)

No. 4: Try a discussion about discussion. This is another effective first-day strategy. Some students, because
they see taking part in a class discussion as optional, may be resentful of your expectation that they
participate. They may even feel you are out to “catch” them unprepared for class and embarrass them
publicly. Shy students, and those for whom English is a second language, may feel that you are making them
unnecessarily anxious by requiring verbal participation.

Those perspectives, left unattended, can fester and lead to an an unnecessarily hostile relationship between
professor and student. A discussion about discussion can help everyone overcome those concerns. Try these
steps:

 Ask students why they think you’re making participation in discussion an expectation (and perhaps a
percentage of their grade).
 Inquire about their time in other courses that have made heavy use of discussion. Were those positive
experiences? Why or why not? What made discussion helpful to them in other classes? When did a
discussion seem unproductive?
 Then explain: Research demonstrates that when students participate in class discussion, it benefits
them. Point out that most students will pursue careers that require them to work in teams. To be an
effective team member, one must be able to engage in dialogue, learn from colleagues, and help deal
with challenges as a group.
 Use this time to develop discussion guidelines for the class. You might adopt a civility guideline: “It is
OK to challenge and refute ideas or positions, but not acceptable to attack someone personally or
engage in name-calling.” Discuss the difference between unsubstantiated opinions and reasoned,
supported arguments. When students participate in crafting the discussion “rules,” they are more likely
to take ownership of their own involvement in those conversations.

No. 5: Don’t give up on discussion in a large class. Even in the largest courses, instructors can build in brief
periods for discussion. Try organizing students into teams, and have them sit with their teammates for the
entire semester. I recommend randomly assigning students to groups, because self-selected groups of friends
can easily get off topic. At multiple points during class, pose a question for team discussion. To ensure that
the teams stay on topic, wander the room and eavesdrop on the debates. After a few minutes, randomly call on
a few teams to offer their responses.

An online forum is a place where the in-class discussion can be continued or extended, allowing students with
anxiety to contribute.

Create names for the teams. In a science course, for example, teams might be named after elements on the
periodic table or famous physicists. This team-based approach gives students a small number of classmates
whom they know and makes participating in discussion feel more comfortable and safe.
43
No. 6: Have students pair up. Try a classic assessment technique like think/pair/share to encourage
discussion: Pose a question or topic and give students a minute to write a response. They then pair off and
share their responses.

Typically, you would next ask for volunteers to share their answers with the whole class. However, by asking
for volunteers, you risk the consolidation-of-responsibility norm rearing its ugly head — that is, the same few
students who regularly speak up will volunteer again. Instead, I suggest asking, “Whose partner had a brilliant
insight? Whose partner really hit the nail on the head and summarized an important point? Call out your
brilliant partner and let’s make them speak up.”

This approach is particularly helpful with those very bright, yet very shy students. The exercise means they’ve
already had an opportunity to collect their thoughts and rehearse them with a partner. They are now being
publicly affirmed for the quality of their comments, making it much less anxiety-provoking to speak up in
front of everyone.

No. 7: Take the conversation online. You might have strong reservations about requiring students who
suffer from severe anxiety to speak in class. But you can compromise: Try moving some of the discussion
online.

It can be difficult to attain the same quality and depth of discussion online as in face-to-face settings, because
of the tendency of many students to post no more than “Good point” or “I agree.” Nonetheless, an online
forum is a place where the in-class discussion can be continued or extended, allowing students with anxiety to
contribute. If an online discussion proves fruitful, start the next class session by referencing some of the
comments. That way you give reluctant public speakers some recognition for their online insights — and
review the previous course material in the process.

How to Keep a Discussion on Track

So you’ve set the stage for a good discussion. Your students know that you expect participation, and they are
ready (if not necessarily eager) to dive in. Now you face a different challenge: keeping the conversation
focused, fair, and inviting for all students.

Some of the following suggestions are steps you can take during class. Others are things that you — and your
students — can do ahead of time to encourage focused discussion and broad participation.

Slow down the dominant talkers. Classmates tend to have a love/hate relationship with the dominant
talkers.

 On the one hand, the talkers are appreciated. When a question is posed, students know they can count
on the dominant talkers to respond, which greatly decreases the likelihood that the professor will “cold
call” those who are unwilling or unprepared to participate. In such moments, the nontalkers will
sometimes physically adjust their position to look at one or more of the dominant talkers, as if hoping
they will speak on behalf of the class.
 On the other hand, students can be annoyed by those who talk too much or share too much tangential,
personal information.

44
Dominant talkers are typically more extroverted and willing to process material aloud. They may wander
around a topic, figuring out what they think as they speak. More-introverted students need to gather their
thoughts before sharing them in class. If suddenly called upon to speak without having had the opportunity to
process their thoughts, introverts may perceive the instructor as engaging in hostile behavior.

How can you slow down the dominant talkers and allow time for other students to process? The
aforementioned think/pair/share technique is an obvious strategy, but there are many others. Some are as
simple as saying, “Let’s hear from someone who hasn’t spoken up yet” or “I have heard a lot from the front of
the room — now I want to know what those of you in the back are thinking.” That signals to the dominant
talkers that it is time to allow others to join in.

 Control the rhythm. One way to ensure broad participation — not just reining in the dominant talkers
but opening up the floor — is to limit who can speak, and how often. How you do that can be fun, not
just restrictive. For example, try using:
 Poker chips: As students enter the classroom, they each pick up three poker chips. When they speak,
they place a poker chip in a basket. Once they’ve used up their three chips, they may no longer
contribute. To make sure everyone participates, require all students to use up their chips by the end of
class.
 Nerf balls: Use an object like a Nerf ball to give students greater ownership of the discussion. Only
the person holding the Nerf ball is allowed to speak. When the speaker finishes, he or she selects who
goes next by tossing the ball to a classmate.

Quizzes are good for more than just the syllabus. Many professors use quizzes of one sort or another
to make sure students do the reading. It’s an effective technique. Your challenge is to structure quizzes in a
way that does not feel punitive yet results in students’ being well-prepared to discuss the material. Here are
some ways to do that:

 When students arrive, provide a question on the board or screen tied to the assigned reading. Give
them five or so minutes to write a response and then randomly call on students to share their thoughts.
They can simply read their response or elaborate on it. Their comments become a starting point
focusing the discussion on important ideas from the reading.
 A variation on that approach: Give students the question ahead of time and ask them to bring a
response (from a paragraph to a page) to class and be ready to share it. Just-in-time quizzes are another
strategy. Ask students to complete a brief online quiz within the hour or two before class starts. The
quiz can be a combination of multiple-choice and short-answer questions on key ideas or controversies
from the reading. Grade the quizzes before class, and select some sample responses to share (without
naming names) as a starting point for discussion. Depending upon the objectives of that day’s session
and the nature of the material, you may want to provide examples of well-written responses. Then
ask: What makes this a particularly strong response? Or provide examples of responses that illustrate
common misunderstandings or errors in logic, while keeping the student anonymous. Open the
discussion by saying, Here’s a good attempt that ended up going astray. Where and how did this
response get off track? How could the writer have made it better?

Together, these approaches help students learn to identify the differences between a well-argued response that
uses evidence from the reading versus one that is merely unsubstantiated opinion.

Use discussion questions to focus their reading (and the resulting debate). Hand out the
questions in advance of a reading assignment. This is particularly helpful when the texts are difficult. As the
students read, the questions help them identify key points, concepts, or controversies. Then during class, the
questions become the basis for the day’s discussion.
45
Try to frame your reading questions in ways that might result in a more engaging discussion. For example:

 Make them relevant to students’ lives. Ask students to apply concepts from the reading to their lived
experiences or to situations they may encounter in their careers.
 Make the questions analytical in scope. Ask students to summarize or critique an author’s argument,
thereby pushing them beyond mere reading and into higher-order thinking skills.
 Make sure they don’t miss the big points. Students often find it difficult, especially in their first year
of college, to discern when a key idea or an important nuance is being communicated during a class
discussion. Especially in the midst of a vigorous debate, students easily lose track of what they’re
supposed to take away from the discussion. Among the ways to counter that tendency:
 Sometimes the simplest strategies work best — like asking a student to repeat a key idea while you
write it on the board.
 When a student makes a crucial point, overtly emphasize it by saying, “That’s it. Did everyone hear
what Omar just said?”
 Summarize the discussion of one topic before moving on to the next. That can also help keep the
discourse on track. “OK, we’ve had several key insights. LaShon noted that social-conflict theory
pushes us to ask ‘who benefits from our health-care system.’ Katie countered that structural
functionalism points out the need for multiple institutions to work collaboratively. Vince took us to the
microlevel by focusing on provider-patient interactions in the healthcare system. Now we’re ready to
move on.”

Your goal here is to help make the learning more obvious. But in the process, you can also keep the
discussion focused.

Shine a light on the “muddiest” point. A tried-and-true assessment technique, known as the “Muddiest
Point,” can help you clarify challenging concepts in a discussion and, at the same time, give reluctant talkers
an additional opportunity to participate.

Here’s how it works: In the last few minutes of class, students write a brief summary of the topic or idea that
they felt was the least clear in that day’s discussion. It is often helpful to directly ask them to summarize either
the “muddiest” or the “most important” point. Collect their comments as they leave. Then, before the next
class, review the responses to see which topics you should revisit.

The exercise gives you insights into any gaps between what you tried to emphasize and what students
perceived as the most significant material discussed in class. For example, if students focus on a colorful
illustration but fail to recognize the concept being illustrated, you can recap the key points at the start of the
next class meeting.

Encourage comments from students of varied backgrounds. The research on women’s

participation in class discussion extends back to the 1970s, when the “chilly-climate thesis” first argued that a
hostile environment meant that female students were called on less frequently and volunteered less often in
class than their male counterparts. However, much of the evidence for that thesis was anecdotal. In recent
decades, systematic research has found no consistent patterns regarding the relative participation rates of men
and women in class discussion.

There’s been far less research on discussion participation by students of color. Most of the literature that does
exist also leans toward the anecdotal, making generalizations difficult.Nonetheless, in terms of what you
should — and shouldn’t — do to encourage female and minority students to speak up in class, there are some
guidelines:

46
  It should probably go without saying, but: Do not call on a woman or a person of color and ask that
person to speak for all those in their particular demographic. It’s an unfair and impossible burden, and
one person hardly represents an entire gender, race, or ethnicity. Of course, students from
underrepresented backgrounds on your campus may have life experiences that are illuminating and
different from the majority. Invite sharing — just don’t treat a student as an authority who speaks for
an entire class of people.
 Recognize that students from underrepresented groups may suffer from “impostor syndrome,”
doubting their own abilities and their deserving to be on campus. It might help to mention their
previous comments, submitted papers, or online discussion posts when inviting their participation.
 Students who are the first in their families to go to college may also suffer from impostor syndrome.
They may not have had spring-break trips to warm climates, parents with extensive professional
networks, or childhood visits to museums. If you assume that all of your students shared such
experiences, you are implicitly and unintentionally communicating that the ones who didn’t don’t
belong. This attitude can show up in something as seemingly innocuous as the illustrations you use
when introducing concepts. For example, a reference to certain kinds of ethnic food may leave
students from rural or working-class backgrounds lost because they have never eaten such foods.
 While providing discussion questions ahead of time will benefit all students, it can be particularly
helpful to students whose first language is not English.
 Ensure that at least some of the class discussion occurs in pairs or in small groups — it’s less stressful
than commenting before the entire class.

Common Challenges: Participation Grades, Bad Answers, Divisive

Topics
Should You Grade Class Discussion?

Clearly, you can grade the quizzes or the short-essay responses that are part of your class discussion. But what
about grading students’ participation in the actual dialogue itself? Knowing they will be graded certainly
motivates students to speak up in class. But there are two schools of thought as to whether it’s a good idea:

 The argument against: Some students are painfully shy. To require them to speak in class is unkind
and unreasonable, because of the severe anxiety that the expectation provokes. What’s more, it’s
inherently unfair to judge the quality of students’ fleeting comments in the midst of a class discussion.
The task becomes impossible as the number of students increases. The result is that extroverted
students are rewarded for being extroverted rather than for the quality of their remarks, while
introverted students are devalued.
 The argument in favor: We ask students to do a variety of things that may make them
uncomfortable. Some students find multiple-choice or essay exams stressful, yet we give those tests
anyway. Other students struggle to be articulate in writing, but we still assign papers. We require
students to read challenging and difficult texts even when they find the material discomfiting. Math-
phobic students must complete quantitative-reasoning courses. Why? Because we as teachers believe
that this will lead to greater learning. Sometimes being uncomfortable is necessary to facilitate
learning. Why should we treat class discussion any differently?

The one thing we can agree on, whatever our position, is that grading class discussion is a highly subjective
endeavor. It’s hard enough to track who speaks and how often, let alone assess the quality of the

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contributions. But there is an alternative: Have students assess their own class participation. At the end of
class, ask students to score their participation based on a rubric you’ve created. Alternatively, three or four
times a semester, ask students to write a narrative assessment of their participation in class discussions, guided
by a rubric. In the latter case, you can evaluate the narrative, indicate whether or not you agree, and offer
advice on how to improve.

Self-assessment has two key advantages here. First, it relieves you of the burden of simultaneously managing
a class discussion while attempting to note the frequency and quality of individual comments. Second, it
pushes students to evaluate their contributions to their own learning.

What If a Student’s Remark Is Wrong or Misguided?

There was a time when some professors — at least in the movies — would publicly humiliate a student for an
incorrect or ill-advised remark. Few academics would regard that as good teaching today (if many ever did).
One harsh or unsympathetic response to an incorrect answer can shut down the willingness of the entire class
to engage in discussion for the duration of the semester.

That said, when you structure a course to include regular class discussions, you open the way for students to
give false or misleading responses. You don’t want those to be the ones other students remember from the
discussion. Here are some useful strategies for dealing with such situations, without alienating your students.

Affirm, then correct. Some critics will see it as “hand-holding,” but if you want students to keep
participating, it’s important to first affirm their contributions. You don’t want to discourage those who were
anxious about responding yet took a risk and were wrong in what they said. So look for something you can
reinforce in the student’s remark: “You got the first step correct but then ran into a common
misunderstanding,” or, “OK, that’s one strategy. But it’s not as effective as others. Who can help us identify
another approach?”

But what if a student makes an ill-conceived argument and neglects to offer any evidence? Here, too, you can
affirm the articulation of the position. Then invite the student or the rest of the class to critique it: “That
summarizes the liberal [or conservative] viewpoint well, but let’s play devil’s advocate for a minute. If you
wanted to rebut the position Josh just articulated, what evidence would you present?” That allows classmates
to challenge Josh’s unsupported argument without appearing to attack Josh. You may even want to pose that
question to the speaker himself: “Josh, assume for a moment that you believed the opposite. How would you
challenge the argument you just made?” You’re not asking Josh to disagree with himself — you’re asking him
to consider and articulate the counterarguments. This approach helps all of your students question their own
assumptions.

Be respectful when they’ve lost the plot. On other occasions, a student’s comment isn’t necessarily wrong
— it just seems out of left field. In these situations, I respectfully ask the student to make the connection
between their comment and the topic we are discussing: “You’ve lost me. Sorry, I am slow on the pickup
today. Explain the connection for me.” This shifts any “blame” away from the student and onto you as the
instructor. Often there is a connection between the topic and the student’s comment, only it is two or three
unarticulated steps removed.

Another approach is to ask classmates to assist the student who is on the wrong track: “We’re not on that
subject yet. It is easy to get off track here. Who can help us out and redirect us to finish what we were
discussing?”

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How to Handle News Events and Controversial Topics in Class

When should an instructor invite students to discuss recent news events, particularly controversial ones? The
college classroom should be a space where contemporary and controversial topics are open for debate. We
should be modeling how to engage in civil dialogue, especially when people hold strongly differing views. So
the fact that a topic is controversial is not a reason to exclude it from classroom discussion — assuming it’s
relevant to your course content. In fact, such topics may be an ideal means of teaching students how to engage
in reasoned dialogue, critique, and critical thinking.

Yet that sort of class discussion can go quite wrong if you’re not careful. As Noliwe M. Rooks wrote in a
Chronicle essay on this topic: “Revising a syllabus to include popular culture and current events is not always
in the service of the course or in the best interest of students. Not all current events are easily incorporated
into every classroom, and it's all too easy for a professor inexperienced in handling sensitive topics to do more
harm than good.”

Here are some guidelines to help you ensure that when you do bring current events into your class discussion,
the dialogue turns productive rather than ugly:

When to raise controversial issues. Relevance is key. Discussion of the removal of Confederate statues from
public places fits well in U.S.-history courses, for example. It’s much harder to make the argument that such
discussion belongs in an organic-chemistry course. Likewise, discussion of the merits and drawbacks of the
Electoral College are an obvious fit for political-science or sociology courses, but it’s a stretch to see how that
could be relevant in business accounting.

The college classroom should be a space where contemporary and controversial topics are open for debate.

However, there are cases in which current events affect a particular campus to such a degree that students
want to talk about it in class, whether or not the topic relates. If, for instance, your college faces a debate
about changing the name of a building because the person for whom it was named turned outn to have been an
avowed racist, the consequent tensions can affect classrooms across the curriculum. In such situations, faculty
members may see a need to provide students with a forum to discuss the issue and the related tensions even if
the topic is unrelated to the course.

