A few years ago - during an ill-advised jaunt through law school in my mid-30's - I had one class in particular that used an organizational style that I thought was incredibly effective. Possibly it just clicked with me personally, or it may just be that it was a law school class (patent law, which was the entire reason I went back to school) and those, for some reason, lead themselves to creating a "great outline" of all the material covered in the class.
(Perhaps I should have been outlining my classes all along, STEM and non-STEM, in undergrad, and I was just too young and dumb to do it that way.)
In any case, we spent the entire first week or two going through the entire semester's worth of material at a very high level. Here's what a patent is, the overall requirements for getting on are that it is original, functional, and you created it first (or something - this was 15 years ago and I don't do that anymore), it lasts for this long, it can be invalidated by x, y, or z, whatever. In any case, for an outline, just covering the major headings.
Then we spent the rest of the semester working through that outline, hitting each topic in full detail. I thought it was great because the entire semester I had a sense of what we had covered, what we were covering now, and what we still had to cover for the rest of the semester, within a framework that had been previously laid out.
Again, perhaps it's just me, but in other classes I never had a sense of what was coming next, and I didn't have a framework of what we were covering mattered within the overall structure of what I was supposed to learn over the course of that class. I found that exceptionally helpful because normally at the end of the class I would have this mass of material that I learned and I'd be trying to figure out how to organize it as a whole, and not just a collection of disparate topics that had been thrown at me willy-nilly. (In fact, I'm sure it made sense within the context of the syllabus, but since I didn't know what any of the things in the syllabus meant until we got to them, it meant nothing to me until we were already in the weeds of it.)
TL;DR - the most effective use of the syllabus I've seen was when we spent several class periods going over it with a general explanation of what each topic was, so we could see how it fit into the whole. Then we went back and filled in the details on each topic so we had a sense of the entire structure from the very beginning.
Just some thoughts from the other side of the lectern. :)
Thanks for mentioning this! I may try doing a modified version of this next semester. I'm in math, and I feel many students struggle even to realize that the weeds are plants, much less that they are part of a landscape. (Sorry for straining the metaphor.)
I suspect it would be very helpful! I think I've had classes where we blew through an overview of the syllabus on the first day, but it was pretty much in one ear and out the other since I had no idea what any of the topics even meant. In this particular class we spent a good week or two with a basic introduction of each major topic, so that when we got to each one weeks or months later, it was something that we'd at least seen before.
Again, this may just be me, but I have noticed how much easier it is when I've had to learn something for "the second time." Part of the law school experience is after graduation everyone has to take a "bar review" class where you re-learn everything that you'd originally been taught during the first-year foundational classes - torts, property, criminal law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and... er... the other one. I was amazed at how even the classes I'd struggled with when I took them were so easy when I was exposed to the material for the second time, and I think it's because I'd been through the whole thing once already, and now I had a good sense of the entire subject as a whole. To use another metaphor, when you're building a house, you put up the framework first, and then go back and do the plumbing, the electrical stuff, the walls, the fixtures, and then paint it all. Nobody would start by finishing the first floor and only then starting on the second floor, yet I feel like that's how most of the classes I took in school were taught.
Not so much a question as a comment, ha ha. Like you, I probably wouldn't do any of these for an upper level course, though I might do one or two of the shorter ones on the second day with a class consisting mostly or entirely of first-year students, just to emphasize that it's an important document they should pay attention to. I'd make the syllabus part of the reading homework for the second day -- maybe requiring students to mark it up in Perusall or Google Docs, or giving a short syllabus quiz on the second day. These days I rarely spend the first day of class on the syllabus itself; instead, I jump right in with an activity that exemplifies what we'll be doing in class. More interesting for everyone.
Tangential to your poste, but for random reasons I just re-read Snow's piece and was really struck by his explanation of why science-y academics tended to be more left-wing that humanities-y academics. The slant was not at all apparent to me even back in my undergraduate days (U Texas '64) so maybe it was a UK phenomenon.
I think there is at least one other relevant variable: is the class a coordinated class with a huge number of sections? If the class is coordinated, the syllabus tends to get out of hand because it's not only a contract between the professor and the students, but it's also a document that's used by the coordinator to tie the hands of the various instructors in the class.
