Category: Course Design

Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D.

Let’s begin with debunking a persistent misconception about learning: Learning styles do not exist. Moreover, matching instruction strategies to a particular learning style, such as using visuals to teach a “visual learner,” does not improve learning for that particular student (Pashler, McDaniel, Roher, & Bjork, 2009). Worse, using the wrong sensory modality for instruction for some content may impair learning if the content is better suited to learning strategies delivered in another modality. For example, providing a lecture on knitting to an “auditory or verbal learner” will not improve learning if this is the only form of instruction. All learners will benefit from visual instruction and will require hands-on practice (kinetic learning strategies) to learn to knit.

Why the language we use matters when we talk to students about learning strategies and learning preferences.

The myth of “learning styles” persists for several reasons. One source for this misconception is the genuine need to accommodate individuals who cannot access materials in a particular modality. A second source is based on personal experiences with preferred activities. Some people prefer to read a book whereas others prefer to watch a film. If we talk about “learning styles” when we mean to talk about preferences, we inadvertently reinforce the false belief in “learning styles.” Language matters.

Certainly, some individuals have physical or cognitive characteristics that impair accessibility to learning in that modality. Hearing impairments create obstacles for lecture-based instruction. Dyslexia and other reading disabilities limit the accessibility of written materials. Visual impairments (blindness, or, in some cases, color blindness) interfere with learning from images. Limitations on mobility or fine motor skills make hands-on learning activities less effective. The fact that a particular modality is not accessible to a student does not mean that the student has a “learning style.” Materials presented through one sensory modality are simply not accessible to them for learning.

Similarly, preferred activities are not “learning styles.” We may enjoy some activities more than others, but our preferences do not mean we cannot learn if we use a less preferred activity. We might be more motivated to engage in a learning strategy that uses our preferred learning activity. If I like to watch videos more than I like to read, I might be more likely to complete an assignment that requires watching a video than one that requires reading a text. However, my preferences do not mean I will learn more by watching the video than by doing something else (e.g., reading or hands-on practice). 

Different content and skills are sometimes learned best when students use specific modalities to interact with the content, regardless of the learner’s preferred activities (Bruff, 2019). For example, botony students will learn to identify plants more accurately if they study pictures than if they listen to a lecture or read verbal descriptions. Students in a poetry class will learn more about writing poems if they listen to poems read aloud than if they study images that depict the meanings of poems. Students of piano or dance must engage in physical activity to learn to play piano or dance. Interestingly, for all disciplines, students learn even better if they engage with the content and skills using a variety of modalities and learning activities (e.g., viewing images of art and reading verbal descriptions and analysis of the work).

Research on how people learn indicates that people learn best when they use multiple modalities to think about, practice, and encode new content and skills (Ambrose, et al., 2010; Bruff, 2019). If I read content, listen to a lecture, and study images and graphs related to the content, I am more likely to remember than if I think about the content in only one way. Research on memory and cognition refers to this phenomenon as the benefit of dual coding (Paivio, 2007) or breadth of processing (Anderson & Reder, 1979). If memory for new information uses both images and words, I have two ways to remember the information. If I forget the information coded in one modality, I might still be able to remember it by using the other encoding modality. Redundant systems work more reliably than a system that operates correctly with one procedure only. 

Application: Effective Learning Strategies

• Present material in a variety of modalities: visual (pictures and graphics) and verbal (written and spoken). 
• Provide concrete examples as well as abstract explanations of concepts. Discuss the connection between characteristics of the concrete examples and key elements of the abstract representation.
• Distribute learning activities over time. Repeated exposure and practice of new material spaced across intervals of time (a few weeks) produces longer-term learning. The passage of time between each exposure creates a different learning context. Variations in learning contexts create multiple cues that students can use to help them remember.
• Interleave review of examples of solved problems with activities that require students to solve problems independently. As expertise and problem-solving skill increase, ask students to spend less time studying examples of solved problems and more time working independently to solve new problems.
• Use quizzes and exams as opportunities to learn. Tests require students to practice retrieving information from memory. Students get feedback about retrieval success during the test and from their test scores. They can learn about how well the strategies they used to learn new material worked. Ask students to reflect on how they prepared for an exam and ask them to consider whether using a different study strategy might improve future test performance. Post-exam reflections (exam wrappers) help students calibrate their judgments about how well they prepared and how much they learned. These insights can guide their choices for future study activities.

Resources

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass. 