In such circumstances, you need to be careful not to abuse your position of power in the classroom. It isn’t a
platform to impose your view and ban all others. If you decide to take a political or moral stance, you must be
clear that agreement or disagreement with that stance will not affect a student’s grade.

Should you stake out a position? There are differing schools of thought:

 One view is that faculty members should not only be open and honest about their political positions
but also be advocates for social justice, offering evidence and a rationale. Inevitably, the argument
goes, the classroom cannot be value-free. However, because a majority of college faculty members
lean left politically, conservative students may feel that their views are unwelcome and may even
perceive faculty members as hostile.
 Another approach is to not reveal your personal position on any issue. In this view, it is better to ask
students to articulate the pro-and-con arguments while you serve as moderator of the discussion: Why
should the name of the building be changed? What are the arguments in favor? What is the
counterargument? What values underlie each position? How is the issue viewed by people in differing
social locations (e.g., race, gender, social class, geography)? Can we begin to understand how our

49
 identities and backgrounds cause us to weigh some values more heavily than others in a given
context?

Decide for yourself which is a better fit — both with your institution’s policies and with your teaching
persona and pedagogy.

Be clear about the ground rules. Think back to my suggestion on holding a discussion about class
discussion. Laying out the ground rules can be helpful. They give you a means to ensure that the discussion
remains civil and is driven by reasoned argument and evidence rather than degenerating into name-calling or
character assassination. As the instructor, you can model kind-but-committed disagreement and show how to
challenge someone’s misinformation or poor logic. Depersonalizing the discussion — moving from a debate
between Monica’s and Manuel’s personal opinions to a critique of positions on the issue, weighing the
evidence for and against, and considering the implications (intended and unintended) of various stances —
can help keep the class discussion civil.

Ground rules are also helpful when a student — intentionally or unintentionally — makes a racist, sexist, or
homophobic comment. Remind the class and the commenter of your ground rules, which prohibit attacks on
individuals or unfair generalizations about categories of people. This is, of course, easier to manage when
students don’t recognize how a comment would be perceived as offensive. Things get more complicated when
the student is intentionally, perhaps even proudly, sexist, racist, or homophobic. It might help if you explain
the difference between secondhand anecdotes and systematic research. But you may have to rely on the
agreed-upon ground rules precluding such comments in the classroom. Then change the subject.

Ask students to take sides. Yet another approach is to ask your class to “take sides” on an issue. Divide the
students into small groups who hold similar views on the topic. Have them develop a list of arguments in
support of their position and report back to the class. Then have the groups take the opposite position: Imagine
you are an advocate for the other view. How would you challenge your initial position? Where are the
weaknesses in your argument? They then report back again.

That way you are encouraging students both to sharpen their own stance and to see issues from another
viewpoint. The group tactic can help soften some strident views.

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Resources
Effective class discussions rarely occur by chance. They happen because (a) you’ve structured your course to
ensure that they happen; and (b) you’ve established from Day 1 that students will be expected to take part in
discussions. The benefit of active participation for students is that they will learn more and develop the
thinking skills that a higher education is supposed to facilitate.

Here’s a list of additional resources to help you improve your own discussions.

Books

 Elizabeth F. Barkley: Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty

 Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill: Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques
for Democratic Classrooms
 Jay R. Howard: Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and
Participating in Person and Online
 Multiple authors: Just-In-Time-Teaching: Blending Active Learning With Web Technology

Journal Articles

You might have to hunt down the first one in print, but the second is online. Both are worth reading:

 “The College Classroom: Some Observations on the Meaning of Student Participation,” published
in Sociology and Social Research in 1976, written by D. A. Karp and W. C. Yoels
 “Student Participation in the College Classroom: An Extended Multidisciplinary Literature
Review,” published in Communication Education in 2010 and written by Kelly A. Rocca

Advice and Opinion Columns

 A 2018 advice column from The Chronicle: “The ‘Holy Grail’ of Class Discussion”
 A 2015 essay from The Chronicle: “How to Build a Better Class Discussion”
 A 2018 report from Faculty Focus: “An Approach for Helping Quiet Students Find Their Voices”
 A 2019 article from Faculty Focus: “‘Everybody With Me?’ and Other Not-so-Useful Questions”
 A 2016 advice column from The Chronicle: “The Beauty of the Virtual Discussion Section”
 A 2018 report from The Chronicle: “Running Class Discussions on Divisive Topics Is Tricky. Here’s
One Promising Approach”
 A 2014 advice column from The Chronicle: “Knowing When to Teach Current Events”
 A 2017 essay from The Chronicle: “Don’t Ignore Your Republican Students”
 A 2018 blog post from the Association of College and University Educators: “How to Ensure Success
in Discussions on Controversial Topics: Structure”
 Advice from the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching: “Guidelines
for Discussing Incidents of Hate, Bias, and Discrimination”

Jay Howard is a professor of sociology and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler
University. His most recent book is Discussion In the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and
Participating in Person and Online (Wiley, 2015). You can reach him by email at jrhoward@butler.edu and
follow him on Twitter@JayRHoward.

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52
How to Create a Syllabus
Advice Guide
By Kevin Gannon

Syllabus Essentials (and Two to Avoid) ............................................................................................................... 55

The Syllabus Components .................................................................................................................................. 56
Course Information .................................................................................................................................................... 56
Instructor Information ............................................................................................................................................... 56
Course Goals .............................................................................................................................................................. 58
Course Materials and Requirements ......................................................................................................................... 60
Course Policies ........................................................................................................................................................... 60
Attendance ................................................................................................................................................................ 61
Late or Missed Work .................................................................................................................................................. 62
Academic Honesty ..................................................................................................................................................... 62
Technology................................................................................................................................................................. 63
Accessibility and Inclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 64
Grading and Assessment ........................................................................................................................................... 66
Course Schedule and Calendar .................................................................................................................................. 67
Putting It All Together ....................................................................................................................................... 68
Creating Your Syllabus ............................................................................................................................................... 68
How Will Students Access Your Syllabus? ................................................................................................................. 69
Getting Them to Read It ............................................................................................................................................ 70
Assessing and Revising Your Syllabus ................................................................................................................. 71
Loopholes................................................................................................................................................................... 71
Revisions on the Fly ................................................................................................................................................... 71
What to Keep, What to Change ................................................................................................................................. 72

Perhaps you’re offering a new course, or you’re looking to revamp an old one. Maybe that section you were
scheduled to teach didn’t make enrollment, and now you’re facing a new prep with only a few weeks (or
days!) to get ready. Even if you don’t need to write or revise a course syllabus, though, there’s never a bad
time to re-examine and rethink your syllabi. As much as we exhort our students to Read The Syllabus, we
ought to make sure we’re giving them something that’s actually worth reading. So without further ado: here's
how to write a syllabus.

53
A syllabus is more than just a checklist or collection of policies and procedures. In fact, approaching it as akin
to a “contract” — while that’s a popular analogy in higher education — is not the way to create an effective
syllabus. We should aim to do more than badger our students with arbitrary dictates that suggest we fully
expect them to misbehave. The course syllabus is, in most cases, the first contact that students will have with
both us and the course. As the cliché goes, we don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. The
syllabus sets the tone for the course. Rather than emphasize what they can’t do, an effective syllabus is a
promise that, as a result of our course, students will be able to do a number of things either for the first time or
at least better than they could before. As you create a syllabus, then, the question you ought to keep at the
center of the process is: What am I saying to my students?

With that in mind, this guide is aimed at showing you how to create or redesign a syllabus so that it’s not only
an effective map of your course’s nuts-and-bolts logistics but also an invitation to actively engage in the
learning process. Whether you’ve been teaching for years or are embarking on your first course as instructor
of record, you’ll find in this guide the resources, recommendations, and tips and tricks to craft a syllabus that
will guide students through your course and motivate them to succeed in it.

You won’t need much to get started, but it helps to have the following on hand before you begin syllabus
construction:

 Your course materials. Assemble the books, readings, and other resources you’ll ask students to
acquire for the course, along with other things they might need to be successful (e.g., specific art
supplies or high-speed internet access for streaming media).
 Your institution’s academic calendar. When does your term begin and end? What holidays occur
during the course? What campus events or deadlines are important to be aware of as you schedule
class activities and assessments?
 Other calendars. Two, in particular. First, consider referring to a calendar of major religious holidays
from the traditions represented at your institution. My campus does not close for Jewish or Muslim
observances, but I take them into account in my course schedule, as I know I will have students of
those faiths in my classes. Second, have your personal calendar available, too. If you are attending a
conference during the semester, or have an article, a project, or a tenure-and-promotion file due, you’ll
want to ensure that you won’t have a stack of 45 essays descend upon you at the same time.
 Any other relevant information or materials. Some institutions require every syllabus to include a
set of boilerplate policy statements. Perhaps you might have departmental assessment outcomes that
need to be part of your course goals. For laboratory courses, there may be lab-specific materials that
need to go into your syllabus. It’s far better to have such materials in hand than to have to go back
after you thought you were done and shoehorn in two pages. If you’re unsure whether your department
or institution has any of these types of requirements, ask your department chair or dean, or see if your
department has a syllabus archive where you might look at previous iterations of the course you’re
teaching.

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Syllabus Essentials (and Two to Avoid)
As you’ll see, there is a wide variety of options when it comes to formats, styles, and content. Many
institutions have templates or checklists to help you get started. Another good resource is The Course
Syllabus: A Learner-Centered Approach, which has sample syllabi and templates in its appendices. Whatever
model you choose, there are certain core elements that every syllabus needs in order to be effective.
Remember, the purpose of a syllabus is to set the tone, map the course for your students, and explain how to
be successful in the class. Leaving out essential components is tantamount to showing students that you are
absent-minded and unprofessional, or that you don’t care about their success in class. To avoid sending such a
counterproductive message, make sure your syllabus includes the following essential pieces (a fuller
discussion of each can be found in subsequent sections):

 Basic course information. What course is this? (You may be required to include the catalog
description.) When and where does it meet? How many credit hours does it offer? Is the course face-
to-face, online-only, or blended? Are there prerequisites?
 Instructor information. Who are you? What’s your departmental affiliation? Where is your office (if
you have one)? When and where can students meet with you — what are your regular office hours, or
do you schedule individual conferences? How can students communicate with you via phone or email,
and do you have a preference?
 Course goals. What will your students be able to do as a result of this course that they could not do, or
do as well, before? What purpose does this course and its material serve? Are there discipline-specific
objectives, larger metacognitive goals, or both?
 Course materials and requirements. What books, readings, and other course materials will be
needed, and where can students acquire them? Are there other skills that students will need to be
successful (for example, proficiency with specific software)? Will the course involve site visits or
fieldwork outside of regular meeting times?
 Course policies. Do you have policies regarding attendance or missed work? Are there particular
classroom expectations that students need to be aware of? What about technology use?
 Grading and assessment. What will students be asked to do? How is the course grade determined,
and what is the grading scale? Do you offer extra credit?
 Course schedule/calendar. What will students be asked to do for particular class sessions? When will
quizzes and/or examinations be given? What are the due dates for the papers, projects, or other
assessments? Is there a final exam, and if so, when? (Many institutions have a special calendar for
final-exam week.)ation, storytelling, correspondence and diary. Writing has been instrumental in
keeping history, dissemination of knowledge through the media and the formation of legal systems.

Ineffective syllabi —or just plain bad ones — have common attributes of their own. Whether you’re creating
or revising a syllabus, make sure the following are not part of it:

 Sloppy editing. Given this document’s importance in setting the tone for a course, the worst way to
begin the term is to convey the impression of unprofessionalism. There’s nothing wrong with reusing
syllabi, or adapting sections of one syllabus for another one. But when you cut and paste information,
and leave in a reference to the “Fall 2016” section of the course, or when a policy section is a
mishmash of three font sizes, you’re not inspiring confidence in your attention to detail. If the syllabus
is riddled with typos or poorly formatted, any message you’re trying to convey to students about the
importance of proofreading their papers is undercut. Do as I say, not as I do does not lead to
successful courses.
 Scolding. There’s a temptation to put something in your course policies that responds directly to that
one student who did that really aggravating thing two years ago and you’ll be damned if that happens

55
 again. If you do that, however, you end up with a list of policies that is both oddly specific and overly
long. Students will see all of those “thou shalt nots” as your telling them that you expect them to screw
up at some point during the semester, or that you anticipate “bad behavior.” Subsequent sections of
this guide will look at ways to approach course policies (and etiquette) in a more constructive manner,
but the takeaway here is: Ask yourself if your policy sections would sound, from the student’s
perspective, like a scolding. Also, AVOID USING ALL-CAPS SENTENCES FOR EMPHASIS, as
that is now seen as how one yells at other people on the internet.

The Syllabus Components

Course Information

The first thing students should see on a syllabus is information about the class and about you, the instructor.
The course title, section, date, time, and location, too, ought to be immediately apparent — which may seem
obvious but isn’t always so. Featuring that information prominently is particularly important if you teach at an
institution where students “shop” for classes the first week of the term — your syllabus will be what they refer
to as they consider whether to enroll or switch classes. It’s also essential to make sure this information is up to
date; there’s no worse feeling than getting ready to distribute your syllabus to students on the first day of
class, only to notice that you forgot to change the semester and time information from when you taught the
course the year before. (That happened once to … uh … a friend.)

Put the essential facts of your class at the top of your syllabus.

If you’re teaching a blended or online class, you should include a description of that format here. Students
might not be familiar with what a blended course entails, for example. And first-time online students could
use an explanation of the expectations and requirements for a course of this nature (and how those differ from
a face-to-face class). It’s also useful to give a brief description of the course here so students can quickly
gauge its scope and content, and be aware of any prerequisites or corequisites; the description listed in the
course catalog is often ideal for this role.

Instructor Information

While the previous section is relatively straightforward, information about you — the Instructor — involves
more reflection and choices. Some instructors include brief biographical information; for example, where they
did their graduate work, or a brief explanation of how their scholarly and teaching interests intersect with the
course topics. It might read something like this: Welcome to “U.S. History to 1877.” As a historian who
specializes in the Revolutionary and early national periods of U.S. history (my Ph.D. is from one of the oldest
universities in the country), I really enjoy teaching this course, and I look forward to sharing some of what
I’ve learned in my own research on this period as we journey together this semester. It’s up to you how much
information you provide, or whether you include a biographical statement at all. But if you feel that it’s a
good idea to emphasize your credentials and qualifications (something that many academics who are not
white males have to consider, unfortunately, given what we know about the biases that lead some students to
question the expertise of female and/or minority faculty members), then a short biographical introduction
could be the opportune moment to do so.

Whether or not you choose to include biographical material, I highly recommend incorporating a statement of
your teaching philosophy. There are a number of ways in which taking the time to discuss your pedagogical
56
approach makes the syllabus more effective: It helps personalize a potentially dry document, it projects a
caring and welcoming stance (particularly important if you’re teaching a large lecture class, in which
“impersonal” is the default setting), and it creates a larger framework for your particular goals, assignments,
and expectations. It might seem difficult to conceive of a philosophical statement like this in the relatively
abbreviated space available in a syllabus (as opposed to the two-to-three-page statements of teaching
philosophy you might have included in your job applications). But this needn’t be a full-blown exposition of
your pedagogy — that will become apparent as time goes on in the classroom. Rather, it should be an
overview — the “elevator talk” version — of your pedagogy that gives students a good sense of how you
approach teaching and learning. As you consider how to effectively and concisely convey your teaching
philosophy, you may find it helpful to consider the following questions:

 Why are you teaching? What drew you to the profession? What do you enjoy about working with
students in the college academic environment? Your students will appreciate seeing what motivates
you to be with them.
 Why are you teaching this course? If you drew the short straw in the departmental rotation and are
teaching it because no one else wanted to, perhaps it’s best not to say so. But usually there is
something about the course — it’s in your area of specialization, it’s one of your personal favorites,
you enjoy introducing nonmajors to your discipline — that drew you to it. Tell your students what that
is, and invite them to share that interest with you.
 How do you define successful learning? How do you know when your students have learned? What
sort of processes do you think are most effective to foster learning? How do you define “success?”
Students will benefit from having a tangible sense of what constitutes success in your course.
 What can students expect from you? A statement outlining your teaching philosophy is a good way
to signal what students might expect. If your syllabus says you believe that learning occurs best
through discussion and deliberation, for example, they’ll know they can expect class to be discussion-
oriented. If you have a particular organizational schema for your material, or if there are pedagogical
techniques that you embrace, conveying that to your students helps them visualize what their
experiences will be like during the term. Moreover, it can open a conversation about expectations and
roles.

Once again, this doesn’t have to be an extended essay. A brief paragraph that gives students a sense of your
excitement and interest in the course and in their learning can be an invaluable tone-setter. The process of
formulating such a concise statement can be a clarifying exercise for you as well.

