Teaching Support
Consultation
Preparing the Course Syllabus
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Teaching Support •Consultation
Preparing the Course Syllabus
A thoughtfully prepared course syllabus is an important point of
interaction, often the first, between you and your students. This section offers some
suggestions on ways to make your syllabus more effectively support teaching and learning.
Composing a Syllabus
Composing a syllabus is an important stage in the process of crafting
educational experiences for your students. If carefully developed, your syllabus will provide a
common plan and reference that will allow you and your students to focus more on course content and
process, and less on course mechanics and procedures. It can be an important learning tool that
communicates expectations, reinforces intentions, roles, attitudes, and strategies that you will use
to promote active, purposeful, and effective learning in your course.
Composing a course syllabus is a reflective exercise that asks you to
think carefully about your teaching philosophy, what it means to be an educated person in your
discipline or field, how your course relates to disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses of study,
and your goals and purposes for promoting and assessing learning. It requires that you develop a
learning environment for your students using teaching and learning strategies that are consistent
with your beliefs. It asks that you think through the implications (consistency and practicality) of
your preferred teaching style, the choices you make about course content, teaching strategies, forms
of assessment, and the ways that students' diverse needs, interests and purposes can influence those
choices.
The Syllabus as a Negotiable Agreement
Consider the balance between instructor leadership and student initiative in
all of your course activities, and ask yourself to what extent you will promote students'
involvement in the following:
- Participating and planning all phases of their individual learning
process.
- Clarifying their own goals for the course
- Monitoring and assessing their own progress
- Establishing criteria for judging their own performance within the
educational intentions of the course (including any limitations imposed by certification and
licensing), the constraints of time, and respect for the needs of other students.
Planning Your Syllabus
We suggest that you consider the following elements when planning your
syllabus:
- Develop a well-grounded rationale for your course consistent with your
personal beliefs and assumptions about the nature of learning and how it is promoted and produced.
- Decide what you want students to be able to do as a result of taking
your course. Establish what skills, knowledge, and attitudes you believe are of most worth, how
they can be built into your course, and how students’ work will be appropriately assessed.
- Define and delimit course content.
- Structure your students’ active involvement in learning. How will the
way the class is conducted meet students' diverse needs, interests and purposes and give students
the best chance to learn and to demonstrate what they know?
- Identify and develop resources.
- Compose your syllabus to communicate your expectations and intentions,
with a focus on students as the primary audience.
Reference: Grunert, J. (1997) The course syllabus: A learning-centered
approach. Anker Publishing: Bolton, MA.
Syllabus Inventory
We have also provided an inventory of important
syllabus components. After working through the inventory, we suggest that you review your syllabus
with colleagues to be certain that it is intellectually and culturally responsive, and with students
to be certain that it makes sense to them.
Syllabus Review Service
In addition, you may want to take advantage of CSTL’s Syllabus Review
Service. If you would like our teaching consultants to offer written suggestions on the content and
format of your syllabus, you may send your syllabus
electronically, by campus mail, or drop it
off in person. Please contact us to discuss which will be the most useful approach at:
Center for Support of Teaching and Learning
400 Ostrom Ave.
443-4572
More Information
If you would like more information on this topic, please contact the Center by email at
mailto:cstl@syr.edu or by phone at 443-4572.
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