Anderson, J. R., & Reder, L. M. (1979). An elaborative processing explanation of depth of processing. In L. S. Cermak and F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Levels of processing in human memory (pp. 385-404). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bruff, D. (2019). Intentional tech: Principles to guide the use of educational technology in college teaching.West Virginia University Press.

Paivio, A. (2007). Mind and its evolution: A dual coding theoretical approach. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. is the Director Emeritus at the Center for University Teaching, Learning and Assessment at University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL

This article is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Heather R. Porter, PhD, CTRS, FDRT

As described within a previous EDvice Exchange article, Positive Projects is the revving up of students’ Positive emotions through Engagement of Meaningful student projects outside of the classroom that highlight and strengthen Accomplishments and Relationships. Here, we will delve into the Positive Project of creating and operating a profession-specific niche website and database with students.

Meaning

A Positive Project begins by identifying a profession-specific gap or need that’s meaningful to you and your students. For the purpose of this article, consider how this gap or need could be met by developing a profession-specific niche website. For example, students in the Recreational Therapy (RT) Program at Temple University conduct literature syntheses within select coursework. Some of this work is exceptional and could inform current clinical practice with additional mentoring by faculty outside of the classroom. Sadly, however, it sat idly in their computers. The need to share and disseminate this work to the broader field was identified as a gap and a need. Consequently, the RT Wise Owls website was created to share peer-reviewed student syntheses publicly.

The dissemination of student work through this website is meaningful to faculty and students because it contributes to the greater good of the profession, increases name recognition, demonstrates a commitment to strengthening the field, and is often presented at regional, national, and international conferences.

Since its inception in 2013, the website has grown into a database and evidence-based practice information resource center for the field. Additionally, the RT Wise Owls Research Lab was created to support the upkeep of the database. In this lab, RT students search electronic databases for high-quality RT-related literature aligned with their clinical interests for potential inclusion in the database. This experience strengthens their literature search skills and increases their knowledge of the most up-to-date research in areas of interest, which subsequently enhances their clinical marketability.

The website currently garners 14,000+ unique visitors per year from over 100 countries.

Engagement

Positive Projects need to immerse students further into the profession than what is typical in academia and allow them to ‘give’ something (e.g., to another student, the profession, or the community). Engagement at this level can help students find meaning and purpose in their career path and promote altruism, driving personal and professional growth. The development of a profession-specific niche website can provide this experience for students. For example, the RT Wise Owls site offers opportunities for students to be published, which is not typical, especially for Undergraduate students. In addition, it provides them with an opportunity to contribute to the profession at large, connect with others who read their research, and increase their sense of being a change agent within the profession, which often drives intrinsic motivation for continued professional involvement.

Importantly, students involved with the RT Wise Owls site are mentored by faculty members outside the classroom, where students build upon existing skill sets gained in other contexts. For example, RT students learn how to search electronic databases and synthesize literature in coursework; and then expand upon these foundational skills through their involvement with the RT Wise Owls site. This creates a sense of flow, an optimal state of intrinsic motivation. 

Accomplishment

A sense of accomplishment is an essential ingredient within Positive Projects. Consequently, if choosing to develop a profession-specific niche website, the project needs to be broken down into discrete steps with clear and feasible timelines. Regular feedback must also be provided, along with opportunities for students to experience a level of autonomy appropriate to the tasks.

Students who desire to publish their work on RT Wise Owls work closely and collaboratively with a faculty mentor over a semester outside of the classroom to strengthen their work. Specific tasks are outlined along with clear deadlines. Kind, specific, and helpful feedback is provided. Two additional faculty members then peer-review, and a decision is shared (accept, accept with revision, denied).

Students who volunteer in the RT Wise Owls Research Lab work collaboratively with their faculty mentor to identify a topic of interest that they will research for the semester. Additional education and training are provided at the start of the semester on how to search electronic databases related to their research topic, and guidance is provided throughout the semester.

Relationships

Within a Positive Project, the students and faculty members work together in a collaborative process that enhances a sense of support, relatedness, and belonging. When students work on a synthesis of the literature to be posted on RT Wise Owls, the students and faculty mentor work collaboratively throughout the process. This not only aids in the students’ enhancement of skills through regular feedback and guidance, but it also creates a ‘we’ bond. It increases students’ comfortability in seeking and receiving feedback and lessens students’ anxiety. Collaboration may take the form of providing questions and answers within the synthesis document, discussing resources, reviewing and explaining literature, and having group-based conversations.