Finally, an effective syllabus should include information that makes it as easy as possible for students to meet
and/or communicate with you outside of class. A quick glance at the beginning of your syllabus should
convey the following:

 Office hours. Are they at set times every week or by appointment? Perhaps a mixture of both? What if
your posted office hours conflict with a student’s schedule? How would he or she make an
appointment to see you then?
 Office (or other meeting) location. Your students need to know where to find you. But given that
contingent instructors teach nearly 75 percent of credit hours in U.S. higher education, and often do
not have a designated office or work space, the traditional version of “office hours” is far less
prevalent than it used to be. If you have a campus office, be sure your syllabus lists the location. If you
expect to meet students in some other campus space, make that clear high up on your syllabus
— something like “I hold office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 11 a.m., at the coffee
shop on the main library’s ground floor. Come find me there.”
 Options for (and preferred method of) contact. List your campus email address and/or office phone
number. If you have a preference for one method of communication over the other, specify that here.
57
 Also, it’s useful to include information about how you tend to respond. Making it clear that you will
respond to email within 24 hours, or that you don’t reply to email on Saturdays or Sundays, for
example, can save your inbox from being inundated with scores of “Did you get my email?” messages,
which can commence mere minutes after the original email was sent.

A common lament is that students never come to office hours, or that they write vague and/or unprofessional
emails that leave you mystified as to what they’re trying to find out. A clearly defined section of the syllabus
that not only provides the contact information they need but also explains the process and expectations
surrounding out-of-class communication is a vital way to set the stage for positive faculty-student interactions.

Course Goals

Some call them learning outcomes. Whichever label you use, you are very likely required by your institution
to articulate some for your course. Without goals/outcomes, you won’t know what to assess, and you won’t be
able to talk about your students’ learning in any coherent fashion. Regional accreditors tend to look
unfavorably upon that. “Assessment” is one of those words that often elicits faculty grumbling, usually the
product of cumbersome and ineffective procedures that aren’t collaborative. But at its root, and done well,
assessment is the vital practice of telling your pedagogical story: What are your students learning? How well
are they learning? How can we prove that learning is occurring? Your syllabus can play a crucial role in
answering those questions.

Clearly expressed course goals help students understand what the class is about and how they will be
assessed.

How to articulate course goals and objectives. There are reasons beyond assessment (and those pesky
accreditation requirements) to articulate a good set of learning outcomes. If the syllabus maps where you and
your students are going, then the course goals are the destination. Well-constructed goals convey the purpose
of the journey to students (and can help you clarify it for yourself, on occasion), and they also can provide the
starting point for course design. In their influential 1998 book, Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and
Jay McTighe outlined how to use “backward design” to ensure that all the various elements of your course
are in alignment. Backward design suggests that you begin with the end in mind — that is, with your course
goals. Then work backward:

 Define measurable objectives that demonstrate fulfillment of the broad course goals.
 Design assignments, tests, and other assessments to measure whether students meet the objectives.
 Devise the day-to-day class activities that will help students understand the material and succeed on
the various assessments.

Here’s how that might look in my own history course:

 Course goal: “Students will be able to understand and apply the analytical habits of mind used by
historians.”
 Measurable objective: “Students will be able to assess disparate accounts of a historical event and
create an evidence-based interpretation.”
 Assessment: A research essay that makes use of both primary and secondary sources.
 In class: Activities to help students acquire the research skills and documentary analysis necessary to
write the essay.

In a well-aligned course, goals, objectives, assessments, and activities act like a set of Russian nesting dolls,
the smaller resting neatly within the larger.
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From a student’s perspective, a well-crafted set of course goals can provide a handy framework for organizing
and synthesizing the material throughout the term. Your course goals belong at the front of the syllabus, if not
on the first page itself. To introduce them, consider using phrasing along the lines of “As a result of this
course, you will be able to …,” or “This course will help you develop the necessary skills to…”. Framing the
goals in that way is what Ken Bain sees as the basis of a “ promising syllabus.” In his 2004 book, What The
Best College Teachers Do, Bain pointed to a common element he found on the “best” teachers’ syllabi: “First,
the instructor would lay out the promises or opportunities that the course offered to students,” which
“represented an invitation to a feast.” The invitation was the crucial element, according to Bain — “giving
students a strong sense of control over whether they accepted” and motivating them to pursue the work
involved in fulfilling those promises. The syllabus “was the beginning of a dialogue” and “became a powerful
influence on setting high standards and encouraging people to achieve them.” Motivation is a key ingredient
in effective learning, and a syllabus that puts these types of “promises” front and center, and shows students
the possibilities open to them, is a great way to seed that motivation within their initial encounter with your
course.

Embrace all of your course content. One other factor to consider as you frame your course goals: the
“noncontent content” you teach. For example, a class I teach on the history of the ancient world features
specific content from ancient societies through the fourth century CE. But students in that class also create
course blogs on the ancient world using WordPress, and in the process, acquire proficiency on that platform
and learn to create digital pieces of text and media. Those skills are a significant aspect of my course that can
be useful outside the context of ancient history. One of my course goals, then, states that students will learn to
write in a digital medium for an online audience. Academics talk all the time about the larger academic and
intellectual skills that we teach beyond our content area. Incorporating those skills into a course goal
presented on the front page of your syllabus is an excellent way to make that point explicit for students (and
for other audiences, like assessment committees that use syllabi to determine what students are learning from
particular courses and curricula). Moreover, a course goal built around “noncontent content” lends itself to the
idea of a “promising syllabus” that stokes student interest and motivation. For courses with a reputation for
being difficult, or in subjects (such as mathematics) around which students feel significant anxiety, this is a
particularly salient point.

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to course goals. The key question becomes how to present them on
a syllabus without either giving them short shrift or overwhelming students (and ourselves) with text. One
strategy is to consider grouping course goals by theme. Are there a few “meta-subjects” into which your
specific goals can be sorted? For example, if there are content-based goals grouped around disciplinary
knowledge, and application-oriented goals that come from a laboratory or recitation component, that might be
the schema you use to present those goals on the syllabus. Alternatively, many instructors choose to organize
their course goals around conceptual frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy or L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of
Significant Learning Experiences. Both offer a natural way to organize your course goals. And you can see for
yourself whether you’re paying sufficient attention to all of the cognitive areas you want to see your students
develop (e.g,, are you focusing too much on simple understand-and-remember outcomes at the expense of
higher-order thinking?).

It is essential, whichever structure you choose, to phrase your course goals clearly and carefully. As Ken
Bain’s discussion of the “promising syllabus” makes clear, presentation matters. Creating a set of thoughtful,
explicit learning outcomes provides a powerful opening statement for your syllabus and for the class itself.
Course goals framed as opportunities — rather than abstract or generic goals (the kind that make students’
eyes glaze over) — set the table not only for a successful and engaging learning experience but also for the
rest of an effective course syllabus.

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Course Materials and Requirements

Clearly, this part of your syllabus is context- and discipline-specific. Lab courses require different materials
from classes built around lectures and discussion. Students will be asked to acquire a much different array of
tools for a studio-art course than for one on managerial accounting. Still, there are some considerations to
keep in mind regardless of the type of course you’re teaching:

 How — exactly — do students access your materials? that’s pretty straightforward if you’re simply
requiring a few books that are available at the campus bookstore. But if you’re using proprietary
software that requires an access code or an account to be created, be sure your students are aware of
that. If you’re teaching a film course for which students need a Netflix account, stipulate that on your
syllabus. A good rule of thumb: If you’re requiring students to use something in your course, it should
be discussed (even if briefly) on the syllabus.
 What’s the cost? It’s no secret that the high cost of textbooks and course materials is a major issue
confronting many students. It’s more important than ever to take costs into consideration when you
decide what course materials you’re asking them to acquire. There are ways to help ease the financial
burden, such as using “ open educational resources” or adopting textbooks that have a large number of
used copies available (a quick way to check is to look for the book on Amazon and see how many
used copies are for sale; that’s probably a good indicator of general availability).
 Are there any copyright and intellectual-property issues? Some instructors cut costs for
instructional materials by making PDFs of the course readings available free to students on the course-
management system, or via some other work-around. Just be sure, however, that you’re within “ fair
use” guidelines if you do so. For example, using a photocopy of one chapter from a scholarly
monograph is probably OK, but scanning the entire book is a copyright violation. If you want to model
good information-literacy practices for students, those are the types of things you have to consider.
Your campus librarians are an excellent resource to navigate fair-use and intellectual-property issues
as you decide how to make course materials available to students. Speaking of the library, consider
having copies of any required materials available at the reserve desk for students who might benefit
from that access.

Course Policies

What and why. This section is the heart of a course syllabus. Most institutions and syllabus templates refer to
it as “policies and procedures.” Here is where you discuss course expectations and logistics — what students
will be be asked to do (and discouraged from doing). It’s where you begin to create the type of climate you
want to see in your classroom. It’s also the portion of a syllabus that can be the most fraught. Many of the
pitfalls that make for an ineffective syllabus reside here, and the potential for unintentionally conveying
negative or counterproductive messages is significant. All too often, it’s in this portion of a syllabus where
things bog down, where the instructor’s initial enthusiasm turns to jaded cynicism. Too many times, this
section is where you simply cut and paste institutional boilerplate or fall into the trap of peevishly reciting all
of the things you don’t want students to do. Even if you don’t mean for it to happen, your syllabus can slouch
into the type of adversarial tone that alienates rather than welcomes students to the course.

Sections of policies can come across as adversarial. Avoid that by discussing policies in constructive terms
that highlight the reasons rather than the consequences.

With each policy you list, keep the key question for syllabus construction in mind: What are you saying to
your students? Reflect not just on the specifics of your policies and procedures but also on the reasons you
have them. The “policies and procedures” section can devolve into a laundry list of thou-shalt-nots for two
primary reasons:
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  Institutional requirements. Most colleges and universities, figuring that they have a captive
audience, require instructors to make room on their syllabi for a laundry list of policies or statements.
Some of those mandatory statements can run several pages as they attempt to pre-empt any scenario of
student malfeasance.
 Your own past experience in the classroom. That one student who danced along the line between
paraphrasing and plagiarism? Add a new statement on academic honesty! That time when a student
challenged a grade because missing half the class period wasn’t the same (in the student’s opinion) as
an absence? New late policy! If we teach long enough, the course-policies section can read like a
greatest-hits collection of weird scenarios. Ask yourself, though, if specific cases of “bad behavior”
should be what animates the heart of your syllabus. Nothing will spoil an otherwise promising and
engaging syllabus than a litany of policies that read like veiled threats. What are you saying to your
students? With policy bloat, you’re saying you expect them to do something wrong. And it’s not a
matter of if but when.

In short, every syllabus — brand new or redesigned — should have a policy section that’s the product of
significant discernment and reflection about what is included, why it’s there, and how it’s worded. Here is a
list of the most common types of course policies, with some thoughts and questions that might help you
articulate what they look like for your specific course and students.

Attendance

You may be required to adhere to an attendance policy set by your institution or your department. There might
be a cap on the number of “allowable” absences, perhaps a percentage of total class meetings or, in most
cases, a specific number. Perhaps there’s a policy about the types of absences that should be excused (with
any missed work made up for credit), and the ones that shouldn’t (meaning that penalties will ensue).
Conversely, some of us are at institutions where these matters are left to the discretion of individual faculty
members. If you’re unsure where you fall on this continuum, it’s best to consult your department chair or
dean.

Strict attendance policies don’t ensure attentive students. A flexible policy reduces stress and makes life easier
for you as well.

The foundational question of an attendance policy is, Why is it essential for students to be in class? (I’m
defining “in class” broadly, so as to cover online courses as well.) The answer ought to be how you introduce
your attendance policy on the syllabus. For example: “Because class discussion is at the heart of this course,
you are required to be in class, and what we do in the course of our class meetings will determine a large
portion of your grade.” Note, I’ve underscored that attendance is important, and I’ve tied its importance to the
very way the course will be conducted. Policy derives from philosophy, which helps make clear to students
the legitimate pedagogical reasons behind these expectations.

But perfect attendance almost never occurs. What then? What about those occasions when students do end up
missing a class session (or online unit or module)? Some instructors with the latitude to do so categorize all
absences in the same way — capping the number of classes a student can miss without penalty and making no
distinction between “excused” and “unexcused.” Most instructors (and most institutions/departments) opt to
keep that distinction in place, and attach penalties only to the “unexcused” variety. I recommend the more
flexible approach — it’s a recognition that life happens. Worry about academic penalties shouldn’t be added
to an already stressful situation like a family emergency or illness.

Additionally, forcing students to choose between attending class and participating in a university-sponsored
activity (which might be connected to a scholarship that pays their tuition) places them in a lose-lose situation.
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Avoid that if at all possible. Incorporating these additional considerations into my sample attendance policy
would make it read something like this:

Because class discussion is at the heart of this course, you are required to be in class, and what we do in the
course of our class meetings will determine a large portion of your grade. Of course, I understand that
sometimes emergencies or other unexpected circumstances arise that make attendance that day impossible. If
this is the case, please talk with me as soon as possible so we can make arrangements to get you caught up
(this provision will not apply to nonemergencies like oversleeping). If you will be absent from a class for a
university-sponsored activity, please make arrangements with me — beforehand — regarding any work you
might miss.

That’s a concise statement that outlines a policy, makes the necessary distinctions between what is excused
and what isn’t, and informs students that they will need to take responsibility for initiating the process to make
up missed or late coursework.

Late or Missed Work

Will you accept late work? If so, how late? What, if any, adjustments will you make to the assignment’s grade
if a student submits it past deadline? Perhaps you are less deadline-focused and have a rolling submission
policy. Some instructors set assignment deadlines in collaboration with their students. When it comes to late
policies, a compelling case can be made for one that offers a grace period and abandons hard-and-fast
deadlines. As Ellen Boucher argues, “It’s time we give our students the same respect and flexibility that we
demand in our own careers” and not make a priori assumptions that late work stems from some academic or
character deficit instead of real-life circumstances. On most syllabi, a late-work policy will be closely tied to
the attendance policy, as a majority of instructors allow for the submission of late work without penalty if an
excused absence is involved. However you choose to deal with deadlines in general — or with late
submissions, missed exams, and the like — your syllabus should convey your policy clearly. That will save
you from spending the semester adjudicating every case of late work. More important, students will know
ahead of time exactly what to expect if they turn in assignments past the deadline.

Academic Honesty

Drafting a policy on academic integrity and cheating is one of the thorniest areas of syllabus construction. The
ready availability of online resources raises a plethora of issues around paraphrasing, attribution, and
plagiarism. Some students cheat intentionally by buying papers from online essay mills, but many end up
plagiarizing unintentionally simply because they don’t know how to use digital sources properly — a
difficulty exacerbated by the often hazy line between paraphrasing and outright expropriation. Cheating has
become a matter that’s both increasingly relevant for academe and increasingly byzantine for students. That
trend is reflected in course syllabi, where academic-integrity policies have become both longer and more
punitive in tone. My own institution, for example, mandates that all syllabi include a two-page academic-
honesty policy, much of it given over to a detailed description of the appeals process should a student be
charged with a violation. While I understand the logic — clearly the previous policy didn’t work — I don’t
think adding a long section of campus boilerplate that reads like a criminal statute is particularly effective.
Once again, you’re essentially telling students you think that many of them will cheat, and you’re already
weighing how to punish them.

Yes, academic integrity is important. Yes, this is increasingly complex terrain. You have an ethical imperative
to be abundantly clear about your policies on your syllabi. So how do you talk about academic honesty
without descending into the language of pre-emptive indictment? Two strategies can help you deal with this
constructively:
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  Focus on equity, not punishment. All too often, professors and institutions rush into procedures for
“catching” students without explaining why academic integrity is such an important issue. There are
compelling intellectual, ethical, and legal reasons for a robust and effective policy on academic
honesty. So explain them to students: Creators should be able to control what we create; appropriating
others’ ideas or labor without credit or attribution is theft; no creators want their stuff stolen. The
entire scholarly enterprise depends upon an adherence to those norms. Citation and attribution are also
important ways to ensure that scholarly discourse is open to all voices and does not silence
marginalized or minority perspectives. In that regard, plagiarism can be a form of censorship, in that it
removes someone’s voice (and by extension, scholarly identity) from the conversation. These
fundamental principles of fairness and reciprocity are a much healthier framework for a conversation
about student cheating than a list of thou-shalt-nots and their consequences. Academic honesty should
be more than just a game of cops and robbers; It’s the scaffolding for most of what we hope to
accomplish in higher education. Use your syllabi to make that point.
 Examine your assignment design and class requirements: As James M. Lang argues in his
excellent 2013 book, Cheating Lessons: Learning From Academic Dishonesty, one of the best ways to
combat cheating is to change the environment in which it usually occurs. For example, almost every
case of plagiarism I’ve encountered is the product of procrastination, followed by panic the night
before an assignment is due and by poor decision-making skills that make copy-and-pasting from the
internet seem like a viable solution. It didn’t matter how many students I turned in for academic
dishonesty; the next semester, the same thing would unfold with different students. But ever since I
modified my syllabi to break down large assignments into smaller components — due at various
points throughout the semester, with numerous check-in points to receive formative feedback —
plagiarism has virtually disappeared in my courses. Assignment scaffolding is only one way to create a
classroom ethos that militates against cheating. Another strategy: Design essay prompts so course- and
context-specific that students can’t find an easy answer for them online. While assignment design may
go beyond the immediate scope of syllabus creation, how you choose to either revise or recreate
assignments to counteract academic dishonesty will have a big effect on what your syllabus says about
those assignments and their structure. It’s worth thinking about these issues before drafting a syllabus.

