Syllabus by William Germano

Author:William Germano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Starting from the Work

Here’s a thought experiment meant to help you sharpen that focus. Imagine that the content of your course—whatever material students must work with, such as equations, procedures, the content of lectures, reading, and so on—has been chosen for the single purpose of enabling and supporting the assignments that students will complete. Imagine, in other words, that you had to come up with the assignments first, and everything else, from lecture topics to textbooks, afterward. What would you need to do?

You might have any number of good reasons to object to such an approach. In the physical sciences, for example, there are concepts that appear to transcend our apprehension of them; the point is the knowledge, not a set of skills. It is also obviously true that without a body of knowledge to communicate, assignments become meaningless—they cannot, in fact, be separated from content. We aren’t asking you to abandon such objections, and we aren’t asking you to build a course entirely out of assignments. We are simply asking you to pretend to do so, for the sake of the insights you might gain. It’s the thought experiment that counts.

Such a shift in thinking can reframe coursework’s purpose from evaluating and ranking students’ mastery of content to learning the facilities, developing the habits of mind, building the knowledge, and embodying the ethos necessary to work in your discipline. Notice the shift in the prior sentence: Those first verbs—evaluating, ranking—belong to the teacher, while the second set—learning, developing, building, embodying—belong to the student.

In this thought experiment, then, students do work in some particular order, and this order becomes the underlying narrative of your course, a narrative within which students—these students, in this class—are very much present.

Imagine the experiences of your students as they progress through the work you’ll assign. It’s helpful to start from the final work you hope to get from them, the thing they should be able to do at the end of the term. Whether it’s a final project, an exam, or a performance, name—out loud, at least to yourself—the component activities students will need to perform to a high level in order to succeed in this final work: Doing x really means doing a, b, c, and d. Now think about how students will learn the right articulation of these activities, how they’ll master each individually and in concert.

Or try to. And fail. Because this is the core of teaching, and it’s incredibly difficult. You, the teacher, will fail, but you will also succeed, with any luck, at least a little, if you look at your own practice and speak with your colleagues about their practices.

When people repeat the adage that if you really want to learn something, you ought to teach it, this is the hidden logic of their claim: What you’ve figured out how to do yourself, what has become instinctual to you as a practitioner or a scholar, will remain a sort of mysterious, magical power until you ask yourself how you actually do it.

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