Keystone Concepts in Teaching: A Higher Education Podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning

S1 E9: Syllabi Supporting Learners and Instructors

• Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Join our guest host, Kelly Chandler, as she talks with Dr. Rachel Yoho about how we can make our syllabi more inclusive of all learners and us as the instructor in the first of our “Hear From Your Host” series. 

Resources: Eberly, M. B., Newton, S. E., & Wiggins, R. A. (2001). The syllabus as a tool for student-centered learning. The Journal of General Education, 50(1), 56–74., Bers, T., Davis, D., & Taylor, W. (1996). Syllabus analysis: What are we teaching and telling our students?. Assessment Update, 8(6), 1-14., References on first impressions, demonstrating values, and use as a learning tool: https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/explore-teaching-guides/inclusive-teaching-guide/planning-inclusive-course/building-inclusive https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/designing-inclusive-syllabus/ References on course policies:  https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/resources/art-and-science-of-teaching/creating-an-inclusive-and-equitable-course/ George Mason University, Religious Holiday Calendar: https://ulife.gmu.edu/religious-holiday-calendar/ References on Tone and Language Use: https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/designing-inclusive-syllabus/ https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/explore-teaching-guides/inclusive-teaching-guide/planning-inclusive-course/building-inclusive Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West Virginia University Press. References on Readings and Resources in Syllabi: Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/DiversityStatements Fuentes, M. A., Zelaya, D. G., & Madsen, J. W. (2021). Rethinking the course syllabus: Considerations for promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion. Teaching of Psychology, 48(1), 69-79. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0098628320959979 References on Activities and Assignments: Fuentes, M. A., Zelaya, D. G., & Madsen, J. W. (2021). Rethinking the course syllabus: Considerations for promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion. Teaching of Psychology, 48(1), 69-79. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0098628320959979 https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/DiversityStatements Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. Check out Episode 7 of Keystone Concepts in Teaching for more information on teaching multilingual learners:  https://stearnscenter.gmu.edu/season-1-fall-2024-keystone-concepts-in-teaching/ References on Course Design:

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Kelly:

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast where we share impactful and evidence based teaching practices to support all students and faculty. My name is Kelly Chandler and I am the Programs Administrator for the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University and Producer for the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast Prior to my position at the Stearns Center, I taught first year writing courses and developmental writing as an adjunct professor at community colleges for four and a half years. For this episode, I am also your guest host in the first episode of our Hear From Your Host series. For these special episodes, we'll turn the tables and listeners will get to Hear From Your Host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, about keystone concepts and teaching. Dr. Yoho is the Assistant Director in the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. She is also a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. Dr. Yoho and I will discuss the course syllabus and how we can make our syllabus work better to support everyone in the space, including the students and you as the instructor. So, let's start with discussing the purpose of the syllabus. Rachel, can you tell us about the potential multiple roles or purposes of the syllabus?

Rachel:

So when we're talking about our syllabus, we have a number of things. The syllabus is sort of a legal document, but not really. And it's sort of an organizational tool. Well, it's mostly an organizational tool, and it's also sort of a means of communication. And so when we think about the purposes of our syllabus, we have lots of things going on. We're not talking about the syllabus as a contract or a legal contract because it's not really but it is sort of that planning for the semester and planning for what's going to happen in the course.

Kelly:

Right.

Rachel:

Some of the things that we don't think about as often with the syllabus is that the syllabus is also a public course description. It's that public face of what's going to happen in our course and something that we especially need to be thinking about or might be wanting to think about at a state institution. We also have uses and, you know, I was a graduate program director at my previous institution. Some of the uses that we might also think about a little bit less often are things like transfer and equivalency. So determining especially for transfer students, what could be used, what they took at a previous institution, what meets different requirements. So really, we see a lot of things going on, and I think that's really where we're looking at how do we balance all of this and also make it not 75 pages long.

Kelly:

Yes, absolutely. I would say I was a little guilty of that. Maybe not 75 pages. Because you just get to a point where a student will try something new that you weren't expecting before and next thing you know you're like,"Ope, now I gotta put that in my syllabus." Just keeps getting longer and longer and longer.

Rachel:

Oh, you can definitely see those you look at someone else's syllabus like,"Oh, that happened, huh?"

Kelly:

Exactly. But I'm really interested in what we're saying here about how the syllabus can support both learners and the instructors. So what are some ways that this can be accomplished?