Even if you’re required to add lengthy and/or punitive campus policies on cheating to your syllabus, you
should still try to put them in language oriented toward equity and the ethics behind these requirements.
Ideally, a discussion of academic honesty will complement other elements of the syllabus, like the description
of your teaching philosophy and the assignments/assessments section. Most important, though, frame this
section with that key question in mind: What are you saying to your students? Tone and approach matter,
especially when it comes to an issue as complex as academic integrity.

Technology

Perhaps no area of the syllabus has changed more in recent years than the section on how students use
technology in our courses. When I became a college teacher, in 1998, the only reference to technology on my
syllabi was a requirement that final drafts of essays and research papers be typed or word-processed. (I know,
“typed.” How quaint.) Now, however, there’s a whole section of my syllabus devoted to how to handle email
communication and use our learning-management system, how to create accounts for the course-blogging
platform, and how to access online readings. Here, too, you must discuss your expectations for technology
clearly and thoroughly without becoming pedantic or hectoring students. Make sure your technology policy
covers these two areas:

It’s best to tackle technology — both how it will be used in the course and how it should be used in the
classroom — head on.

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  Logistics. Be explicit about any technology that students will be asked to use in the course. Do you
post assignments and readings on your university’s learning-management system? Does your course
include various platforms (e.g., WordPress, Google, YouTube, Blogger, Dropbox) that require
students to create an account? Does your institution’s email system affect the workflow for your
course? Don’t assume that students are proficient in — or even aware of — the various applications
and platforms you’ve become used to using. A final point: Most (if not all) of the online tools and
platforms that college teachers use require high-speed internet to function. For some students, access
to that type of bandwidth is inconsistent at best. The Pew Research Center has found that 75 percent of
Americans have home broadband service; if your campus demographics mirror that average, then a
quarter of your students have to go elsewhere (like a public library or campus computer lab) for the
internet. In other words, the digital divide is real, and it should inform the technology policy on your
syllabus (not to mention your course design). On the syllabus, invite students who need assistance
obtaining regular broadband access to talk with you about their options.
 Technology etiquette in your classroom. There are several schools of thought about how to approach
this issue on the syllabus. At one end of the spectrum are faculty members who enforce a technology
ban. I understand the sentiment — students looking at eBay or YouTube in class are distracting not
only themselves but also to those around them. But students with disabilities may need to use laptops
or other technology in class, and so-called “laptop bans” force them to either avoid using those tools
(and thus hinder their learning) or out themselves to both the instructor and their classmates. As Rick
Godden and Anne-Marie Womack argue in their important article on this subject: “All too often,
underlying discussions of appropriate student behavior and traditional best practices are narrow
visions of students’ abilities and classroom praxis. Seeing a study body as an undifferentiated group
leads to strict rules and single solutions.” You wouldn’t employ a single pedagogical method
throughout the entire semester; you should think about technology policies with the same logic. It’s far
better for students and their learning that you draft flexible technology-use policies that adjust to both
specific contexts and student needs. If you are worried about distracted students, look at class planning
and course design rather than trying to craft syllabus policies aimed at the symptoms, rather than the
causes, of that distraction.

Ask your students. One solution to the “what do we do about potential disruptions” conundrum — whether it
relates to technology use or student behavior in general — is to invite students to collaborate with you on the
policy. Set aside class time early on and allow students to help set the community norms for the course.
I’ve previously written about this practice, which has been a successful one. I’ve found that students have a
sense of ownership over class meetings, hold themselves to a higher standard, and are more invested in
learning when they’ve had a say in coming up with the technology policies and other classroom rules. Then,
when a conflict arises, I remind students that they created the class rules. So maybe leave this section of your
syllabus blank, with a note that says “to be determined by the class,” or the like. Whatever you decide about
technology and other sorts of etiquette policies, though, your syllabus should be explicit and transparent about
your expectations as well as the philosophy that informs them. Showing students that you made these
decisions intentionally and carefully is the key to a classroom-policies section that complements the rest of an
effective syllabus rather than switching the tone from inviting to scolding.

Accessibility and Inclusion

More and more institutions require at least some language on syllabi about accessibility and inclusion. Even
without a requirement, devoting space to those issues on your syllabus can pay significant dividends. While
the two areas overlap (accessibility can be seen as a subset of inclusion), it’s probably best to deal with them
distinctly.

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Accessibility. Some professors discuss accessibility on their syllabi under the heading of “disability.” Not
only is that an inherently stigmatizing and exclusionary way to approach the issue, but it undermines a
broader conversation you could be having with your class on diverse ways of learning. An accessibility policy
that is limited to specific accommodations for students with “official” documented disabilities may satisfy the
letter of the law, but it leaves other important issues unaddressed. You and your students are better served
thinking about accessibility in the terms proffered by the advocates of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
Learning, UDL advocates argue, is something that can occur effectively in a variety of ways rather than in one
“true manner” that treats “accommodations” as a less-satisfactory deviation. On your syllabus, rather than a
“disability policy,” define what “universal” or “diverse” learning looks like in your course. Invite students to
discuss any learning issues they have with you, but do so within the larger framework of describing how
everyone in the course can fully participate. Reframing “accessibility” as a matter for the entire class — and
not just a few student “exceptions” who need to be “accommodated” — can contribute to the inviting tone and
motivational qualities that make for an effective syllabus.

Inclusion. Academe is finally catching up to what student protesters have been saying for years: that a
commitment to diversity and inclusion is crucial, both pedagogically and institutionally. Inclusive pedagogy
is a worldview rather than a specific set of techniques. But as institutions welcome a student population that is
more diverse than ever, and wrestle to reach more learners with less money, creating an inclusive learning
environment is especially challenging. And making your position on inclusion clear on your syllabus is an
excellent first step. The terms “diversity” and “inclusion” are so ubiquitous they can seem like buzzwords on
a syllabus rather than signifiers of a genuine commitment. Consider the following questions to avoid falling
into that trap:

 What does diversity mean for you and for your discipline? Are you committed to genuine inclusion
(all voices will be heard in your course)? That means not only ensuring an environment in which every
student might contribute but also representing the scholarly diversity of the discipline itself. Do your
course materials show a wide range of scholars/producers and viewpoints? If so, consider calling your
students’ attention to that commitment on the syllabus as your model for the course.
 How will you promote inclusivity in your classroom? Re-emphasizing some of your already stated
policies can do some of this work for you. Refer students to your teaching philosophy or your views
on accessibility, for example. If you and your students are setting course expectations collectively, that
is another opportunity to both promote and model inclusion, particularly when it comes to laying the
ground rules for class discussions. The more inclusive your classroom climate, the likelier it is that
your course will be a significant learning experience for all of your students, not just those whose
families have a long history of going to college. One way to promote inclusivity is through content
warnings, sometimes called “trigger warnings.” If you decide to use such warnings, the syllabus is
where you introduce them and your rationale for their use. Content warnings have come in for
criticism, mostly from arguments based on a caricature rather than on how they are actually used. If
your course includes content that is likely to provoke controversy or cause strong emotional reactions,
content warnings are entirely appropriate. Note that warnings do not “excuse” students from that
particular material, but rather help them prepare themselves to encounter it constructively. Given the
increasing number of diagnosed PTSD cases among college students, you should consider how to use
powerful or emotionally difficult material so that it actually promotes learning. Your course can be
both compassionate and rigorous if you use tools like content warnings to prepare students for the
work ahead.
 What campus resources can assist you? If some of your students need further assistance, where do
they go? The syllabus can highlight such important campus locations as the counseling center, student
services and learning support, the tutoring center, multicultural offices and organizations, and so on.
Don’t assume that your students know about those places or what they offer. Highlighting that
information in your syllabus helps reinforce a message of inclusion.
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Whatever form it takes, this section of your syllabus should be the product of thoughtful reflection and should
effectively convey how and why you value these aspects of the learning environment. Using your syllabus to
tell students they matter — even via seemingly quotidian means like letting them know you will use their
preferred pronouns or emphasizing your commitment to the principles of Title IX — is a powerful way to
foster an inclusive course climate. An effective syllabus should do all it can to foster that climate.

Grading and Assessment

This is one of the sections (if not the section) to which students turn first, so there’s a powerful impetus to set
the right tone. Moreover, striving for clarity and transparency in your discussion of assignments and grading
will pay off over the duration of the course. You will see less student frustration, anxiety, and/or complaints
with a thorough and accessible presentation here. Here are some particular elements to ponder as you frame
your grading policies.

Clarity and transparency when it comes to grading will avoid drama later in the course.

Offer a complete assignment list. Ideally, students should be able to peruse this section of your syllabus and
know everything they’ll be asked to do in the course. That doesn’t mean you have to list every assessment one
by one — but the number and various types of assignments should be clear. One strategy is to group
assignments into categories, specify how many will be required in each category, and briefly describe them.
For example:

Examinations: There will be three in-class examinations during the semester, and a final examination at the
conclusion of the course (see the course calendar for specific dates). The in-term exams are worth 100 points,
and the final exam is worth 150 points. Each exam will contain objective (multiple-choice) and short-answer
questions, as well as a brief essay prompt. I will distribute a study guide about a week in advance of each
exam, but bear in mind that the best way to prepare for these exams is to keep up with the readings and our
in-class activities. We’ll take some time in the week before an exam to talk about study strategies, and I’ll be
happy to answer any review questions you may have. The purpose of these examinations is to assess your
command of the material we’ve covered in a particular unit (the objective and short-answer questions), as
well as your ability to synthesize concepts into an evidence-based argument (the essay).

It’s a useful practice to include some mention of the assignment’s outcome or purpose. Why are you asking
students to do [X]? Or, to put it a different way: When students ask why they have to take a test/write an
essay/post on the discussion board, do you have a good answer ready? Think of the assignment description as
the pedagogical analog of the dissertation or thesis “elevator talk” — a thorough but pithy overview that gives
the details one needs to know at the outset, with the insinuation that more information is to come.

Grading schema and scale. It’s easy to lament students’ single-minded focus on grades — we want them to
learn, not argue with us about the difference between a B-plus and an A. — but their fixation merely reflects
what they have been told since childhood. Grades and grade-point averages have always been a metric by
which they’ve been judged. That mindset is worth trying to undo in college, but I don’t think it’s fair to expect
students to not care about grades when they begin our courses. Grades are not only omnipresent but anxiety-
inducing as well, which is why it’s important to be as clear as possible about how students’ work will be
assessed. What “counts,” and how can students track their progress? Are you using letter grades?
Percentages? Points? Tiny multicolored beads? Whichever system you adopt, be sure your syllabus explains it
clearly. How many points do they need — or what is the percentage cutoff — for an A, a B, etc.? Does your
institution have a standard grading scale, or is this something left up to individual instructors? Do you use
simple letter grades, or is there a plus/minus dimension as well? Spelling all of that out in your syllabus
creates a useful reference and may decrease the potential for complaints.
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Exceptions and distinct features. If you incorporate any sort of measure that is different from the standard
grading procedures that students are used to, be sure to make it clear in this portion of your syllabus. For
example:

 Some instructors allow students to revise and submit work that originally received a subpar score.
Others allow students to submit corrections and receive partial credit for exam questions they missed.
There’s a great case for using these types of measures — when students have the opportunity to reflect
upon and learn from failure, it can be powerful.
 The same holds true for any system in which you eliminate or reapportion specific scores. Perhaps you
drop the semester’s lowest quiz score before averaging a student’s grades. Or you use weighted
grading, in which an average of all a student’s test scores counts for 25 percent of the total grade, their
quiz average another 25 percent, and so on. Be sure to explain this clearly in the syllabus so that
students won’t receive graded assignments back and miscalculate how much weight those scores carry
in their overall grade average.

There’s nothing wrong with using unconventional grading systems so long as you think you have a good set
of pedagogical reasons for doing so. But keep in mind: Students aren’t nearly as familiar with different
grading approaches as you are, so their use needs to be accompanied by a clear and understandable
explanation.

Frequency and distribution of assessments. The number and type of assignments in a course will vary
widely by discipline, class level, and other factors. But a few general principles bear directly upon your
grading policy. First, it’s important to ensure that students have some opportunities early in the course to
receive both qualitative and quantitative (graded) feedback. If your institution employs any sort of “early
alert” practices, by which instructors can identify students who are struggling academically early in the term
so that they can be connected with the appropriate support services, you’ll want to ensure that you have
enough data to make that system effective. So time your assignments on the syllabus accordingly. In a larger
sense, it’s simply good pedagogy to give students a sense of where they stand, preferably via a mix of mostly
low-stakes assignments and a few high-stakes ones. Classes in which grades are determined solely by the
average score of three or four high-stakes exams make it difficult for students to alter their approach or seek
out assistance. (And it’s questionable whether those exams accurately measure student learning in a course.)
However, courses that offer a range of short, predominantly low-stakes assignments in the early weeks of the
term allow students to adjust their approach to the material and help you identify who among them are
struggling. As you construct your syllabus, make sure the workload and the pace are appropriate for the type
of course and the level of students.

Course Schedule and Calendar

How will your students know what to do, and when? A course schedule and/or calendar is a crucial
ingredient. Surprisingly, many institutions list it as an optional component within their recommended syllabus
formats. Yet it contains much of the information that research shows students use most frequently — the
topic(s) for a particular session, the assessments scheduled that day, and the due dates of assignments and
readings. Ignoring it in your syllabus will only confuse and frustrate your students and convey the sort of
message you don’t want to send: that you’re disorganized and don’t place a lot of value on regular
coursework. Or, worse, that you don’t care about students enough to help them plan for the semester. It’s vital
to include a clear and thorough course schedule and/or calendar.

Including a detailed calendar of classes and assignments helps both you and your students plan
appropriately.

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At the very least, your syllabus should offer a breakdown of the course by weeks, units, or modules, listing all
the readings and assignments associated with each chunk. Ideally, you will provide more detail, such as a
session-by-session accounting of topics, assignments, and important course dates. An effective course
calendar includes the following elements:

 Topics or unit descriptions. The course calendar is an excellent opportunity to present your course
organization visually. Perhaps you’ve listed the various topics in the course description. But seeing
them laid out in order and associated with particular dates throughout the term can be even more
useful for students. They can also refer to the calendar for a quick reminder of how a particular unit
fits into the larger course schema.
 Due dates for all assignments. When students look at the course calendar, they should be able to see
when each assignment is due and when a test is scheduled. Your exhortations for them to plan for the
semester ring hollow if you aren’t giving them sufficient resources with which to do so. That holds
true for both major and routine work that you assign. Besides the big due dates, they also need to know
which specific readings you want them to have finished for class next Tuesday.
 Any exceptions to the routine schedule. Is there an off-campus site visit that your students need to
attend? Will there be days when class won’t meet in person? If so, what are you requiring students to
do in lieu of the regular session? Anything you’re planning that isn’t included in the campus academic
calendar needs to be highlighted on your syllabus.
 Important campus dates and deadlines. You can use your course calendar to highlight important
dates, even if they don’t pertain directly to the course. What’s the deadline to drop a course (both with
and without a “Withdrawal” on the transcript)? Are there holidays when campus offices (including the
library) are closed? When is final-exam week? And if your final exam is on a different day and time
than the normal class meetings, is that noted on your calendar? Consider adding major religious
holidays, especially if there is a diversity of faith traditions represented among your students.

A clearly formatted and easy-to-read course schedule is a crucial part of your syllabus. Monthly calendar
templates work well for this section: You can provide a significant amount of detailed information yet retain a
clear and accessible organization. Whichever mode you use, your course schedule/calendar accomplishes
several important things: It conveys your expectations regarding coursework; it presents a visual guide to the
organization and flow of the course; and it gives students the information they need to plan for the entire term.

Putting It All Together

Creating Your Syllabus

Now that you’ve collected all of the information you need to convey, scheduled the course activities and
assignments, and decided how you’ll organize everything, it’s time to create the actual syllabus. Depending
upon your institutional and departmental requirements, you may have considerable latitude in how you
present this material to your students. Conversely, there may be pretty significant restrictions on appearance
and format that you’ll need to take into account. If the former is the case, don’t be shy about design. Try to
make your syllabus as visually compelling and interesting as you can. Sure, you can retain the simple, text-
based structure that will make it resemble a rider on an insurance policy. But it’s easier than ever to
be creative — even unconventional — in presenting information to students. Faculty members have made
a graphic syllabus, presented their syllabus as a Prezi, or used specific tools to create a visual and/or
interactive syllabus.

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You don’t need to be a graphic designer or web developer to produce these types of documents. Simple steps
like adding color, varying headings, and incorporating images or graphics (think infographics) go a long way
toward creating a more interesting and creative syllabus, one that students are more likely to read and
remember. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you have a teaching center on your campus, chances are it has
sample syllabi and expertise with the tools you’ll need.

How Will Students Access Your Syllabus?

At first glance, the answer may seem obvious: My students will have access to the syllabus when I pass it out
to them the first day of class. But for those who teach blended or online classes, that’s not the case. Moreover,
even in traditional face-to-face courses, many instructors are rethinking how and when to make the syllabus
available. For online classes, it’s generally seen as best practice to send an email and/or post an announcement
on the course web page that includes an introduction and directs students to the syllabus. It’s a good idea to
adopt this practice for in-person classes, too. Consider emailing a PDF of your syllabus, or posting it on your
course web page, a week before class begins. You might introduce the document by directing students to a
few of the sections you know they’ll be most interested in, such as assignments and grading, or the schedule.
If you want to draw their attention to other sections, highlight them in the email. Not every student will read
the syllabus before the first day of class, but providing it early can (a) set a professional and organized tone
and (b) assist those students who like to plan ahead.

