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What Should Students Learn?

In designing your course, it's important to remember that much of what students should learn will be informed by the other features of your course—what you want them to do, the content you want them to cover, and the models of expertise you want them to see. These often come from diverse sources, including your discipline, research interests, and sense of what students will need for their future lives. That might sound like a lot—and it is. It’s almost certainly too much for any one course. To have a successful, learner-centered course, it is important to distill your broad goals into a...

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Professional Conduct

As a teacher of undergraduates, you are expected to act professionally in your dealings with your students and within your courses' teaching staffs. You must be fair, equally available to all of your students, friendly but not your students' friend, well-prepared for class, and prompt. You must also take seriously your obligations to protect your students’ private information and to act ethically with regard to any sensitive information you may obtain about your students and/or fellow teachers.

Syllabus Design

We recently asked a cohort of undergraduate and graduate students how, in a word or short phrase, they would define the function(s) of a syllabus. The results were impressive: while several answers (like "a contract") repeated as one might predict, others (like "a recipe book," "a user's guide," or "a provocation") reminded us of just how many audiences—and how many ends—this genre is meant to serve. Faculty (not to mention job market candidates) often compose syllabi as much to demonstrate their mastery of a topic to other instructors as they do to inform their students. (This may be one... Read more about Syllabus Design

Early / Midterm Feedback

We occasionally meet instructors who are reluctant to solicit early feedback from their students; most commonly, these instructors are worried either (1) that students aren't in the best position to judge a process in which they are still immersed, or (2) that inviting students to identify things which may not be working as well for them—especially if there's a chance that they can't be changed—could have the adverse consequence of putting students in the mindset of dissatisfied customers. These fears are entirely understandable—but also, in our experience,...

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Taxonomies of Learning

As you design learning objectives for your courses, you’ll be thinking deeply about what type of work you want your students to do to demonstrate that they have achieved your desired outcomes. What should our students know? What skills should they have? What types of activities should they be able to do? A taxonomy of learning provides an incredibly useful tool for defining the types of work that we want our students to do.

How to Write an Effective Assignment

At their base, all assignment prompts function a bit like a magnifying glass—they allow a student to isolate, focus on, inspect, and interact with some portion of your course material through a fixed lens of your choosing.





Learning Lab Feature - Expos 20: Narratives of Immigration

December 1, 2018

Students from Margaret Rennix's Expos 20 course visited the Bok Learning Lab three times to prepare for their video capstone project. Our Learning Lab team supported students in the development of narrative storytelling on film and creating their media products, then hosted an event where the students came together to share their final videos.

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Classroom Debate

In its ideal form, debate is a tried-and-true way to get students engaging more purposefully with their readings. Not only does it allow them to see multiple perspectives on an issue, it allows them to hear those perspectives as inhabited by their peers, and encourages them to listen more intently to each other before responding.

Preparing students to have the most meaningful debate possible, however, can prove difficult. Many students may come to the classroom with preconceived notions about what it means to “debate,” derived either from the high-intensity world of high...

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Teaching with Cases

At professional schools (like Harvard’s Law, Business, Education, or Medical Schools), courses often adopt the so-called "case method" of teaching, in which students are confronted with real-world problems or scenarios involving multiple stakeholders and competing priorities. Most of the cases which faculty use with their students are written by professionals who have expertise in researching and writing in that genre, and for...

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Grading and Responding to Student Work

Grading is among the most meaningful tasks we undertake as teachers, and it’s one that—even when things are going smoothly—can require what feels like outsized amounts of time and energy. To be sure, we use a lot of that time and energy simply carrying out the intrinsically difficult job of grading, but a lot of time, and probably even more energy, can get taken up weighing the factors that—when things are going less smoothly—can make the job feel discouragingly fraught. To name a few:

• How do we assess process versus product? (How do we recognize “A...

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