Rachel:

Yeah, so when we're talking about our syllabus, it's a great way to have that first impression space for the students. You know, what will this course be like? What's this instructor like? And what can the students expect during the semester? Not just what they're going to do and when they're going to do it, but also, what's it going to be like working with Dr. Yoho over this, you know, number of weeks? And so, through the syllabus, we can use this as a document, as a tangible way to show our approach to teaching, what we value, how we're looking to support our students through their learning experiences, and highlight other student focused efforts, because as we're doing this, you know, we want it obviously to be a space for all of us, so planning is important. And so overall, the syllabus really is that essential learning tool. We're outlining expectations. We're directing student effort. We're also directing our effort and our timelines and our feedback and grading, all of that. And so overall, we're really looking at how we articulate the course goals and the learning progression. You know, here we've really shifted away from sort of that university business side of the syllabus and really get into the educational purposes with our syllabus.

Kelly:

Absolutely, I hear you on that balancing act of taking care of our students, of course, with our syllabus, but also ourselves. So it seems like you were already kind of approaching this, but I want to ask a pointed question of what are some of the kind of core areas of a syllabus where we can focus on inclusive approaches?

Rachel:

There are a lot of different areas that we can certainly think about and look at, but a few of those that I want to talk about right now are thinking about our course policies, as well as our readings and resources. And the course policies, for instance, might be things that we automatically go to. That's probably one of the sections that our students, if they look at the syllabus, are jumping right to what's the late policy, for instance.

Kelly:

Oh, yeah.

Rachel:

But some of our policies, we might be thinking about the workload. That's both for our students and ourselves. Again, that grading, the feedback, the timelines. But we also, of course, might be thinking about the late policy, and there's a number of ways we might be looking at, and we've mentioned in some of our earlier episodes, different approaches to late policies, the Life Happens Pass was mentioned in one of our first episodes by Dr. Shelley Reid. But we might also be thinking about some of our policies around, for instance, holidays, like different dates, how we schedule our course, as well as things like religious observances. So, for instance, George Mason University puts out a calendar, so we can keep in mind different major holidays for different religions. But we also might be thinking about the modality of our course. We might be thinking about individual needs. If we're teaching an online synchronous course, so something on Zoom, we might be thinking about camera policies. You know, not every bit of engagement perhaps needs to be people staring into a camera, but maybe there are other ways to contribute. Or we might think about caregiving needs or chronic illness or things like that of how we look at building in flexibility or building in understanding, just awareness that we're all people in these spaces and things happen not only for us but also for our students and how we can approach our course policies from that sort of understanding. But really here it's looking at how we might demonstrate our values and our approaches. So that might be openness or flexibility or communication, any of those types of things.

Kelly:

I want to ask, along these same lines, I've seen some talk about tone in syllabus. Is this kind of related to that flexibility and policy writing? How might we work that into our syllabus? What do they mean when they say tone?

Rachel:

Absolutely. I think tone is probably one of the most important things that we can think about in our syllabus and we can work on without actually changing content. So, essentially, when we're talking about tone or language, we're considering what's being said as well as how it's being said. And so again, this is a great way to demonstrate our commitment to shared values, to our students' learning and create a really nice atmosphere. And so some examples of this are considering the balance between warm and cold language use. So there's some great examples here that we' ll be sharing the resources and the sources in the show notes, but some examples of cold language, for instance, would be things like,"If you need to contact me outside of class..." That definitely may have the underlying,"Don't contact me."

Kelly:

Yeah

Rachel:

Maybe that's not what we mean. Please don't mean that. We might warm that up a little bit with,"I welcome you to contact me outside of class," or something like,"When you need assistance, I encourage you to contact me in these ways." Anything like that. Or we have another example like,"Late work will be penalized by 50%." That's a lot, but we can warm that up and say the exact same thing by saying that"Late work is still eligible for 50 percent partial credit." So it's exactly the same content. Like, we didn't change the policy in any way. It's just how it's being said.

Kelly:

Mm. That makes sense.

Rachel:

And the tone thing also works for all caps[capitals] writing. You know, there are different ways to bring attention to words. So that's, you know, bold or underlining or italics or, you know, any of these things. All caps writing, especially for people who are very online, in different spaces and social media and things, all caps writing is generally understood as like shouting or yelling. And so, avoiding all caps writing, like, we don't need to yell our policies at our students, even metaphorically. But, you know, maybe we look at underlining, or putting something in bold that we want to particularly highlight.

Kelly:

Right. And I think at one point you were talking about inclusive approaches for readings. You had mentioned that. Did you want to speak more to what you were saying there?