Positive Emotions

Positive emotions–such as joy, excitement, and pride–flourish when projects are structured in the above manner. Regarding RT Wise Owls, students who publish on the site or work in the RT Wise Owls Research Lab report feelings of joy and pride related to the work they produced and contributed to the broader profession. Faculty also report feeling a sense of pride in the students they mentored and a sense of meaning in mentoring the next generation of the RT profession.

Resources

If you would like additional guidance in creating a Positive Project, feel free to reach out to me (hporter@temple.edu). Also, if you are interested in creating a profession-specific niche website, here are a few helpful resources:

• Website Platform: Temple faculty can create a free website using WordPress through Temple University. Simply go to sites.temple.edu to develop your own website.
• Domain Name: It is recommended you choose a name for your website and register it (e.g., through Name Cheap) so that your readers can easily find and share your website with others.
• Database: The search functionality for the database within RT Wise Owls was created using a free WordPress plug-in called Pods, which allows you to create taxonomies for data. This is used in conjunction with Posts Table Pro ($79/year), which works with Pods to create searchable taxonomy tables.

Heather R. Porter, PhD, CTRS, FDRT is a Professor at Temple University,’s College of Public Health in the Recreational Therapy Program.

Claudia J. Stanny

Direct instruction on effective study strategies and concrete feedback about the quality of learning

The consequences of fixed or growth mindsets (Dweck, 2006) have been a powerful influence on thinking about teaching and learning. Dweck found that successful students have a growth mindset and advocates using teaching strategies that promote a growth mindset.

Individuals with a growth mindset believe that expertise emerges from practice. Students with a growth mindset perceive difficult tasks as opportunities to stretch and learn new skills. They try tasks that challenge their current level of skill and accept the risk of making mistakes as an opportunity to learn. Constructive feedback from mistakes helps them improve.

In contrast, students who believe talent is an innate characteristic have a fixed mindset and avoid challenging tasks. Students with a fixed mindset fear that mistakes made on a difficult task expose their lack of talent. They believe that mistakes expose their weaknesses and reveal that they are overreaching or studying the wrong discipline. Students who believe performance depends entirely on talent prefer tasks for which they are confident they will excel. When learning gets difficult or they make mistakes, they tend to give up.

Dweck notes that many teachers and students falsely claim to have a growth mindset (Gross-Loh, 2016). Because a growth mindset is the socially correct attitude to espouse, people believe they ought to subscribe to a growth mindset. However, their behavior suggests that they believe performance is really determined by fixed talent. Instructors with a false growth mindset place too much emphasis on rewarding effort and too little emphasis on providing specific guidance on effective strategies for completing challenging tasks. They may fail to provide diagnostic feedback about errors to guide future efforts. Dweck argues that teachers who subscribe to a “false growth mindset” offer empty praise for effort as a sort of consolation prize, given to students they believe lack the talent required to perform well on a task. They fail to provide the constructive feedback students require to correct errors and improve learning. Empty praise for effort without constructive feedback perpetuates the notion of talent and promotes a fixed mindset.

What actions will nurture a genuine growth mindset?

The hallmark of a genuine belief in a growth mindset is students who seek challenging tasks that stretch their skill. They risk making mistakes to obtain beneficial feedback from difficult learning experiences. Their persistence and effort are rewarded with personal growth and development of expertise. Thus, although effort and persistence are necessary, they are not sufficient to achieve benefits for learning. Students need more.

Complex learning seldom occurs in one trial or through a single insight. Expertise, particularly expertise with cognitive skills (critical thinking, professional writing, problem-solving) develops when practice is repeated over time. Persistence is important and must be encouraged. But persistence is effective only when combined with practice guided by formative feedback from a skilled expert.

Instructors who want to encourage a growth mindset and develop expert skill in their students need to offer more than praise for effort or simply give “lip service” (empty endorsement) to adopting a “growth mindset.” They must offer specific, concrete, constructive feedback to guide future efforts and correct errors.

