Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything

by William Germano, Kit Nicholls

Overview

How redesigning your syllabus can transform your teaching, your classroom, and the way your students learn

Generations of teachers have built their classes around the course syllabus, a semester-long contract that spells out what each class meeting will focus on (readings, problem sets, case studies, experiments), and what the student has to turn in by a given date. But what does that way of thinking about the syllabus leave out—about our teaching and, more importantly, about our students’ learning?

In Syllabus, William Germano and Kit Nicholls take a fresh look at this essential but almost invisible bureaucratic document and use it as a starting point for rethinking what students—and teachers—do. What if a teacher built a semester’s worth of teaching and learning backward—starting from what students need to learn to do by the end of the term, and only then selecting and arranging the material students need to study?

Thinking through the lived moments of classroom engagement—what the authors call “coursetime”—becomes a way of striking a balance between improv and order. With fresh insights and concrete suggestions, Syllabus shifts the focus away from the teacher to the work and growth of students, moving the classroom closer to the genuinely collaborative learning community we all want to create.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691209876
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Series:	Skills for Scholars , #14
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William Germano is professor of English at Cooper Union. His books include Getting It Published and From Dissertation to Book. Twitter @WmGermano Kit Nicholls is director of the Center for Writing at Cooper Union, where he teaches writing, literature, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Preface: Reality Check xv

1 What You Do, What They Do 1

The Syllabus We Have 5

The Syllabus We Could Have 11

The Pedagogical Contract 17

2 Turning the Classroom into a Community 23

Students and Sovereigns 28

Classroom Composition 33

Finding the Center 36

The Classroom Community as a Working Community 39

True Believers 45

3 Clock and Calendar 49

Two Kinds of Time 51

Coursetime 53

Off-Season 62

4 What's a Reading List? And What's It For? 69

Not Quite a Short History of the Reading List 71

Required Reading, Recommended Reading 81

Thinking with the Incomplete 84

Making Use of Everything 89

How to Read a List, or Pretty Much Anything Else 90

5 Their Work and Why They Do It 95

Starting from the Work 97

Of Students and Stories 99

Facts and Concepts 103

Putting It All Together 109

6 Our Work and How We Do It 115

The Trouble with Grades 117

Feedback, Feed Forward 124

Honesty and Other Best Policies 133

7 What Does Learning Sound Like? 141

Group Improvisation 144

What Teaching Sounds Like 155

Together and Apart 160

8 For Your Eyes Only 163

The Instructor's Copy 169

Reflective Teaching 171

A Teaching Philosophy, with Oranges 175

9 The Syllabus as a Theory of Teaching 181

A Design for Possibilities 183

Us and Them 184

The Real Life of a Syllabus 189

The Syllabus at the End of the Mind 191

Further Reading 197

Index 199

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A magic box of a book, much bigger on the inside than the outside, unfolding from its one-word title and provocative, playful subtitle into an extended masterclass on the educational principle of learner-centered backward design. Engagingly written and astutely argued, Syllabus belongs on the bookshelf of every teacher who has ever looked ahead to the next semester and asked, ‘Now, where do I begin?’ ”—Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing

"With humor and compassion, William Germano and Kit Nicholls dissect the document at the nexus of all of the complexities and opportunities of teaching: the humble syllabus. Drawing on a wealth of institutional knowhow, classroom experience, and theoretical expertise, they show that a transformative course need not be an accident—it can be the product of deliberate design. This book is a manual on how to achieve that."—Roosevelt Montás, Columbia University

"The educational world has lately seen a sustained effort to change the way we think about teaching: from focusing on what teachers do to what students actually learn. This book should become the essential guide for this effort."—Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, authors of They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

“This excellent and invigorating book helped me remember yet again what a wondrous calling teaching is. It is also a reminder that teaching is a subject worthy of the most serious thought.”—David Gooblar, author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching

“Syllabus is required reading for any academic interested in the history of our profession—and its future.”—Cathy N. Davidson, author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux

“New, inventive, and refreshing, Syllabus will give teachers the inspiration and perspective needed to reimagine and improve their classes.”—Monica Linden, Brown University

Editorial Reviews

"Germano and Nicholls’s gently polemical, deeply romantic book regards the syllabus, and the work that goes into constructing one, as an opportunity to ponder the possibilities and pathways of the classroom. . . . As such, their book is filled with useful insights about teaching and how, under ideal circumstances, what is transferred isn’t a body of knowledge but a kind of ‘craft,’ a way of reading and taking in the world. . . . The authors of Syllabus come across like fantastic and committed teachers."—-Hua Hsu, New Yorker

"Germano and Nicholls show how constructing the syllabus can facilitate self-reflection that fuels powerful pedagogy in every subject area. . . . Above all, Syllabus offers prompts for doing the thinking about teaching that will empower readers to create learning communities."—-Koritha Mitchell, Public Books

From the Publisher

"An inspiring exhortation to make the standard college syllabus work harder and better. . . . A thoughtful, provocative collection of well-tested teaching strategies and philosophies that work across the curriculum."

starred review Kirkus

★ 2020-07-28
An inspiring exhortation to make the standard college syllabus work harder and better.

Germano and Nicholls, who teach at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, argue that the syllabus, “that almost invisible bureaucratic document,” must become something more than the purposes it normally serves: as something of a contract between teacher and student (if you do X and Y, you will get an A) and as a repository of university policies on such things as unexcused absences, plagiarism, and accommodation for special needs that the teacher almost certainly did not write. Both those functions are necessary, but the syllabus can be more useful. The authors encourage teachers to keep a “secret syllabus” that is a teaching diary, reflecting on successes and failures in presenting material and eliciting students’ responses. Moreover, the authors hit hard and repeatedly on the thought that the best teaching turns on notions of “student-centered pedagogy,” which relies on collaborative projects. “So when we craft a syllabus,” they write, “let’s choose to think actively about the plan we’re making for students to know together and how to know together.” Over the course of this short book, the subject subtly transforms from the Rousseauvian pedagogical contract to the act of teaching itself, with some useful pointers toward unwonted practices, such as the teacher’s holding discourse back and insisting that the students talk, as well as promoting the thought that if the course contains readings, students must be actively committed to that work. “Because we sometimes fail to fully imagine our students in that act of reading,” write the authors, “our syllabi sometimes fail to create the right conditions for students to read well.” Overburdened teachers will cheer the authors’ suggestion that they mark only categorical errors on written work—but perhaps will groan at the thought of reading “a fully corrected redraft.”

A thoughtful, provocative collection of well-tested teaching strategies and philosophies that work across the curriculum.

Kirkus Reviews