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we're thinking about our readings and our resources, those can often feel like a pretty stagnant thing unless we're like,"Okay, I'm redoing the whole course." And essentially, we might be asking ourselves, whose voices are being heard and whose voices are not being heard? Does the course content represent a diversity of voices in any number of aspects of diversity, of course? So we might be looking at incorporating some other ways. Certainly not just continually adding to our readings, like that's not good for anyone, including, uh, us. But we might have different ways to highlight current practitioners in the field, or we might bring in a video, we might bring in something else during class, or might have these conversations with our students of whose voices are typically heard and whose voices are less heard. But also as we think about the readings and the resources, we might also be looking at the cost of textbooks, for instance, or the cost of software access, or whatever the thing is in your course to purchase. And so open access materials, or really just thinking about the accessibility of different resources or content can be really useful and a great way to make this space more accessible to everyone.

Kelly:

Absolutely. I love that. I will never forget my first year at university, I had to purchase your typical Biology 101 book. It was huge, heavy, and then at the end of the semester, when I went back to the bookstore to resell it, because that's something you used to do back then, they were willing to offer me one cent, literally. One penny. When we had paid, I think, over 200 dollars for the book, because the next semester was going to be a new edition of that book. So mine was rendered useless. That was whew. Interesting. So I wanted to kind of switch gears a little bit here and then talk about one of the things students are also most worried about, so what about the activities and assignments? How might we include these in our syllabus in a way that supports both, you know, students and instructors?

Rachel:

Yeah, that's another area our students are often probably likely to look at within the syllabus. And so we might be thinking about things like discussions. We might be especially considering the added importance and the extra focus on civil discourse and what's being said and what's going on and free speech and things we're not going to solve today. But we might be thinking about how we work with our students, and especially to cocreate some discussion ground rules, or classroom guidelines, or community expectations, or they're all the same thing, no matter what you want to call them there. But we can review those, certainly, with our students. We can use that kind of structure to intervene when we need to jump in during a, for instance, a live class discussion, or even if we're teaching fully asynchronous online. Even jump in on a discussion board post, for instance. And so this might be an area where we are designing assignments that the students could have a little bit more choice, a little bit more autonomy in terms of a specific topic or focus area. We might also in certain cases, certainly not across the board, but we might have the ability, on specific activities to have different types of content submissions. So having a little bit more agency for the students in terms of how they demonstrate their learning. So again, not across everything, but maybe in one or two activities in the course, they have the option to do, you know, X or Y activity, or they can, for instance, they might write, a paper of X amount of length, or they might create a video of Y duration, something like that. But also with our activities or even our examples, in some of our lectures or our content, we might think about and we might look at some of the names or the terms that are used in those, so like whose names are being used, whose names are not being used. Not our students names, but example people in, in activities, for instance. We might also think about how we look at our terms. Are we using the same word consistently? Especially for multilingual learners. changing up how we say the same thing, just to make it more vocally interesting is not a great instructional approach. So consistency in our terms, not only in our syllabus, but then in our discussion, our lecture recordings, live lectures, whatever that looks like. But also we could just talk to a colleague or get some student feedback on some of these things as well. The other one I will mention here is thinking about group work. Group work is such a challenge for everyone, but we can do a few things to help our students because working with others is incredibly important. I can't think of many professions where you don't have to work with other people, and it's just a good life skill anyway, And so the ways we can scaffold the group work. So thinking about how we help the students interact with each other, how we help them interact productively, and also having some check ins, some opportunities for feedback. You know, we don't want to get into those situations, which many instructors may have been in, in the past where you get to the end of the semester and you find out that group was wildly dysfunctional. And I didn't know it.

Kelly:

Haha, yeah.

Rachel:

And that's not where we want to be because that's not a good experience for anyone in the space. It's not a good learning experience. So the more we can check in that we facilitate the discussion with some guided questions and some structure can really help.

Kelly:

Absolutely. If we're talking about syllabi supporting learners and instructors: whenever you are differentiating your assignments and giving those different options for how they can accomplish that assignment, I can hear some instructors thinking,"Well, that's extra work for me. Now I have to design three different assignments versus just one." What might be your response to someone who might be thinking that?

Rachel:

Yeah, it's a great point, but I don't think we have to design three. So, for instance, we might give the students a prompt, you know, we might be saying, create a solution to this problem and provide evidence, whatever that looks like in your field. But you can demonstrate that, you can show, you can submit this using a number of different modalities. So, that could be the paper, that could be the infographic, that could be the video. But what's really key there are the bounds. It needs to be of this length, of this duration, of this level of detail, you know, anything like that. I've, you know, learned from my mistakes, folks. So that's really the key there, is having the options. So it doesn't have to be three different assignments, but just options for how they can submit it. And honestly, this is a great inclusive thing for us as the instructor because oh my goodness, it can make it so much more interesting to grade. Because we're not grading 50 of the exact same paper. Okay, hopefully they're not exactly the same. But, we're not grading 50 of the essentially same thing. That is boring, but if we're having the students, they can take more ownership. They can be a whole lot more interesting. They can be really engaging, which obviously isn't our goal. It's a good learning experience, but it's not a bad thing either to have the grading, have the experience be better for everyone.