• Teach students about specific study strategies that are known to be effective. Don’t simply encourage students to persist, try harder, or study longer. Too many students believe (erroneously) that spending more time studying (exerting more effort) will improve their learning. They waste time re-reading, highlighting, and engaging in mechanical rote repetition study tasks that produce little benefit for long-term retention. Instead, advise students to change the way they study and adopt strategies known to produce good long-term retention. Dunlosky et al. (2013) identified six strategies that have been shown to produce superior long-term retention, based on substantial laboratory evidence. Sumeracki and Weinstein (2017) created a one-page, open access infographic that describes these six strategies. Instructors can distribute this infographic to their students as a course handout, discuss it in class, and refer to it again when advising a student who is struggling in class. The infographic describes the following strategies: retrieval practice (using self-tests), elaborative interaction with course content (posing and answering “why” and “how” questions), practice distributed over multiple sessions, interleaving practice on different topics, frame abstract content in terms of concrete examples instead of memorizing textbook definitions, and use multiple methods (visual, verbal) to represent and encode information.
• Provide specific formative feedback about the nature of errors in performance. Describe concrete actions students must take to correct errors and produce more skilled performance. Students need more detailed feedback than simple identification of errors (what they did wrong). They also need to know what they should do. Describe new strategies students should use and the actions they should take to correct errors and meet expectations for skilled performance.

Resources

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14, 4-58. https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Dweck, C. S. (2006/2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success (updated edition). New York: Ballantine Books.

Gross-Loh, C. (2016, December 16). How praise became a consolation prize. [Interview with Carol Dweck.] The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/

Sumeracki, M. A., & Weinstein, Y. (2018). Six strategies for effective learning. Academic Medicine, 93, 666. https://www.doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000002091

Claudia J. Stanny is the Director of the Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at the University of West Florida.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Cliff Rouder

Faculty often ask us if there are ways to have students work more equitably and effectively in team projects. In our 2018 STEM Educators Lecture, we had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Elisabeth (Lisa) Stoddard discuss the work she and her colleague, Geoff Pfeifer, have been doing at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) to minimize bias and stereotyping in undergraduate student project teams. Her discussion generated interest in our TU STEM community. We know this work is relevant and useful for all disciplines that utilize team projects for deep learning, and thus we are delighted to share an overview of their work with our whole faculty community.

The Issue

We know that student group projects can be a valuable experience for students. However, even  with an equal distribution of work, they may not always be equitable. This can be especially true in disciplines where underrepresented and marginalized groups might be stereotyped as not being capable enough to handle the project. Consistent with prior research in STEM fields, Stoddard and Pfeifer reported that in WPI’s required first-year interdisciplinary project-based learning course pairing one STEM and one social sciences professor, women and students of color more frequently experienced their ideas being ignored or shut down, being assigned less important tasks, dealing with an overpowering teammate, and having their work go unacknowledged or claimed by others.

The Approach

Stoddard and Pfeifer employed an equity-based approach using asset mapping originally developed by Kretzman and McNight in 1993. In essence, asset mapping gives students the opportunity to get to know their and their team’s strengths, interests, identities, and needed areas of growth related to the project. But it goes well beyond that. Asset mapping is just the initial step of a process that enables students to take a deeper dive into bias and stereotyping as they evaluate their own behaviors and the dynamics of their teams. In a paper presented at the 2018 Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference, Stoddard and Pfeifer shared quotes from their students that spoke to improved teamwork by overcoming stereotypes, minimizing task assignment bias, and building student confidence.

As a way to operationalize asset mapping, Stoddard and Pfeifer developed this toolkit containing three modules that include the tools, activities, assignments, and rubrics needed at different times of the semester. Here is an overview of these modules:

• Module 1: Individual work.  Before teams have their initial meeting, students complete a series of self-assessments about their discussion, presentation, problem-solving, and conflict resolution styles. They then create an asset map. (Students are given a sample asset map and a free asset map-making tool.) Students also choose three areas for growth as a result of completing the course or group project. Having reflected on all of these, they are then asked to write a short critical reflection essay that addresses specific prompts.
• Module 2: Group work. Teams then meet early in the semester to get to know each other’s assets and growth areas, and complete a group chart that maps these to each task/skill required for the project. Each task can have multiple members working on it, with some using assets and some developing assets.
• Module 3: Individual and group work. Beginning about halfway through the semester, students are given readings about equity and bias and individually work through a set of questions to assess how the team is functioning in terms of equity and productivity. The second step is a team processing activity to assess what is going well on their team and where their team may be struggling in terms of team dynamics, including whether assets are being used and opportunities for growth are being made available to all. The final step is an individual essay reflecting on whether or not they and other team members are using their assets and creating opportunities for growth, and the effects of bias and stereotyping that may have occurred on their team dynamics.

While there are real benefits that can accrue from this process, Stoddard and Pfeifer recognize that for some students, overcoming biases and stereotypes does not happen as a result of one classroom experience. They see this as a first step in a longer process, and thus recommend that these experiences happen at different times throughout a student’s course of study.

