Part of my responsibility at the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning at ACU is the review of new course applications and syllabus. So I inevitably have a book or two on syllabus design or teaching and learning methodology on the go in addition to the many other books I am reading. I am only a few chapters into Linda Nilson’s The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcome Map: Communicating Your Course so I won’t be offering a full review of this book but wanted to share some extremely valuable insights I have discovered. Nilson is the founding director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University and may be better known as the author of Teaching at its Best: A Research Based Resource for College Instructors so she does have some credibility to support her claims.
Nilson accurately points out the a course syllabus reveals much about an instructors theories of teaching and learning and whether an instructor sees oneself as a knowledge transmitter or on the other side of the spectrum an experience creator. But a syllabus can reveal much more:
If a syllabus contains enough detail, it can show how “honest” an instructor is in assessing his or her students. Instructors who claim their courses will help develop higher order thinking skills, but who assess students using test-bank multiple choice items are not being totally honest with the students and probably not themselves.
Nilson also reminds us that:
In order to develop genuinely high-order cognitive and affective abilities students must typically do considerable reflection, writing and sometimes out of class research. Objective quizzes and tests are seldom up to the task. More “personal” and student-choice assignments suggest that the instructor is interested in his or her students’ development as whole persons.
It is very easy to talk the talk in the outcomes section of the syllabus but the truth of what is really valued or significant in a course is revealed by the course assessments. An emphasis on assessment in a course also tells us that the priority in that course is the information and not the learning.
I am looking forward to working through the rest of this book.