Kelly:

Right.. And I think you would agree that what I don't hear you saying is that every single assignment has to have multiple options. This is something that you might do once, maybe twice, for one or maybe two assignments in a semester.

Rachel:

Yeah, so the way I've done this before is a number of different activities through the semester. Let's say I had, maybe six, let's call it six different activities. In each of them I might have something different, so it might be they're writing, whatever the activity is, and they can choose a little bit on the topic, so I'll give them a few topics to choose among. Or in one or two activities, they might be able to do a video or a paper, something like that. So we're just doing little things here and there, and it creates a little variation, which is nice for everyone. But it's not a big thing, and this is a place to start with maybe one activity, like you said, Kelly. It's not, let's do all of them. That's overwhelming.

Kelly:

Right, right. So, here we're talking about designing assignments, so I feel like let's take a couple steps back, think a bit larger here, and you start with designing things even before you put together your syllabus, and so what are some of the ways that the design of our course overall can appear in the syllabus?

Rachel:

Yeah. So here we're also considering accessibility beyond the legal requirements. Of course, there are bare minimums that we have to do. We're certainly not saying like,"Okay, let's stop there." But how do we level that up? Because that's also a great way to have fewer assignment modifications based on particular accessibility needs or student disability accommodation needs.

Kelly:

Well, speaking of modifications, adjustments, alternatives, I can hear some people wondering about how to address what may be some potential barriers to syllabus modifications that instructors might be up against.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. We have quite a number of those. Like, let's be honest, there's a lot of things and a lot of people, and a lot of different requirements out there. So depending on what type of program we're in, what type of college we're in, any of those things. And so some of the barriers we might have might be things like having secondary accreditation. So if you're in a program like engineering that has ABET or public health, those different types of programs, as well as many others, have a secondary accreditation that may have very particular expectations for learning outcomes, for what students are doing and when. We might also have the potential barriers of, you know, so and so colleague down the hall. Right?

Kelly:

Right.

Rachel:

We're teaching multiple sections, or we have multiple instructors, and there needs to be some sort of consistency, getting people on board. But we can have those conversations if we're looking at, perhaps, beginning some discussions with colleagues about ideas or plans or what can we change in this section that we keep consistent with the others. But we also might look at how we try out new things, again, those are department level, those are course level navigation types of activities. We might also have the major barrier of curriculum committees, or maybe it's so and so associate dean in your area, that is the person who has their hand very heavily on top of a syllabus, if you will. And so we might look at considering the committee's priorities, the timelines for review, and especially how we might apply innovations that don't need a committee review first. So we're not out here throwing out new learning outcomes for the course, but we're looking at maybe are there ways to tweak an assignment or something like that. Maybe there are ways to, again, talk with the people we need to and see what can I change, what shouldn't I change right now, and really prioritize the greatest needs first and then see what's needed to submit for approval.

Kelly:

Well, I think we have certainly covered a lot about syllabi today. As we do for every episode, I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how this conversation represents a keystone concept in teaching.

Rachel:

I think it really relates to how we are looking at continuous improvement. We can look at our syllabus as this thing that we just get out and we update the dates, which, you know, it can be perfectly legitimate for that new semester. But we can also look at is there something small we can do in that small changes model that we talk about in the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning? Is there something new we can try in maybe one or two little places? Can we try that out? Can we see how it goes? Because honestly, not every inclusive teaching or every evidence based teaching practice or idea or structure or plan will work for every course. But there are many influences on course design, and those will impact what's possible, or probable, or any of those things.

Kelly:

Yes. Love that. All right, well, thank you, Dr. Yoho, for your insights today.

Rachel:

Absolutely. It was great to be on this side of the microphone.

Kelly:

I love it. I love it. And we want to thank you listeners for joining Dr. Yoho and I in our first Hear From Your Host episode. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone listening during our first season of Keystone Concepts in Teaching. We hope you'll join us next season to hear from more new guests as we explore teaching and learning small change strategies that can be applied across disciplines and instructional modalities. In the meantime, you can visit our website at Stearnscenter. gmu. edu for more resources and opportunities to engage with us. See you next season!