We invite you to explore with your program faculty how you could incorporate this equity-based approach into your curriculum. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to a CAT faculty developer for assistance. Added bonus: Assessing the impact of asset mapping on team dynamics would make a great research project if you are looking to do scholarly work in the area of teaching and learning (better known as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL), and the CAT is here to help you with that as well!

Cliff Rouder is Pedagogy and Design Specialist at Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Geoff Keston

Imagine you’ve given students an exercise, say, think-pair-share, when someone asks, “Why are we doing this? Can’t you just teach things instead?” Could you, off the top of your head, explain the pedagogical theory? If so, how would you do it?

Pedagogical concepts enrich our teaching, but let’s consider whether they’d work even better if we explained the reasoning behind them to students. A good starting place for exploring this question is remembering what we want from students—that they engage with material, summon their creativity, work hard to solve problems on their own, and transfer learning to other domains. Toward each of these goals, knowing at least something about your pedagogical motivation helps students.

And as the coronavirus has pushed us and our students into new territory, openness about our teaching choices might be more important than ever. We’re trying novel techniques and need students’ input about what works. And after years of learning in-person, students need our help to develop new habits and find fresh sources of motivation.

But how can we share our pedagogical reasoning? One simple way is to discuss it casually, avoiding theory in favor of stories. For example, when explaining why I have students give presentations in a Technical Communication course at Temple University, I described the commonplace experience of thinking you understand something until you try to explain it out loud. I also said—not-too-scientifically—that talking out loud to a group “uses different parts of our brains” than does writing. After their presentations, I had students work on the next revision of their papers for a few minutes, with the goal of adding content that they may not have thought of before. This non-technical explanation and the short exercise helped the class see for themselves how presenting sharpened their thinking about their research topics and encouraged them to apply new perspectives to their papers.

Another way to share pedagogical reasoning is to make it a part of a course’s content. This was the approach taken by LaVaque-Manty and Evans (2013), who, in college writing-based courses in two different disciplines, taught explicitly about metacognition, “thinking about thinking.” They used technical language, included the concept in the syllabus, and gave assignments to have students put the idea into practice. This approach elevates a pedagogical idea from a technique used for learning another skill into a valuable skill in itself: students learn how historians, writers, engineers, and scientists think about questions in their fields and how they use reflection in the real work they do as professionals. (For a similar case study of a college class, see Hall et al. (2013).)

Two thoughts about “pulling back the curtain” on your teaching techniques are useful. First, while you’ve talked out loud about your core discipline many times, you probably lack practice in putting pedagogical concepts into words. When I first talked to students about metacognition, it felt like my first day ever teaching. I knew my topic, but didn’t have a feel for explaining it. In past semesters I had assigned metacognitive self-analysis exercises but hadn’t used the technical term, hadn’t explained my own thought process behind giving the assignments. With this hazard in mind, it is good to rehearse even when you are taking the casual approach. Your presentation may be loose and informal, but the behind-the-scenes work takes time and practice.

Second, understanding the science of teaching and learning will be new to students. They might resist the topic, thinking it is merely extra work. And even if they embrace the idea in principle, the concepts and terminology are likely to be unfamiliar because previous instructors didn’t explain their own pedagogy.

In online learning in particular, both you and your students are figuring out new ways to teach and to learn. Making pedagogy a subject of class conversation will help to make this a shared journey. Some of the pedagogical reasoning behind online teaching that you might share with students includes:

• why Zoom attendance is required (see the literature on the Community of Inquiry model, for example, especially regarding social presence in online learning),
• what the goals of breakout room activities are (for example, peer instruction ).

And in some cases you could—with caution—invite discussion about what works well with an online learning technique and what doesn’t, allowing students to help shape the activity. With pedagogical reasoning already a part of open classroom discussion, students will have more vocabulary to talk about these issues and will feel freer sharing their thoughts. One candidate for such discussion and experimentation is the use of discussion boards in an LMS.

Whether using an informal approach or integrating it into course content, sharing pedagogy with students might still seem radical and burdensome. If it does, keep in mind that we all share our teaching philosophy on the first day of the semester, when we hand out the syllabus. The course calendar and instructional goals give students our pedagogical plan and philosophy. Let’s go deeper and keep the conversation going after day one.

