How can we foster a sense of student investment in our courses and speak to their changing interests?
I’ve long been interested in designing courses around the interests and needs of specific groups of students, but have sometimes been frustrated in finding effective ways of doing this. In addition, students are sometimes a little resistant to such an approach—after all, I’m the expert, so I should decide what they need to learn.
As a fellow of the 2023–24 Kaneb Center Course Design Academy (KCCDA), I encountered a number of tools and approaches I hope to adopt for the purpose of promoting a sense of learning as a collective effort. These included:
- A group syllabus review exercise on the first day of class. I rarely spend much time reviewing the syllabus with students, but this seemed a good way to both increase transparency and create the sense that we are entering into a mutual agreement in embarking on the course.
- A contractual approach to deadlines and late policies. As part of the syllabus review, I plan to provide students a set of options for late policies and ask them to come to an agreement within their own group. This idea was inspired in part by a model of “contract grading” I encountered in our KCCDA session on grading and ungrading. Amongst the options I will include is “time banking,” in which students are given a “bank” of extension/late days that they can use as they wish.
- Leaving a blank week in the schedule, to be filled as student interests emerge. This is a simple way of allowing students to shape course content. For me, it’s also quite difficult, and a useful form of self-discipline—a reminder that it’s counter-productive to stuff as much as I possibly can into the schedule (or an individual class session, for that matter), or to come up with a “perfect” design, and that it is more important to leave space.
With these and other relatively simple methods, I hope to build a greater sense of investment and inclusion in my courses.
Heather Wiebe is a teaching professor with concurrent appointments in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies and Department of Music. The director of graduate studies for Sacred Music at Notre Dame, she was a participant in the 2023–24 Kaneb Center Course Design Academy.