Here are a few specifics to consider if you decide to go the digital route:

 Distribute your syllabus in a way that minimizes any technical or accessibility issues. The best way to
make the digital version easily readable is to convert it to a PDF before emailing or posting it. If you
distribute the syllabus in its original format — say, in MS Word or Publisher — students who don’t
have that software won’t be able to open it, and there’s also the danger of your formatting being
disrupted, since these file types can be edited. A PDF will preserve your formatting and is easy for
students to read on whatever device they’re using; there are lots of PDF reader software and mobile
apps that are easy to install and free of charge.
 Another consideration when using electronic documents is their accessibility for visually impaired
students using screen-reader technology. (This, of course, holds true for any digital course materials.)
Use the “styles” function in whichever document platform you’re on to designate the “titles,”
“headings,” and “normal text” as such on your syllabus. Otherwise the student’s screen-reading
software will read everything back in undifferentiated form, just a monolith of plain text. For any
images on your syllabus, be sure that you enter alternative text. You don’t need to use phrasing like “a
picture of” — screen-reading software will identify an image as such. Instead, think of the alt-text as a
brief caption that describes the image (“George Washington commissioned this portrait as a young
militia officer in the early 1760s”). There are several useful online guides to using alt-text for
accessibility, including one from the University of Minnesota and a more advanced set of resources
from Oregon State University.
 For a general resource — for both nuts-and-bolts matters (like alt-text) and larger considerations about
rhetoric, image use, and policies that promote access — I highly recommend Tulane
University’s Accessible Syllabus Project.

While these considerations may not be at the top of your syllabus-construction agenda, accessibility is and
will continue to be an urgently relevant matter for both students and institutions. If you’re not in the habit of
ensuring that your course materials are accessible, it’s time to start. The syllabus is an excellent place to
begin.

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Getting Them to Read It

There is a cottage industry of “It’s in the Syllabus!” gear — T-shirts, coffee mugs — that joke about the
seemingly universal student trait of not knowing what’s in the document you’ve spent so much time and
energy preparing. But is it really true that students ignore the syllabus? Only if you’ve given them reason to
ignore it. Here are some strategies to make sure they don’t:

 Keep mentioning your syllabus in class. If you dump the document on students and rarely (or never)
refer to it again, you’re telling them it doesn’t contain any information vital to their success. If you
don’t treat your syllabus as important, why should they?
 Don’t read the syllabus aloud on the first day of class. It’s one thing to take class time to highlight
the important areas of the syllabus. But to spend a class period reading it to students — or going over
it so closely as to have the same effect — is overkill. Do that and your students may decide they’ve
heard everything they need to hear about the syllabus, and put it out of mind. Like your syllabus, the
first day of class is an important opportunity to set a particular tone. Try to avoid turning that class
session into merely a “syllabus day.”
 Let students know where they can find a backup copy. One of the prime culprits behind “they don’t
read the syllabus” is students who lose their copy and don’t know (or are too embarrassed to ask) how
to get a new one. If you use a learning-management system or some other digital platform for your
course, be sure to have a PDF of your syllabus prominently featured on the landing page. Some
instructors choose (or are forced by budget cuts) to make their syllabi available only in an online
format. In that case, be sure to communicate where to access it, and follow up to ask if they have.
 Give a syllabus quiz or other low-stakes assignment. Sometimes students are motivated by grades
more than other factors. However much you wish that wasn’t so, use it to your advantage by giving
a short syllabus quiz in the first week of the term. It’s a good way to see who’s engaging with the
course right away, and who might need extra encouragement. It’s also an easy way for students to be
successful on their first assignment and perhaps lessen their anxiety over grades (particularly true in
subjects that are anxiety-producing or viewed as intimidatingly difficult).
 Hide an “Easter egg” on your syllabus. My father likes to tell a story from his undergraduate days
when he discovered, about halfway through the semester, a line on the syllabus where his instructor
had written something to the effect of “if you read this, let me know by the second week’s class
meeting and I’ll owe you a beer.” Of course, no one in the class collected on the offer. Examples
abound of instructors who hide “Easter eggs” on their syllabi. In addition to letting students catch a
glimpse of your whimsy and humor (like the instructor who asked his students to send him an image
of the ’80s sitcom character Alf), this is a way to gauge how many students have actually read your
syllabus. It’s likely most haven’t, at least not at first; but it’s better to know early rather than assume
everyone is familiar with your syllabus and charge ahead with the material.
 Make the syllabus matter throughout the semester. Be explicit about why your syllabus is as
important in the final week of class as it was at the beginning of the term. Students often skim over the
course goals and dismiss their importance compared with the “real information” like the course
schedule and grading scale. But your goals are a vital part of both the syllabus and the course itself,
and should be front of mind for students as well. Use questions on a syllabus quiz in the first week of
class to place your learning goals/outcomes on center stage. Linda B. Nilson, in her 2016
book, Teaching at Its Best, suggests questions like “Which of the learning objectives for this course
are most important to you personally, and why?” That encourages students to see course goals as
something relevant to them personally, rather than just static decrees. Then, throughout the semester,
keep referring to the course goals in assignments. Explain how an assignment aligns with those goals.
For example: “This essay is meant to help you practice the research-and-analysis skills that are
important parts of this course. Recall that one of our course goals is that you will ‘develop the critical-
thinking skills necessary to meaningfully analyze historical material and arguments’ [HIST 112
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 Syllabus, pg. 1]. This assignment is your first chance to show the results of your work in those
areas.” Another strategy: Link a reading assignment to a particular course goal. That’s the key here:
You want students to see the alignment between the coursework and the course goals. We’ve
internalized that understanding. Our students have not, and they need more explicit signposting.

Assessing and Revising Your Syllabus

Loopholes

There will very likely come a time when — no matter how thoroughly you think you’ve explained specific
assignments, policies, or other material — a student finds a loophole (or, if you prefer, an ambiguity) in the
syllabus. I experienced this the first semester that I asked students to submit assignments via our campus
learning-management system. My usual practice had been for them to hand in assignments by the end of class
on the due date, and I simply assumed this would continue with digital submissions. As it turned out, students
interpreted the “due date” on the syllabus as meaning they could submit the assignment any time that day, so
long as it was before 11:59:59 p.m. Digital submissions were time-stamped, so their interpretation made
perfect sense. Of course, it took me asking “Why did most of you not turn in the essay?” — and then
receiving bewildered responses along the lines of “Um, we still have time, don’t we?” — to realize what was
happening. In the end, I’ve left the end-of-day specification for due dates, as it makes more sense and is what
my students are used to. But the larger point: Be prepared to adjust your policies on the basis of new
technology or other changes that lead to loopholes on your syllabus.

When a student challenges an ambiguity on your syllabus, the first question to ask is whether you have,
indeed, presented information unclearly. If your language is unambiguous and the student has simply
misinterpreted that portion of the syllabus, a constructive conversation can be had. But if a student challenges
you over phrasing that is genuinely open to interpretation — like a wishy-washy due date or a late-work
penalty — don’t get defensive and reject the request. Rather, work with that student and then go back and fix
the syllabus issue before you offer the course again. It’s both unfair and unethical to penalize a student for a
misunderstanding that’s your responsibility, as frustrating as that might be to admit in the moment.

Conversely, be careful about the exceptions you make to your syllabus policies. As the instructor, you
certainly have the discretion to work with students whose life experiences have interfered with their studies.
But it’s problematic if you allow one student to make up an examination because she overslept, while denying
that chance to another. Students expect fairness and consistency — and that’s a professional obligation for any
instructor. If you have a blanket (pun intended) makeup policy for students who overslept, that’s great — so
long as it’s offered consistently. Also, if you’re lax about your stated policies until late in the semester, when
you suddenly become a stickler, that will only confuse and frustrate your students. Again, the key is to remain
fair and consistent. One final consideration: If your syllabus specifies penalties for late work, and you never
enforce them, then you might be placing colleagues who do in an awkward position.

Revisions on the Fly

Perhaps it’s not a student, but you who notices a vague or contradictory passage on the syllabus after the
course has started. Or maybe it becomes clear after three weeks that the reading assignments are overly
ambitious. Sometimes weather-related campus closures play havoc with the class schedule. There’s nothing
wrong with revising your syllabus in the midst of a semester. Indeed, attempting to rigidly adhere to
something that’s obviously not working is a recipe for disaster. Just be transparent about any changes, and
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make them for clear reasons. Ideally, involve students in the conversation if the needed change stems from
something they’ve identified as a difficulty. Post any revisions in the same manner as the original syllabus,
and clearly identify the changes as addenda to the document. You will find yourself on firmer ground here if
you include a statement on your original syllabus that reserves the right to modify its contents — something to
the effect of: “This syllabus, like our course, should be seen as an evolving experience, and from time to time
changes might become necessary. As instructor, I reserve the right to modify this syllabus, with the stipulation
that any changes will be communicated to the entire class clearly and in writing.” That way you can make
revisions while remaining fair and consistent.

What to Keep, What to Change

After the semester ends, it’s good practice to critically reflect on your syllabus (and the course itself) and
discern what worked well and what didn’t:

 Did your syllabus achieve did everything you intended it to?

 Were there sections that students either missed or had difficulty understanding?
 Did your course policies — articulated on your own or in collaboration with students — foster
effective learning?
 Were there any issues that arose during the semester that might inform future versions of your
syllabus? Perhaps a class discussion degenerated into a hostile argument. Should you revisit your
discussion policies or the way you framed the topic?
 Were too many students routinely late to class? Maybe you should rework your policies on attendance
and lateness in the next iteration of the syllabus.

Even though the end of a course is often a flurry of grading and other work, take the time to reflect on how the
syllabus worked while it’s still fresh in your mind. It’s also worth keeping tabs on what changes are occurring
in the departmental and/or institutional environment. Perhaps there’s a new, department-wide attendance
policy that you’ll need to incorporate in syllabi, or new boilerplate that your college is requiring you to
include on your next syllabus (a frequent occurrence). No doubt you hope students will reflect on what
they’ve learned in your course, but you should take the time to do that, too.

Kevin Gannon is a professor of history at Grand View University and director of its Center for Excellence in
Teaching and Learning. He is @TheTattooedProf on Twitter, and you can reach him by email
at kgannon@grandview.edu.

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How to Be a Better Online Teacher
ADVICE GUIDE
By Flower Darby

Commonly used terms....................................................................................................................................... 74

Learning management system................................................................................................................................... 74
Module....................................................................................................................................................................... 74
Asynchronous. ........................................................................................................................................................... 74
10 Essential Principles and Practices .................................................................................................................. 75
Show Up to Class........................................................................................................................................................ 75
Be Yourself ................................................................................................................................................................. 76
Put Yourself in Their Shoes ........................................................................................................................................ 77
Organize Course Content Intuitively .......................................................................................................................... 78
Add Visual Appeal ...................................................................................................................................................... 79
Explain Your Expectations.......................................................................................................................................... 79
Scaffold Learning Activities ........................................................................................................................................ 80
Provide Examples ....................................................................................................................................................... 81
Make Class an Inviting, Pleasant Place to Be ............................................................................................................. 82
Commit to Continuous Improvement........................................................................................................................ 82
Common Misperceptions................................................................................................................................... 83
“Online classes are like slow cookers: Set and forget.” ............................................................................................. 83
“Online students are lazy/disengaged/(insert negative adjective here).” ................................................................ 83
“Online classes don’t work.”...................................................................................................................................... 84
“Teaching online is not as enjoyable as teaching in person.” ................................................................................... 84
How to Find Help............................................................................................................................................... 85
Make friends with your campus instructional designer. ........................................................................................... 85
Seek an experienced online teaching mentor. .......................................................................................................... 85
Connect with colleagues who are trying to be excellent online teachers. ................................................................ 85

Whether you’ve taught online a lot or a little, chances are you didn’t enjoy it as much as teaching in person.
Maybe you didn’t experience that fizz after a particularly invigorating face-to-face class. Indeed, according to
a 2017 Educause survey, only 9 percent of academics prefer to teach “in a completely online environment.”
That means a whopping 91 percent of us don’t. And I suspect that a good majority of that 91 percent would
prefer to teach anywhere but online.
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Clearly, many academics don’t see the value of online courses or of trying to become a better online teacher.
Almost none of us set out to be great online teachers when we decided to go to graduate school. We’ve spent
years in campus classrooms, but we don’t have the same depth and breadth of experience in the online
classroom, as either students or teachers. Most of us don’t know how to teach online or how to get better at it
— and we may not be motivated to learn. Even more likely, we may not feel like we have time to learn.

For all of those reasons, you may not feel fully invested in your online teaching practice. Yet it can be just as
rewarding as teaching in a bricks-and-mortar classroom, if in different ways. Good teaching is good teaching.

Most of us don’t know how to teach online or how to get better at it — and we may not be
motivated to learn.

Which brings me to the purpose of this guide. What you will find here is advice on how to make your online
pedagogy as effective and satisfying as the in-person version, including:

 10 essential principles and practices of better online teaching

 Common misperceptions
 How to find help

Online classes aren’t going away — enrollments continue to grow year after year. Further, online education
increases access for students who, with work and family obligations, would not otherwise be able to go to
college. Those people are just as much our students as the ones who show up on the campus, and they, too,
deserve the best teaching we can offer.

First let’s define a few

Commonly used terms of online teaching.

Learning management system. Otherwise known as an LMS. Online classes typically take place via
your institution’s chosen learning-management system — a platform that include communication, content
delivery, and assessment tools to facilitate the teaching-and-learning process. The specific features of an LMS
can vary from campus to campus, but usually you will find the following common elements and functions:

 A grade book to record student progress.

 Web pages or sites that allow you to present text, videos, or links to other sources.
 Assessment tools so students can submit their assignments, or take a quiz or an exam.
 Discussion forums that enable students to engage in conversations about class content with you and
with one another.

Module. The most common unit of organization for an online class is a module (it has different naming
conventions). If the term is new to you, think of it as tantamount to a unit in your in-person class. Instructors
use modules to organize class materials into topics. They’re ordered sequentially and contain all course
materials and learning activities for that particular topic or unit.

Asynchronous. Most online courses are asynchronous — meaning students aren’t all together in class at the
same time, and class activities don’t take place in real time. Instead, students can complete the tasks whenever
their schedules permit. Flexibility is one of the main advantages offered by online education, and a primary
reason why many students elect to attend class online.

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The jargon and the setup are similar in many online courses, but there are some differences. For example,
some online classes include a synchronous element or two. Some have a small number of students — 30 or
fewer — while others have large enrollments, which can be challenging to teach effectively (a difference that
also happens to be true of face-to-face courses). Some online courses are entirely homegrown, unique to the
individual instructor, while others are highly coordinated across sections or rely heavily on publisher content
and activities.

You will also encounter differences among the circumstances of online students. Some are well equipped
tech-wise, with a good computer and fast, reliable internet access. Others do all of their coursework in a
computer lab on campus. Still others take their laptops to public places with good Wi-Fi (malls, restaurants,
libraries) because they don’t have internet at home.

Even given such variances in class formats and student circumstances, the fact remains that the flexibility of
online education makes it a more accessible option than traditional courses for more than 6.3 million students,
and counting. There are lots of things you can do to be a better online teacher for those students. Read on.

10 Essential Principles and Practices

The teaching suggestions in this guide are not revolutionary. Once you read them, they’ll probably seem like
common sense. But that’s just the point.

Professors often fail to make the connection between what we do in a physical classroom and what we do
online. This guide aims to make that connection explicit — to help you think about what you do well in
person so that you can do those things in your online classes, too. If you already employ some of these
practices, the intent here is to help you think more comprehensively about what else you can do to be an
excellent online teacher. With that goal in mind, let’s get to work.

Show Up to Class

Fundamentally, good teaching requires you to be in the classroom with your students. When you teach in
person, you don’t leave students to their own devices. You’re with them, engaging in any number of teacherly
activities: explaining, guiding, asking, illustrating, answering questions. You arrive early to set up for class.
You stay a few minutes afterward to talk one-on-one with a student who needs extra support. You’re present
and actively involved. You’re there for your students.

Many of you haven’t translated that to online practice. After all, when teaching in person, you have a set
schedule for when to be in class. That schedule also may determine the weekly blocks of time during which
you prepare for class and grade students’ work. But such a set framework does not exist for an online class.
And without intentional planning, you may go several days at a time without engaging in teacherly activities
with your online students.

Instead, create a schedule for meaningful and active involvement in your online classes. For example, how
many hours a week do you spend teaching an in-person, 15-week course? Maybe it’s 10 hours a week, on
average — combining the time you spend in the actual classroom with the time you devote to prepping and
grading (and, of course, even longer after major assignments and tests).

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Schedule the same amount of time each week to be visibly present and engaged in your semester-long online
class. And I do mean visible, meaningful engagement. Here are some ways to do that:

 Post a weekly announcement to provide an overview of the coming week’s topic or a recap of the
previous week’s work, or both.
 Respond to questions posted in an online question-and-answer discussion forum or sent to you by
email.
 Hold online office hours according to a schedule, by appointment, or both.
 Post a quick video to clarify misconceptions about a class topic or assignment.
 Grade and return students’ work in a timely fashion.
 Talk with students in online discussions.