A few years ago - during an ill-advised jaunt through law school in my mid-30's - I had one class in particular that used an organizational style that I thought was incredibly effective. Possibly it just clicked with me personally, or it may just be that it was a law school class (patent law, which was the entire reason I went back to school) and those, for some reason, lead themselves to creating a "great outline" of all the material covered in the class.
(Perhaps I should have been outlining my classes all along, STEM and non-STEM, in undergrad, and I was just too young and dumb to do it that way.)
In any case, we spent the entire first week or two going through the entire semester's worth of material at a very high level. Here's what a patent is, the overall requirements for getting on are that it is original, functional, and you created it first (or something - this was 15 years ago and I don't do that anymore), it lasts for this long, it can be invalidated by x, y, or z, whatever. In any case, for an outline, just covering the major headings.
Then we spent the rest of the semester working through that outline, hitting each topic in full detail. I thought it was great because the entire semester I had a sense of what we had covered, what we were covering now, and what we still had to cover for the rest of the semester, within a framework that had been previously laid out.
Again, perhaps it's just me, but in other classes I never had a sense of what was coming next, and I didn't have a framework of what we were covering mattered within the overall structure of what I was supposed to learn over the course of that class. I found that exceptionally helpful because normally at the end of the class I would have this mass of material that I learned and I'd be trying to figure out how to organize it as a whole, and not just a collection of disparate topics that had been thrown at me willy-nilly. (In fact, I'm sure it made sense within the context of the syllabus, but since I didn't know what any of the things in the syllabus meant until we got to them, it meant nothing to me until we were already in the weeds of it.)
TL;DR - the most effective use of the syllabus I've seen was when we spent several class periods going over it with a general explanation of what each topic was, so we could see how it fit into the whole. Then we went back and filled in the details on each topic so we had a sense of the entire structure from the very beginning.
Just some thoughts from the other side of the lectern. :)
Thanks for mentioning this! I may try doing a modified version of this next semester. I'm in math, and I feel many students struggle even to realize that the weeds are plants, much less that they are part of a landscape. (Sorry for straining the metaphor.)
I suspect it would be very helpful! I think I've had classes where we blew through an overview of the syllabus on the first day, but it was pretty much in one ear and out the other since I had no idea what any of the topics even meant. In this particular class we spent a good week or two with a basic introduction of each major topic, so that when we got to each one weeks or months later, it was something that we'd at least seen before.
Again, this may just be me, but I have noticed how much easier it is when I've had to learn something for "the second time." Part of the law school experience is after graduation everyone has to take a "bar review" class where you re-learn everything that you'd originally been taught during the first-year foundational classes - torts, property, criminal law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and... er... the other one. I was amazed at how even the classes I'd struggled with when I took them were so easy when I was exposed to the material for the second time, and I think it's because I'd been through the whole thing once already, and now I had a good sense of the entire subject as a whole. To use another metaphor, when you're building a house, you put up the framework first, and then go back and do the plumbing, the electrical stuff, the walls, the fixtures, and then paint it all. Nobody would start by finishing the first floor and only then starting on the second floor, yet I feel like that's how most of the classes I took in school were taught.
Not so much a question as a comment, ha ha. Like you, I probably wouldn't do any of these for an upper level course, though I might do one or two of the shorter ones on the second day with a class consisting mostly or entirely of first-year students, just to emphasize that it's an important document they should pay attention to. I'd make the syllabus part of the reading homework for the second day -- maybe requiring students to mark it up in Perusall or Google Docs, or giving a short syllabus quiz on the second day. These days I rarely spend the first day of class on the syllabus itself; instead, I jump right in with an activity that exemplifies what we'll be doing in class. More interesting for everyone.
Tangential to your poste, but for random reasons I just re-read Snow's piece and was really struck by his explanation of why science-y academics tended to be more left-wing that humanities-y academics. The slant was not at all apparent to me even back in my undergraduate days (U Texas '64) so maybe it was a UK phenomenon.
Sorry, I must have missed something -- can you give me a link to the piece you're talking about?
It wasn't a link. I read it in a book! I think this may be an expanded version of what I read: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf
I think there is at least one other relevant variable: is the class a coordinated class with a huge number of sections? If the class is coordinated, the syllabus tends to get out of hand because it's not only a contract between the professor and the students, but it's also a document that's used by the coordinator to tie the hands of the various instructors in the class.