References

Hall, E. A., Danielewicz, J., & Ware, J. (2013). Designs for writing: A metacognitive strategy for iterative drafting and revising. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 147–174). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

LaVaque-Manty, M., & Evans, E. M. (2013). Implementing metacognitive interventions in disciplinary writing classes. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 122–146). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Geoff Keston is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of technical communication at Temple University. Please share your thoughts on talking to students about pedagogy: gkeston@temple.edu. 

Helen Bittel

This assignment grew out of a recent overhaul of my British Literature II survey course using backwards design to shift emphasis from coverage of material to student learning. It also aims to better engage the increasing number of nonmajors taking the course for General Education credit, students for whom the purpose and value of studying literature is often not self-evident.

In this final portfolio assignment, students first take each of the four Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs), choose one or two artifacts demonstrating their competency, and write a paragraph explaining how the artifact shows their achievement of the outcome. The artifacts can come from either graded work (low- or higher-stakes assignments) or from in-class work (small group activity answers, exit tickets, personal course notes). Then, they write longer answers to two additional questions: one “big picture” question that the SLOs were designed to help them answer and another question about their own individual learning.

[Editor’s note: A wide variety of online solutions are available for the creation of digital learning portfolios, starting with a simple Google Doc or Microsoft Word file. For more sophisticated options, instructors may want to consider asking students to build portfolios using Google Sites or Wix.com.)

Student responses were strongly positive across varied majors and skill levels; they reported feeling less stress and more control than with a traditional final exam, presentation, or literary analysis paper. Nobody who followed the instructions earned a poor grade, nobody plagiarized, and nearly everyone successfully connected their individual efforts to our shared goals. They were also relatively easy to grade, since for each item, I only needed to evaluate two criteria.

In addition, the SLO-driven final portfolio:

• Implicitly requires students to review everything they did over the semester—in class and at home— in light of what they now know and can do and to demonstrate cumulative learning
• Levels the playing field, in terms of majors and nonmajors. The portfolio requires less knowledge of disciplinary conventions than traditional assessments, and working directly with SLOs is familiar to many pre-professional majors.
• Fosters metacognition, a habit of mind that supports learning well beyond a single course.
• Gives students significant choice in how they demonstrate their learning and unique perspective, and thus ownership of the project
• Makes visible both how course activities are connected to each other through the SLOs and how the work of the course is connected to the big picture of college learning

Helen Bittel is Director of Center for Transformational Teaching and Learning and Associate Professor of English at Marywood University. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Public domain image courtesy Steven Johnson.

Simuelle Myers

When creating a syllabus, it is important to make sure that course goals and expectations are clear. However the syllabus can also be a place to get students excited to learn and to signal that your course is an inclusive environment. The following tips provide three simple ways to create a more inclusive syllabus and start your course off more positively from day one.

Start with a Welcoming Message

Why is this course interesting? What skills can students hope to gain? How does this course relate to their everyday lives? The answer to these questions can spark students’ interest and prepares them to explore the content of your course. Before jumping into the technicalities of grades and policies, create a welcome message or expand your course description to include reasons that students should look forward to engaging with course content, and you as the instructor. For students who may be new to college or nervous about your course, this can help to alleviate some concerns before the course even begins

Bonus tip: consider what aspects of your course or field that you found the most interesting, this can be a great place to draw inspiration for communicating its value to students.

Use Student-Centered Language

Instead of writing course goals as if they were simply for the professor or the course catalogue, write them for the students. Statements such as “at the end of this course you will be able to” can communicate the importance of the student in the learning process. It also implies an expectation of engagement, and speaks to each person in the class directly as opposed to referring to everyone in the course under the general category of “student”.

Bonus tip: When writing your syllabus, imagine that you are speaking directly to one student and describing what their journey through the course will look like.

Create an Inclusive Teaching Statement

Also known as a diversity and inclusion statement or a respect for diversity statement, an inclusive teaching statement signals explicitly that your course is inclusive of all students. An inclusive teaching statement should express the course climate you strive to create and invite students to be active participants. Many statements also encourage students to reach out to the faculty member if they have any concerns about the class and invite suggestions students may have to make the class better. See a few examples here.

Bonus tip: Students with disabilities pay close attention to how the disability statement is presented. If you are using a standard disability statement, consider expanding this to include language that lets students know that your goal is to support them.

Remember, a syllabus can be more than a contract! Instead, consider how it can be an important tool to communicate the value of inclusion, diversity and student success and add a positive start to your semester.

Simuelle Myers formerly served as Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching. She is now Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for Delaware County Community College.