When you are regularly present and engaged in the online classroom, your students are more likely to be, too.

Be Yourself

Most professors enjoy teaching in person because of the opportunity to interact with students, share our
passion for a subject, and watch understanding dawn on their faces. Some of us, admittedly, enjoy the
performative aspect. We feed off the energy in the room. We use it to fuel our own energetic communication.
Many of us have a unique teaching persona — different from the person we are in a hallway conversation or
in a department meeting. We employ humor. We vary our delivery to best effect. We pause. We raise our
voices. We gesticulate for emphasis.

In an online classroom, your teaching style can get lost in translation. Although this is beginning to change, it
is still the case that a primary means of communication in an online course is the written word. A wall of text
can be dry and demotivating to students. Where is the vocal intonation? Where are the facial expressions?
How do you stride up and down the front of the room to help make your point?

The solution, by the way, is not to post a video of yourself delivering a standard lecture in a classroom. The
physical energy gets lost in that medium, too. Instead, capture your personality and your passion in ways that
are different from what you might do in person, yet authentic.

Written content is inevitably part of any online course, but strive to use a unique voice in your writing. Mini-
lectures, assignment instructions, answers to questions, weekly announcements — you can write those in such
a way as to represent your true self:

 Infuse your writing with warmth. Convey your support. In your weekly announcement, for example,
don’t write, “Some of you have skipped the past few quizzes. You won’t pass this class if you continue
to do so.” Instead, write, “Thank you for your work in this class. I know it’s a lot to manage. Just a
reminder, make sure you’re taking all the quizzes to help you be successful here. Please contact me if I
can help or answer any questions. Thanks!”
 Be human. Sometimes the inherent distance between professor and student in an online class infects
your written communication. But you needn’t write in a detached tone. Instead, practice immediacy.
For example, at the end of a set of assignment instructions, you could write, “If you have any
questions at all about what you are supposed to do on this assignment, please remember I am here to
help. Reach out any time so I can support your success.” That is more friendly, more caring, and more
reassuring than, “Questions? Post them in the Q&A discussion forum.”

Recording yourself whenever possible is another great way to bring your whole self to class. Whether by
audio or video, capture your expertise, your empathy, your teacher persona in a way that comes across with
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much more impact than in writing (again, I don’t mean videos of you lecturing). These recordings don’t have
to be professionally produced, and you don’t have to have a video in every module. Instead, start small. For
example, record a quick introduction and greeting to include in the “Start Here” module of your course.

Many learning-management systems include a built-in feature to record audio and video. Or you can capture a
quick video on your smartphone using the YouTube app or similar. Either way, experiment with providing
guidance and instruction via the technology tools you have at hand.

Students appreciate seeing your face and hearing your voice. Don’t worry about making sure every stray hair
is in place. If you trip over your tongue while recording, that’s OK, too. Pause and start again. After all,
you’re not always perfectly polished and articulate in the classroom, are you? Those little foibles make your
recordings authentic. They show you’re a real person. Students need to know you in order to engage with you
online. So look for ways to be yourself via technology, just as you do in person.

Put Yourself in Their Shoes

Your online students aren’t physically near you or other students when they’re “in class.” Most do their
coursework when they are alone, whether at home or in a public space with Wi-Fi, like a library or a coffee
shop. They can’t turn to a neighbor for help or raise a hand to ask a question. That leads to a strong sense of
isolation and creates a need for support — different from the kind you offer when you teach in person.

In a physical classroom, you can pick up on nonverbal cues. Are students bored? Tuning out? Confused? You
can observe the signals and adjust what you’re doing. When students are taking class at home, puzzling over
your explanation of a complex concept, you’re not there in real time to allay their confusion. You can’t
observe when you’ve lost their attention or when your instructions aren’t clear. Yet you want to support them
just as you would in a campus-based classroom.

How can you do that? By anticipating their isolation and planning for it in your course design.

Imagine that you are the student, on your own, trying to make sense of what is in front of you on the screen.
Get outside your own head — where your online class makes sense and everything is clear. Instead, try to
envision how your students are experiencing the class. I will talk in more detail below about each of these, but
for instance: Are your instructions clear on how long students’ discussion posts should be, and on how they
should cite sources? Do you include a detailed grading rubric? Do you provide an example of a successful
final project, so that students can see your expectations and don’t have to muddle through while they wait for
a reply from you?

In a physical classroom, you can pick up on nonverbal cues. When students are taking class at
home, you can’t observe when you’ve lost their attention or when your instructions aren’t
clear.

Better yet, have a trusted colleague evaluate your online class. Ask experienced online-faculty members or
campus instructional designers to go in and poke around as if they were students. You’ll be surprised at what
they might see that you can’t — a confusing organization of course materials, an overly intimidating tone in
textual instructions, a lack of clarity on what to do first to get started with the course. Use their observations to
help you make a few tweaks.

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Ideally, students should know exactly what you are teaching and what they are supposed to do as a result.
That rarely happens by accident, though. You must be intentional, put yourself in your students’ shoes, and
design for clarity. This principle should guide your practice for the next few suggestions.

Organize Course Content Intuitively

Try to think like a student when you organize course materials. Commonly, online students become confused,
frustrated, and disengaged simply because you or the campus LMS have made it too hard to find the content
and activities. When students use a lot of cognitive resources just trying to figure out where to go to access
readings, videos, discussions, or quizzes, they have little mental energy left for the content itself. Discouraged
and/or irritated students are less likely to learn.

Once again, compare the organization and support services of your in-person courses with what you provide
in your online teaching. In both contexts, there should be a method to your madness that is not hidden from
students. The design and sequence of content and learning activities in both realms should be methodical,
systematic, and purposeful.

If they have to click out of a module and into another folder to watch a required video, that
can be distracting — or frustrating if it’s hard to find.

In person, you have the advantage of giving verbal explanations, reminders, and nudges. Since that
opportunity doesn’t exist in quite the same way online, you need to give structural support to head off points
of confusion. To identify those points:

 Activate the student-preview function (most LMSs have this feature) and navigate your course as if
you were new to online learning in general and to your LMS in particular.
 Is it clear where things are found? Note times when it’s not immediately evident what a student should
do. In some LMSs, for example, a text heading may actually be a link that students have to click to
access a content page or assignment. The need to click to get to more information might not be clear to
them. When possible, add a simple line of guidance: “Click the link above to access the assignment
submission area.”
 Remember, online students can’t generally ask a quick question in real time. Remove any opacity
brought on by the design of the LMS by giving quick pointers wherever you can.
 Think about how the use of menus, modules, folders, and other organizing structures helps or hinders
students’ progress through the course. Strike a balance between scrolling and clicking. Students should
be able to access content, assessments, and learning activities without constantly clicking more and
more links. Equally important, use LMS tools such as folders and pages to keep things organized. An
online course should not be one giant website of endless scrolling. Nor should it be a warren of nested
and subnested folders. Aim for a good mix of navigational approaches so students experience neither
scrolling nor clicking fatigue.

Strive for a course organization that is clear, methodical, and intuitive. Help students move through content
and activities smoothly and seamlessly, so that their attention remains focused on learning the material. If they
have to click out of a module and into another folder to watch a required video, that can be distracting — or
frustrating if it’s hard to find. Similarly, requiring students to exit from a sequence of content pages and
access a quiz by navigating to a different location wastes time and mental energy. Instead, try to order
materials and activities such that the flow makes sense for someone new to the course. Ask an online-savvy
colleague for help if you are too close to the content and unable to see it from a newcomer’s perspective.

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Add Visual Appeal

Online courses suffer a well-earned reputation of being ugly, dry, boring, and unappealing. Humans are more
likely to want to be in a space if it is pleasant to look at. Plenty of students would rather learn in a new
building than in a dingy lecture hall that hasn’t been renovated in decades. The appearance of our
surroundings affects our enjoyment and therefore our engagement.

That’s why you need to give serious thought to the way your online courses look. You may be surprised at the
impact a few small touches can make.

When thinking about the visuals of an online class, look to your favorite websites. Study the layouts of books
and magazines that you enjoy. A great deal of thought has gone into their design. Why not apply this
philosophy to an online class?

Online courses suffer a well-earned reputation of being ugly, dry, boring, and unappealing.

You don’t have to be a graphic designer to enhance course appearance. A little attention to presentation goes a
long way. Do you have a lot of written lecture notes or instructions? Break up long chunks of text with
subheads and space between paragraphs. Embed relevant images. Include thumbnail videos that you’ve either
created or sourced from YouTube, news sites, or library resources. Aim for attractive yet appropriate.

Not sure where to start? Many institutions have media designers who can help. Or approach the campus
teaching center or the LMS-support staff. An online course that is visually appealing (or at least not
completely ugly) helps students to engage more frequently and more meaningfully. Unfortunately, public
links to visually effective online courses are few, but here’s an example (open in view-only format): “Modern
Mythology and Geek Culture.” Notice the visual impact of the home page, then click around to observe its
logical, student-friendly organization.

Note: All visuals should be accessible to all students. Use the formatting tools in your text editor, such as
heads and subheads, to enable screen readers (a tool to help blind students). Pictures, graphs, and formulas
need alternate text descriptions (again, for screen readers). Videos should be captioned or a written transcript
provided. Principles of Universal Design for Learning show us that such supports benefit all learners, not just
those with disabilities. Work with your local instructional designer and disability-resources specialist for help
on this front. By no means should you deny students access to any content just because you want your course
to look nicer. Work with the experts on your campus to ensure good looks andaccessibility.

Explain Your Expectations

When you’re standing at the front of a classroom and you assign a task, a paper, or a project, you don’t simply
hand out written instructions and not say a word about the assignment. Nor do you display the instructions on
a PowerPoint slide without explaining more about what you are looking for and what students should do to
succeed.

Yet that is what often happens in online classes: The only instructions come in the form of written text. You
might think your writing is clear, but what’s missing is the kind of nuanced explanation that you routinely
provide in a physical classroom.

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Remember, online students typically work by themselves. They can’t ask for, or receive, clarification in the
moment they first encounter your assignment instructions. Which is why you need to explain what you’re
looking for as clearly as possible in an online class.

But don’t go to the other extreme and create tomes of written instructions, overly detailed directions, pages
and pages of material that students won’t bother to read. In that case, you haven’t really solved the problem.
Aim for a balance between thorough and digestible. Here are a few ways to do that:

 Write down the directions as if you were having a conversation with a student, so they don’t read like
a textbook.
 Create an informal two-minute explainer video to flesh out some details of an assignment.
 Provide a rubric.
 Share an example of student work that earned top marks. Maybe even share an example of mediocre
work so students can compare the two.

In short, provide as much meaningful support as you can — without going overboard — so that students don’t
have to guess what you want them to do.

Scaffold Learning Activities

When you teach in person, you do a lot of modeling that you may not even be aware you’re doing. For
example, when you demonstrate how to solve an equation, you’re explaining your thinking process. When
you share examples and analogies, you’re showing how you connect concepts for deeper understanding.
When you ask critical questions, you’re modeling how thinkers in your discipline make sense of theories and
approaches.

You explain things — step by systematic step — to help students learn and perform successfully on tests,
projects, papers, and other assignments.

Look for ways to break down complex tasks so that students make timely progress and receive
feedback while there is still time to adjust their approach.

That kind of modeling and “scaffolding” doesn’t happen quite as naturally in online classes, where real-time
interactions are limited. To help students succeed, you must be creative. Scrutinize your assessments, both
large and small. Have your students had the opportunity to build — step by step, as they would in an in-
person classroom — the knowledge and skills they will need do well on those assessments?

Here are some examples of how to scaffold activities in an online course. When possible, make these an
opportunity for you to give incremental feedback so students know whether or not they are on the right track:

 Let’s say you want students to record a video presentation of their research topics. It’s hard enough to
give a good presentation without the video-recording element. So help your online students gain
practice with the technology before they have to use it for a high-stakes project. For example, in the
first week or two of class, give them a low-stakes, low-stress assignment: Ask them to record and post
a two-minute video introducing themselves to the class.
 As part of an orientation module, ask students to send you a message using the LMS messaging/email
system so they know how to do this later in the class if they have a question for you. Ask them to
answer a question about the syllabus or to list two goals for their learning in the course. Reply with a
short personal greeting so they know you received the message and are available to help.

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  During Week 1, ask students to upload a PDF file of their handwritten work solving the first step of a
problem. This exercise will help them learn how to turn a photo on their mobile device into a PDF file,
and how to submit it as an assignment in the LMS. It’s a good way correct any missteps early on.
 At the beginning of the first module, ask students use one of the many free mind-mapping
tools available on the web to create a concept map of what they already know about the course topic.
Then, at the end of each module, assign students to create a summary concept map to help them make
sense of each topic.

Look for ways to break down complex tasks so that students make timely progress and receive feedback on
their work while there is still time to adjust their approach if needed.

Provide Examples

During an in-person course, if students raise their hands and say they just don’t get some concept, you find
another way to explain it. You come up with examples, maybe from another realm of life. That variety of
examples and explanations helps learners grasp the information in a way that makes the most sense to them.
Examples are even more crucial in online teaching.

Consider the first time you taught a college course. Maybe you borrowed a syllabus from a previous instructor
to guide you in developing your own. Likewise, the first time you taught online, you may have relied on
someone else’s content in the LMS so that you didn’t have to start from scratch. Those of you who had to
create your first online class without any model to emulate know how challenging it is to produce something
entirely new.

Online learners, too, benefit from multiple explanations of difficult concepts and multiple examples of the
kind of work you want to see. Among other options, you might:

 Source existing videos that put another spin on a particular topic.

 Record a short guest-lecture video to let students hear from another expert in your field.
 Structure ways for students to explain new information to one another — as novice learners, they may
come up with examples and illustrations that make more sense to their peers than your explanations
do. For example, you could assign semester-long groups of two and ask students to interact with their
partners every week by phone or text to explain course concepts — in an introductory psychology
class, for example, how neurons fire in the brain. Students could submit a short summary of their work
with their partner and tell how it helped them better understand that week’s concepts.

How many examples should you provide? Lots of them, wherever possible. You may want to make some
examples optional or supplemental, for students who want more help. Requiring all students to read or watch
multiple examples and explanations may feel like busy work for some.

How many examples should you provide? Lots of them, wherever possible.

In addition to sharing explanations of concepts, give as many examples of previous students’ work as
appropriate. Show their full work or just pieces. For a persuasive essay, you can show examples of effective
introductions; for a complex clinical process, provide work showing only the first step.

In your teaching and writing for the course, model the kind of work you wish to see. For example, use a
professional yet conversational tone in your discussion posts. Demonstrate how you respect and value diverse
perspectives. When you show students what you’re looking for, they’re likely to be more confident in their
ability to succeed on a task, which in turn increases their motivation to engage meaningfully.
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Make Class an Inviting, Pleasant Place to Be

Ask yourself: Do you enjoy going into your online classroom? Do you like being there? Do you look forward
to communicating with your online students in the same way you look forward to interacting with students in
a physical classroom?

Those are hard questions, but they shine a light on an important issue for many faculty members. If we’re
honest, many of us would have to say that we don’t enjoy being in our online classes as much as we enjoy
teaching in person. Indeed, that could help explain why only 9 percent of us prefer to teach online exclusively.
We simply may not enjoy being there as much.

If you struggle to enjoy the online learning environment as an instructor, it’s not hard to imagine that this
struggle is even harder for students.

When you teach in person, you do a lot of things to help students feel welcome. You greet
students. Smile. Make eye contact. Apply that same principle to your online classes.

When you teach in person, you do a lot of things to help students feel welcome and comfortable in the
classroom. You greet students. Smile. Make eye contact. Answer questions. You show your support in
countless ways. Even when the physical classroom is not particularly attractive, you do a lot to improve the
atmosphere in the room to make it more pleasant and therefore more conducive to learning.

Apply that same principle to your online classes. A deliberate effort to make them more inviting and pleasant
is likely to result in more interesting classes. Students will want to be in your online class if you:

 Use plenty of visuals, media, interactive tools, and learning activities.

 Streamline course organization and navigation. Organize the furniture in the room, so to speak, to
create maximum flow. (The proprietary nature of most online courses makes it difficult for me offer
open examples of what I mean, but the “Modern Mythology and Geek Culture” course I’ve already
mentioned illustrates many of these design strategies.)
 Convey positivity and optimism that students can succeed.
 Demonstrate compassion and caring for your busy online learners.
 Respect their time and engagement by being present and engaged yourself.

By making your online class more enjoyable, you make students want to show up. And students have to want
to be in class before they can learn anything.

Commit to Continuous Improvement

A hallmark of good teaching is the desire to keep getting better at it. Bring that zeal into your online
classroom the same way you bring it to your campus classroom. Invest a little time and energy into
developing as an online teacher. Even small efforts can have a big impact.

Compared with teaching in person, online teaching is still rather new, but there are things you can do to
improve and find fresh ideas to try:

 Participate in workshops offered by your institution’s teaching-and-learning center.

 Join book-discussion groups with your colleagues to delve into books about effective online-teaching
strategies.

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  Subscribe to teaching-related newsletters, such as Faculty Focus and The Chronicle’s Teaching
Newsletter. Sometimes they feature articles specifically related to online teaching; other times, reading
about a new approach in the physical classroom leads to an idea for your online teaching.
 Explore best practices presented in the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository.

Demonstrate your commitment to student success by pursuing your own professional development from time
to time.

Common Misperceptions
Many dedicated online teachers have figured out some good approaches, but mistaken ideas about online
learning persist. Here are some of the most common.

“Online classes are like slow cookers: Set and forget.” Despite the efforts of leading online
educators and educational developers to debunk this myth, many faculty members still treat it as gospel,
consciously or not. Perhaps in part because online courses take so much preparation before the first day of
class — ideally, all content (assessments, activities, prompts) is created in advance and in place for a turnkey
experience — many academics seem to believe that students should be able to walk themselves through an
online course without much active guidance from the instructor.

That is a recipe for disaster.

In the early days of online learning, many online classes were treated like electronic correspondence courses.
Students worked through the content alone, submitted their assignments, and received grades only after they
had completed the entire course. For some people, correspondence courses work. But they take a high level of
motivation, which other online learners, struggling to balance work and family obligations, simply can’t
muster on their own.

Many academics seem to believe that students should be able to walk themselves through an
online course without much active guidance from the instructor. That is a recipe for disaster.

Instead, plan to guide your online class actively and frequently. Just as you advise your students to do, block
out time in your weekly calendar as if you were attending class in person. Post announcements, give further
explanations, provide tips on forthcoming assignments, answer questions, reply to online discussion posts,
grade students’ work. When teaching in person, you don’t expect students to proceed without regular
guidance. The same need for continuous faculty involvement holds true online.

“Online students are lazy/disengaged/(insert negative adjective here).” Many online

students are prone to minimal engagement or drifting away from class altogether. Does online education
attract a certain type of personality, people who are not highly motivated to succeed? Or have we
inadvertently created conditions online that contribute to student disengagement? Things like:

 Confusing and unappealing course designs.

 A shortage of faculty expertise in excellent online instruction.
 The inherent technical challenges of learning online.
 A student population that tends to be working and/or raising children while pursuing degrees.

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With that combination of circumstances, it’s not surprising that some online students do only the minimum
required.

Online learning requires high-level executive-function skills that some students may not possess. The lack of
social and logistical support that is an inherent part of in-person education — where students interact with the
instructor and their peers on a regular basis inside a physical classroom — means that online students must be
able to manage their time well, motivate themselves, direct and regulate their own learning, and seek
appropriate help when needed. But often they simply can’t do all of that on their own, and online courses are
their only option to a degree.

Good online teaching requires you to make an extra effort to help those students persist, learn deeply, and
experience transformation as a result of your online classes. That takes some awareness of the challenges of
online education. It takes careful thought. Planning. Caring. But it can be done. And it seems well worth
doing.

“Online classes don’t work.” Almost half of the 13,451 faculty respondents in the 2017 Educause
survey on faculty and information technology don’t agree that online learning is effective. About 45 percent
of faculty respondents said that students don’t learn as well online as they do in person. In short, they believe
that online education just doesn’t work. But we have plenty of evidence that online courses can produce
student-learning outcomes comparable to those of in-person courses.

Note my use of the word “can.” Much like the best in-person courses, the high-quality online versions require
excellent online teachers. It’s on us to design and teach those highly engaging and effective online classes.

“Teaching online is not as enjoyable as teaching in person.” We all know that many academics
don’t perceive online teaching to be as rewarding as teaching in person. But could that be because we aren’t
doing it right?

If you find online education to be unsatisfying, that might be because the activities you undertake when
“teaching” online resemble administrative tasks more than dynamic co-construction of new knowledge with
students. You log in to grade student work, check boxes, go through the motions, manage operational
functions. No wonder it doesn’t seem fulfilling. Those activities are drudgery.

But online teaching can certainly be rewarding — if in ways different from the face-to-face version. My own
experience is a case in point: Most of my online students are working and caring for children or other family
members. They’re taking online classes because it’s the only way for them to earn a degree and improve their
lot. One of my students, who was serving in the Air Force, recorded his video introduction from his young
daughter’s pink-and-purple “princess” bedroom. Yes, he was a little embarrassed, but I was impressed — no,
moved — by his resourcefulness. It was the only room in the house where he could find a few minutes of
quiet during the family evening routine to do his classwork. So he swallowed his pride and greeted us from
the floor of his little girl’s bedroom, surrounded by toys and dolls. You just don’t get those glimpses into your
students’ personal lives, those tangible experiences of the challenges they choose to overcome, when teaching
classes on campus.

Embracing those differences — the advantages of online classes, the technological opportunities afforded by
a classroom without walls — is how we find joy in teaching online.

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How to Find Help
Ideally, you’re now energized to reinvigorate your online teaching. There’s no need to go it alone. Take
advantage of resources and support as you seek to grow in this pursuit.

Make friends with your campus instructional designer. You are an expert in your subject matter.
Instructional designers (like me) are expert in effective online teaching and learning. Collaborate with this
often underutilized colleague to refine your approach. Maybe you attend a workshop, meet for coffee, or pick
up the phone for a 15-minute conversation about a new idea. Whatever your preference, this person can
significantly improve your experience and satisfaction with teaching online. Go ahead. Give us a call.

Seek an experienced online teaching mentor. Teaching online is a skill different from teaching in
person. Find someone who does it well. Learn from that person’s expertise. Emulating the example of
someone in the online-teaching trenches — who is not only surviving but thriving — can be transformative.

Connect with colleagues who are trying to be excellent online teachers. Interacting with others
who are grappling with the same teaching issues can lead to important new insights and ideas. Propose that a
five-minute tip about online teaching be a regular agenda item at department meetings. Join a book-discussion
group on excellent online teaching. Attend workshops, showcases, and conferences to learn what others at
your institution and elsewhere are doing in online education. Talk with your fellow online educators, learn
from their approaches, and contribute your own ideas. We’re all in this together. Let’s commit to learning
from and with one another.

At this point, you may feel overwhelmed by all the ways of improving your online teaching practice. So start
small. Pick one thing. When you have that down, choose another. Continue step by step, always striving to get
better for the sake of your online students’ learning and success. With some effort, with creative thinking,
with curiosity and courage, you can discover the fizz of teaching within an online classroom.

Flower Darby, a senior instructional designer at Northern Arizona University, teaches online courses at the
university and at Estrella Mountain Community College. She is the author, with James M. Lang, of Small
Teaching Online, forthcoming from Jossey-Bass. Find her on Twitter @flowerdarby or email her
at flower.darby@nau.edu.

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86
Small Changes in Teaching
By James M. Lang

The Minutes Before Class .................................................................................................................................. 88

Arrive Early................................................................................................................................................................. 88
How are you? ............................................................................................................................................................. 88
Display the framework............................................................................................................................................... 89
Create wonder. .......................................................................................................................................................... 89
The First 5 Minutes of Class ............................................................................................................................... 91
Open with a question or two. .................................................................................................................................... 91
What did we learn last time?..................................................................................................................................... 92
Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. ................................................................................................... 92
Write it down. ............................................................................................................................................................ 93
The Last 5 Minutes of Class ................................................................................................................................ 94
The minute paper. ..................................................................................................................................................... 94
Closing connections. .................................................................................................................................................. 95
The metacognitive five. ............................................................................................................................................. 96
Close the loop. ........................................................................................................................................................... 96
Giving Them a Say ............................................................................................................................................. 97
Student-generated exam questions. ......................................................................................................................... 98
Open assessments. .................................................................................................................................................... 98
Class constitutions. .................................................................................................................................................... 99

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The Minutes Before Class
3 simple ways you can set up the day’s learning before the metaphorical bell rings
Arrive Early. When I first started teaching, the open space of a 50- or 75-minute class period seemed an
eternity. Like many a new faculty member, I worried about having enough material. I wanted to ensure that, if
discussion faltered or if I rushed through the lecture too quickly, I would have options to fill the remaining
time. My greatest fear was using up everything I had and finding 30 minutes still left on the clock.
Twenty years later I seem to have the opposite problem: not enough time in the class period to accomplish
everything I have planned. It seems so difficult to me now to do much of substance in 50 minutes. I don’t
know whether to blame that shift in perspective on the fact that I have more teaching experience or that I’m
just older. I suppose those two possibilities don’t untangle very easily.

In my early years I would walk into the classroom with just a minute or two to spare and spend the final
moments before class putting my papers in order, preparing whatever technology I might be using that day,
and gathering my thoughts. If we started a little late, no problem — there was so much time to fill! But lately I
have turned around on this practice as well, arriving at the classroom earlier and earlier. I’ve become my
father’s son, doing the academic equivalent of arriving at the airport hours before my scheduled departure.

The more time I spend with students in that brief space before the start of class, the more I recognize that
those warm-up minutes actually represent a fertile opportunity. I can use the time to enhance the learning that
will take place in the hour that follows, to build a more positive atmosphere for class discussion, or simply to
get to know my students a little better.

Over the next several months I will be making the argument in this space that small changes to our teaching
— in things like course design, classroom practices, and communication with students — can have a powerful
impact on student learning. To kick off the series, let’s focus on what we can do in those potentially empty
moments before class, the ones I used to fritter away with shuffling papers or collecting my thoughts.

The more time I spend with students in that brief space before the start of class, the more I recognize that
those warm-up minutes actually represent a fertile opportunity.
Some faculty have to move hurriedly from one course to their next and might not have the luxury of an extra
few minutes prior to class. But for those who do, I think you will find that a very small investment of time can
pay substantial dividends. Consider the following three ways that you can set up the day’s learning in the few
minutes before the metaphorical bell rings.

How are you? Last year faculty on my campus met for dinner to discuss How College Works,by Daniel F.
Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs. The book documents a long-term study the authors conducted to
understand which aspects of the college experience had the greatest impact on students — both during their
undergraduate years and afterward.

Their most consistent finding: Students cited the relationships they formed as the most important and
memorable aspect of college. Those relationships began with fellow students, but also included connections
with faculty and staff members. The number and intensity of those relationships not only predicted students’
general satisfaction with college, but had the power to motivate them to deeper, more committed learning in
their courses.

While we were discussing this research over dinner, a colleague told us about an experiment she had been
trying in her classes. Although she considers herself an introvert and finds small talk difficult (as do I), she

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had made a determined effort to arrive a few minutes before class and speak to an individual student or two
each day. She rotated around the room, so that eventually she had chatted with each of them. The interactions
were simple and brief: She asked how they were doing, or commented on something she had overheard them
discussing, or inquired about their major or other interests.

The results, she said, had been impressive. Students were more talkative in discussions. The atmosphere in
class took on a more positive, productive tone, and she felt more connected to her students — even the ones
who normally liked to hide out in the back row. Moreover, many students praised the practice in her end-of-
term course evaluations.

The research in How College Works helps explain why. In her pre-class conversations my colleague was
creating an opportunity for relationships to form — more substantive than the ones that arise from routine
classroom interactions. And if Chambliss and Takacs are correct, simple practices like this one have the
power to make a significant improvement on both student learning and the college experience.

Display the framework. In a different book — How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles
for Smart Teaching — Susan A. Ambrose and her co-authors point out that key differences exist between the
way novices (students) and experts (faculty) understand and process new material. Experts have a clear
picture of the framework of their discipline and can quickly recognize how new ideas alter or confirm their
understanding. Novice learners tend to see facts, concepts, and skills as discrete, isolated pieces of knowledge,
without any awareness of the connections that join them all together. A key difference between experts and
novices is "the number or density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know," they write.

Their finding suggests that, in any given class period, we need to help students understand how to better
organize the material. Ever looked at students’ notebooks after a lecture in which they’ve been given no help
on the organizational front? You find lots of facts and concepts written down, but very little understanding of
which points deserve emphasis or how different ideas relate to one another. Part of the problem may be poor
note-taking skills, but another factor is that connections that seem clear to us can mystify our students.

All of which leads me to a very simple recommendation: Before class, put up on the board the day’s agenda in
whatever form you choose — perhaps a broad outline of the lecture material or a list of discussion topics.
Keep your agenda there and visible throughout class. As the session progresses, continue to remind students
where they are within the framework for that day’s material. The point is to let students see in advance how
the class will be organized, even if you occasionally veer from that posted agenda.

This approach may have the added benefit of demonstrating to students that your course does, in fact, have an
organization to it — something that seems obvious to you but not necessarily to them.

Create wonder. My final recommendation comes from Peter Newbury, an astronomer who now serves as
the associate director of the Center for Engaged Teaching at the University of California at San Diego. In a
wonderful blog post called "You Don’t Have to Wait for the Clock to Strike to Start Teaching," he describes a
teaching activity that he employs to stir interest and curiosity in class on that day’s material.

Drawing inspiration from the "Astronomy Picture of the Day" — a NASA website that posts a new and
fascinating image from the cosmos every day — he suggests that instructors post an image on the screen at the
front of the room and ask two questions about it: "What do you notice? What do you wonder?" Before class
starts, let the image direct the informal conversations, Newbury argues, and then use it to guide a brief
discussion during the opening minutes of class.

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Chief among the benefits of this strategy, Newbury says: It can activate students’ prior knowledge, helping
them form connections with what they already know. It also offers both the instructor and the students the
opportunity to discuss how the images connect to previous course material. Obviously you could substitute
anything for the NASA picture of the day: a great sentence in a writing class; a newspaper headline in a
political-science class; an audio clip for a music class; an artifact in an archaeology class.

But what I really love about this technique is the simple message it conveys to students from the instructor: "I
find this stuff fascinating, and I think you will, too; let’s wonder about it together." I can’t think of a better
way to spend those moments before class officially begins.

The small decisions we make in our courses have the power to affect learning in big ways. Preclass activities
like the ones I’ve described here can enrich any type of traditional college course, and even — with some
tweaks — online learning experiences. So whether you are flipping your course or sticking with a lecture that
day, consider how you might use the moments before class to prepare your students for learning.

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The First 5 Minutes of Class
4 quick ways to shift students’ attention from life’s distractions to your course content

By James M. Lang

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant
afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

In a conversation I had with Ken Bain, my longtime mentor and favorite education writer, he cited that quote
— the first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude — as one of the great
openings in literary history. It’s hard to disagree: The sentence plunges us immediately into a drama,
acquaints us with a character on the brink of death, and yet intrigues us with the reference to his long-
forgotten (and curiosity-inducing) memory. That sentence makes us want to keep reading.

When I teach my writing course on creative nonfiction, we spend a lot of time analyzing the opening lines of
great writers. I work frequently with students on their opening words, sentences, and paragraphs. In that very
short space, I explain to them, most readers will decide whether or not to continue reading the rest of your
essay. If you can’t grab and hold their attention with your opening, you are likely to lose them before they get
to your hard-won insights 10 paragraphs later.

The same principle, I would argue, holds true in teaching a college course. The opening five minutes offer us
a rich opportunity to capture the attention of students and prepare them for learning. They walk into our
classes trailing all of the distractions of their complex lives — the many wonders of their smartphones, the
arguments with roommates, the question of what to have for lunch. Their bodies may be stuck in a room with
us for the required time period, but their minds may be somewhere else entirely.

It seems clear, then, that we should start class with a deliberate effort to bring students’ focus to the subject at
hand. Unfortunately, based on my many observations of faculty members in action, the first five minutes of a
college class often get frittered away with logistical tasks (taking attendance or setting up our technology),
gathering our thoughts as we discuss homework or upcoming tests, or writing on the board.

Logistics and organization certainly matter, and may be unavoidable on some days. But on most days, we
should be able to do better. In this column, the second in a series on small changes we can make to improve
teaching and learning in higher education, I offer four quick suggestions for the first few minutes of class to
focus the attention of students and prepare their brains for learning.

Open with a question or two. Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive
psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The
material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don’t Students Like School?, "is actually the
answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the
answer may be quite interesting."

My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the
beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in
the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers
and understand that they have learned something that day.

For example, in a session of his "American Government" course that focused on the separation of powers, the
first question of the day might be: "What problem is the separation of powers designed to address?" And the
last: "What forces have eroded the separation of powers?" Those questions are also available to the students in
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advance of class, to help guide their reading and homework. But having the questions visible at the start of
class, and returning to them at the end, reminds students that each session has a clear purpose.

So consider opening class with one or more questions that qualify as important and fascinating. You might
even let students give preliminary answers for a few moments, and then again in the closing minutes, to help
them recognize how their understanding has deepened over the course period.

What did we learn last time? A favorite activity of many instructors is to spend a few minutes at the
opening of class reviewing what happened in the previous session. That makes perfect sense, and is supported
by the idea that we don’t learn from single exposure to material — we need to return frequently to whatever
we are attempting to master.

But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?

In the teaching-and-learning world, the phenomenon known as the "testing effect" has received much ink. Put
very simply, if we want to remember something, we have to practice remembering it. To that end, learning
researchers have demonstrated over and over again that quizzes and tests not only measure student learning,
but can actually help promote it. The more times that students have to draw information, ideas, or skills from
memory, the better they learn it.

Instead of "testing effect," I prefer to use the more technical term, "retrieval practice," because testing is not
required to help students practice retrieving material from their memories. Any effort they make to remember
course content — without the help of notes or texts — will benefit their learning.

Take advantage of that fact in the opening few minutes of class by asking students to "remind" you of the key
points from the last session. Write them on the board — editing as you go and providing feedback to ensure
the responses are accurate — to set up the day’s new material. Five minutes of that at the start of every class
will prepare students to succeed on the memory retrieval they will need on quizzes and exams throughout the
semester.

One important caveat: Students should do all of this without notebooks, texts, or laptops. Retrieval practice
only works when they are retrieving the material from memory — not when they are retrieving it from their
screens or pages.

Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. Plenty of excellent evidence suggests that
whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a
sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the
previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.

"The accuracy of students’ prior content knowledge is critical to teaching and learning," write Susan A.
Ambrose and Marsha C. Lovett in an essay on the subject in a free ebook, because "it is the foundation on
which new knowledge is built. If students’ prior knowledge is faulty (e.g., inaccurate facts, ideas, models, or
theories), subsequent learning tends to be hindered because they ignore, discount, or resist important new
evidence that conflicts with existing knowledge."

Asking students to tell you what they already know (or think they know) has two important benefits. First, it
lights up the parts of their brains that connect to your course material, so when they encounter new material,
they will process it in a richer knowledge context. Second, it lets you know what preconceptions students have
about your course material. That way, your lecture, discussion, or whatever you plan for class that day can
specifically deal with and improve upon the knowledge actually in the room, rather than the knowledge you
imagine to be in the room.

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Here, too, try posing simple questions at the beginning of class followed by a few minutes of discussion:
"Today we are going to focus on X. What do you know about X already? What have you heard about it in the
media, or learned in a previous class?" You might be surprised at the misconceptions you hear, or heartened
by the state of knowledge in the room. Either way, you’ll be better prepared to shape what follows in a
productive way.

Write it down. All three of the previous activities would benefit from having students spend a few minutes
writing down their responses. That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice
memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge — and not just the students most
likely to raise their hands in class.

Frequent, low-stakes writing assignments constitute one of the best methods you can use to solicit
engagement and thinking in class. You don’t have to grade the responses very carefully — or at all. Count
them for participation, or make them worth a tiny fraction of a student’s grade. If you don’t want to collect the
papers, have students write in their notebooks or on laptops and walk around the classroom just to keep
everyone honest and ensure they are doing the work. Limit writing time to three to five minutes and ask
everyone to write until you call time — at which point discussion begins.

In my 15 years of full-time teaching, the only thing I have done consistently in every class is use the first few
minutes for writing exercises, and I will continue to do that for as long as I am teaching. I love them not only
for the learning benefits they offer, but because they have both a symbolic value and a focusing function.
Starting with five minutes of writing helps students make the transition from the outside world to the
classroom.

So don’t limit student-writing time to papers or exams. Let a writing exercise help you bring focus and
engagement to the opening of every class session. Build it into your routine. Class has begun: time to write,
time to think.

In writing, as in learning, openings matter. Don’t fritter them away.

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The Last 5 Minutes of Class
Don’t waste them trying to cram in eight more points or call out as many reminders as possible

By James M. Lang

Iremember sitting in a movie theater with my children in December of 2003, watching the final minutes of the
third film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and feeling a deep sense of closure as Gollum and the ring toppled
into Mount Doom, and Frodo and Sam were rescued by the eagles. What a glorious finish to an epic film
series, based on a book series that I loved as well.

Only it wasn’t the finish. Once the ring melted we got to see the members of the original fellowship united
again in the land of the elves. OK, I get that. Feel-good closure. I prepared to get up and leave. Oh, wait,
another scene: The hobbits receive public recognition for their heroism. That’s nice. Time to go. Not yet. Now
we have to follow the hobbits back home. Finished now? Nope. Sam gets married.

And on and on it seemed to go. I believe I prepared to get up out of my seat five times before that film finally
ended. A series that could have finished with a nice dramatic punch instead lurched along wrapping up every
possible thread that had loosened over the past nine hours of film.

All of which reminds me of nothing more than your typical college classroom.

In my experience — having observed many dozens of college courses over the past two decades — most
faculty members eye the final minutes of class as an opportunity to cram in eight more points before students
exit, or to say three more things that just occurred to us about the day’s material, or to call out as many
reminders as possible about upcoming deadlines, next week’s exam, or tomorrow’s homework.

At the same time, we complain when students start to pack their bags before class ends. But why should we be
surprised by that reaction when our class slides messily to a conclusion? We’re still trying to teach while
students’ minds — and sometimes their bodies — are headed out the door. We make little or no effort to put a
clear stamp on the final minutes of class, which leads to students eyeing the clock and leaving according to
the dictates of the minute hand rather than the logic of the class period.

When it comes to the deliberate construction of our course periods, we can do better. As I have been arguing
in this series, small changes to our teaching — such as the way we approach the closing minutes of class —
can make a big difference. Like most of my fellow professors, I know I could be doing many things better in
my teaching. But the prospect of change can be overwhelming. Fortunately, a substantial body of research on
learning in higher education offers us strategies for improving our teaching in ways that don’t require a major
overhaul, and yet that have the power to boost the learning, motivation, and mind-set of our students in
substantive ways.

Thus far in this series of essays — which draw from my book (ahem, just published this month), Small
Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning — I have argued for the power of small changes
in the minutes before class starts, in the first five minutes of class, and in the connections we can help students
make between the course material and the world around them. In this column, the fourth in a series of six, let
us turn to ways we can make better use of the final five minutes of class.

The minute paper. You can’t wade very far into the literature of teaching and learning in higher education
without encountering some version of the Minute Paper, a technique made justly famous by Thomas A.
Angelo and K. Patricia Cross in their book Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College

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Teachers. The Minute Paper comes in many variations, but the simplest one involves wrapping up the formal
class period a few minutes early and posing two questions to your students:

 What was the most important thing you learned today?

 What question still remains in your mind?

Taken together, those two questions accomplish multiple objectives. The first one not only requires students
to remember something from class and articulate it in their own words (more about that in a moment), but it
also requires them to do some quick thinking. They have to reflect on the material and make a judgment about
the main point of that day’s class.

The second question encourages them to probe their own minds and consider what they haven’t truly
understood. Most of us are infected by what learning theorists sometimes call "illusions of fluency," which
means that we believe we have obtained mastery over something when we truly have not. To answer the
second question, students have to decide where confusion or weaknesses remain in their own comprehension
of the day’s material.

On my campus, most students do not bring laptops to class, so I might ask them to answer those two questions
on a half-sheet of paper. Reading their responses, even if I don’t grade them, will give me a quick picture of
how well the class went. If everyone writes down as the most important point of the day a throwaway
example I gave, I know I have some work to do. Likewise if everyone expresses the same question in the
second part of their answer, I know how I have to start the next class. But even if I don’t collect what they
write, and simply stroll around and ensure pens are moving on paper, students will still benefit from some
retrieval and reflection at the end of class.

If students in your classes are on various electronic devices, you might create a discussion thread in your
course-management system and ask them to post their responses to these questions at the end of every class
period. In this model students can read each other’s responses, and you can throw the thread onto the screen at
the beginning of the next class period to highlight answers that either nicely captured the main point of the
previous class or raised questions that need answering.

Closing connections. If we want students to obtain mastery and expertise in our subjects, they need to be
capable of making their own connections between what they are learning and the world around them —
current events, campus debates, personal experiences. The last five minutes of class represent an ideal
opportunity for students to use the course material from that day and brainstorm some new connections.

Most faculty members seed such connections throughout our lectures. The other day, for instance, I used a
Taylor Swift song to introduce students to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. In offering such
examples, we can model the sorts of connections we expect of students.

Finish the last class of the week five minutes early, and tell students that they can leave when they have
identified five ways in which the day’s material appears in contexts outside of the classroom. You’ll be
amazed at how quickly they can come up with examples when this activity stands between them and the
dining hall.

In my class period on Browning’s monologues, for example, I might ask students to list five popular songs in
which the "speaker" clearly does not represent the voice of the singer. In a marketing class on the role of
packaging you might ask students to give you five examples of distinctive product packaging that spring to
mind. You can write them on the board or have students post the examples to a course website. Make it three
items instead. Or take 10 minutes instead of five. Vary according to your taste and classroom.

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The metacognitive five. We have increasing evidence from the learning sciences that students engage in
poor study strategies. Likewise, research shows that most people are plagued by the illusions of fluency. The
solution on both fronts is better metacognition — that is, a clearer understanding of our own learning. What if
all of us worked together deliberately to achieve that?

For example, we have excellent evidence that students remember material better when they test themselves
and try to retrieve information from their own minds. And yet most students still study by reviewing their
notes over and over again — probably the least-effective study strategy they can employ. The final five
minutes of class can provide a quick opportunity to let students know how best to prepare for their next
assessment, based on the science of learning and on your experience as an expert learner.

Before the midterm, I asked students to take two minutes and write down for me how they studied for the test.
When I compared what they said with the exam scores, the evidence couldn’t have been clearer: Low-
performing students used phrases like "reviewed my notes" and "reread the poems"; the students who aced the
exam said things like "wrote an outline," "rewrote my notes," "organized a timeline," "tested myself," and
"created flashcards." I made a slide with a side-by-side comparison of the two columns, and spent five
minutes of class showing students the differences. They’ll see that slide again in the last five minutes of class
just before the next exam.

Imagine what a difference we could make if we all took five minutes — even just a few times during the
semester — to offer students the opportunity to reflect on their learning habits. We could inform their choices
with some simple research, and inspire them to make a change. One five-minute session in one course might
not mean much, but dozens of such sessions across a student’s college education would add up.

Close the loop. Finally, go back to any of the strategies I introduced in my recent column on the first five
minutes of class and see if the suggestions can help you formulate a strategy for those final five minutes. If
you began class with a few questions, put them back up on screen and have students use what they have
learned that day to formulate their own answers. If you opened by asking students to tell you what they
learned in the previous class, close by having them tell you what they learned in this class. Or if you started by
soliciting their prior knowledge on the subject, close by having them explain how today’s class confirmed,
enhanced, or contradicted what they knew before.

We have such a limited amount of time with students — sometimes just a few hours a week for 12 or 15
weeks. Within that narrow window, five minutes well-spent at the end of class can make a difference.

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Giving Them a Say
Three ways to improve learning by giving students a measure of control

Over spring break, I helped lead a student trip to Ireland in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the
1916 Easter Rising. We toured the country with a guide and learned about the pivotal role of the Rising in
Ireland’s political and cultural history. I brought my 11-year-old twins on the trip, hoping the experience
would continue to cultivate in them a love of travel and learning.

Observing how the twins responded to the different educational events we had planned offered me another
perspective on a learning principle that has become increasingly important in my own teaching.

One afternoon we visited a small historical site and listened to a long-ish lecture from the curator. I kept my
eye on the twins, knowing how this might test their patience, but they both seemed attentive throughout.
Later, on the bus back to the hotel, I asked them to tell me what they had learned. Neither could recall a single
thing. They had been paying what Jay Howard has called "civil attention," instead of actually listening. They
had learned nothing.

Near the end of the week, with plenty of lectures and walking tours under our belt, I left the students in the
hands of my co-leader and took the twins to a small museum on medieval and Viking Dublin. I promised
them we could stay as long or as briefly as they liked; I would follow their lead. This time, they wandered
through the museum at their own pace, skipping some sections completely while stopping at others to read the
placards, do the activities, and study the exhibits. They followed their own interests entirely, and afterward,
spoke enthusiastically about what they had learned.

No doubt one reason they responded differently to the two experiences was because the lecture was passive
and the museum was interactive. But clearly that wasn’t the only issue, since the twins also zoned out on some
of the very active walking tours. Instead, I would attribute most of the difference to one factor: In the
museum, they had choices — complete freedom to choose what they wanted to learn, and how. They were in
control.

Education theorists sometimes distinguish between two orientations that students take toward learning:
mastery or performance. Performance-oriented learners want to do well on tests, essays, or other assessments.
Mastery-oriented learners want to grasp the material for its own sake, because they find it interesting,
relevant, or beautiful. Plenty of research suggests that a mastery orientation creates deeper and longer
learning.

That same research suggests that we can help orient students toward mastery by giving them choices. As
biologist James Zull has written in The Art of Changing the Brain, "one important rule for helping people
learn is to help the learner feel she is in control." Likewise, the authors of How Learning Works: 7 Research-
Based Principles for Smart Teaching, argue that mastery arises when we "allow students to choose among
options and make choices that are consistent with their goals and the activities that they value."

That said, you may well feel — as I do — that you know more than students about your subject matter, and,
hence, you know best what they should learn. You can’t just take them to the museum of your discipline and
let them wander around freely. They might well, as my twins did, skip entire sections of your discipline that
are essential to a full understanding of the subject. Some faculty and educational structures do offer students
complete control over their learning in this way, but most of us aren’t — or don’t want to be — in that
position.

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But that doesn’t mean we can’t offer our students some control over their learning. The quest to produce
mastery learners is another challenge ripe for a small teaching approach.In the four previous columns in this
six-part series, I have argued that we can make substantive improvements to our teaching and to student
learning by paying closer attention to how we organize the minutes before class starts, the first five minutes of
class,the last five minutes of class, and the opportunities we give students to form connections.

In this column, I propose three small ways in which we can take existing courses and offer students the
chance to assert some measure of control over their own learning.

Student-generated exam questions. Traditional exams represent one of those moments in a course in
which students seem to lose all control. They come into the room at a specific date and time, sit down, and
complete tasks that we have set for them. One obvious way to offer students some choices within an exam is
to create more questions than you want them to answer — if you want students to write four short essays for
an in-class exam, for example, you could allow them to choose from six or eight questions.

But a more meaningful way to give them some control is to allow them to write their own exam questions.
And then promise you will use some proportion or version of those questions on the actual exam. Taking 30
to 45 minutes of class time and asking students to work in groups to generate exam questions not only will
give them some sense of control over the test, but also will serve as an excellent review activity.

I give essay exams in my "British Literature Survey" course, and a couple of the questions always require
students to analyze passages from the works we have studied. The class prior to the exam, I ask students to
work in small groups to identify the passages they would most like to see on the exam questions. With seven
or eight groups, I end up with a long list of possibilities, and I always choose from it. I suppose the class could
collude to limit the choices to two or three works, but that has never happened, and so we have reached a
happy medium in which they get to help determine the works appearing on the exam and I still have plenty of
choices.

Open assessments. I have been intrigued in recent years with assessment systems in which students are
offered a wide range of possible assignments and get to choose which ones to complete to earn the grade they
desire. I profiled the work of one teacher who uses such a system, John Boyer, in my book Cheating Lessons:
Learning From Academic Dishonesty.Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, spoke
about her own use of open assessments in a recent episode.

Adopting this approach in my own classroom would represent a large conceptual step forward for me. I just
haven’t been able to see my way there yet — or even decide if it makes sense for me.

Instead, in true small-teaching fashion, I’ve taken one mini-step in this direction. On my syllabus this
semester, I left open 10 percent of the grade for an undetermined assignment, and told students on the first day
of class that we would decide together what that assignment would be. The default would be a paper, I said.
But if we could come up with an alternative they liked better, I would find a way to make it work.

That idea actually came from a conference paper by Chris Walsh, associate director of a writing program at
Boston University, who spoke about using a "blank syllabus" in his literature-survey courses. He doesn’t
actually hand out a blank document. Instead, he has some blank spaces on his syllabus that the students help
him to fill throughout the semester with readings they would like to see included from their anthology. I loved
the idea of having at least one small blank space on my syllabus, in terms of the work they would do, and will
perhaps even expand its size a little further next semester.

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Class constitutions. Some readers may have another objection to offering students more choice and
control: Perhaps you are preparing students for an external exam or are teaching in a predetermined
curriculum. Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still give students a sense of ownership in the
course.

Cathy Davidson has written about her experience in creating a class constitution. It sets the ground rules for a
course and helps establish the idea that your classroom is a community of learners working together toward a
shared purpose. You can take this notion as far as Davidson does, allowing the class constitution to determine
most of the operating rules, or you can take a slight step toward it in small teaching fashion.

Many of us, for example, continue to wrestle with policies on the use of cellphones, iPads, and laptops in the
classroom. Others struggle with whether (and how) to award participation points. Or we wonder about what
our policies on late work or absences should look like. There are no "right" answers in any of those areas,
which leaves them open for teachers of good will to make different decisions. A class constitution approach
would invite students into that decision-making process.

Practically speaking, you might hand out a draft syllabus on the first day of class, and then present the areas in
which you want students to help you establish certain class rules. (You can obviously set limits and define
certain rules that are nonnegotiable for you.) You could invite students to comment on the course website
and/or have them discuss these issues in groups. Once the class has made a collective decision, you can
remind students that it is your responsibility to ensure that the class abides by these new rules.

Ceding control over any aspect of teaching can be scary, which may be why my own progress in this area has
been so gradual. But if you find the prospect intriguing — if these ideas resonate with your own experience as
a teacher or learner — see if you can offer students one new choice next semester, either in how they
demonstrate their learning to you or in how your class forms its community rules.

In doing so, you just might nudge them one step closer to the goal we have for every student: taking
ownership of their own education.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption
College in Worcester, Mass. His new book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning,
will be published in March of 2016. Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.

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