Is this fall going to be your first semester teaching as a professor on the tenure track? If so, congratulations on your new position and this big transition to the professoriate.
Perhaps you may have had to pack up your belongings and move across the country, find a place to live in a new city, and settle into your apartment and home. It’s an exciting time and a big milestone for you!
Things start to feel real when you see your office on campus and you receive your new e-mail address. And you start to receive e-mails about upcoming faculty meetings and queries from students who are interested in enrolling in your classes.
On that note, have you already finalized and polished your course syllabi for the fall term? For some of you, you might already have syllabi that you’ve taught from that are almost ready to go.
But for others of you, conceptualizing and developing a course syllabus may be a first-time experience for you. And it may seem daunting. You might feel compelled to devote the entire summer to crafting your syllabi.
In this 24th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to be sharing some observations as well as some tips on course and syllabus prep for those of you who are brand new to teaching. And I hope that some of these observations and tips will be helpful for you in your preparations.
If you’re a professor in North America, the month of August usually signals the last few precious weeks of your summer break. You might be deciding to buckle down on finishing your writing projects or deciding to take a last-minute vacation. Or both! You know that once the academic year starts, you won’t have these large blocks of time, so you want to take advantage of what time remains.
If you’ve been teaching for a while, then planning new course syllabi may be a cinch for you. You can take your previous syllabi and tweak them for the new semester. You can put this off until a few days before school starts.
What’s Entailed in Course Syllabus Preparation?
But if this is your very first time teaching as a professor, then preparing your course syllabi is probably more of an involved process for you. And one that produces a lot of anxiety. If you didn’t receive any training in graduate school on how to construct effective syllabi and teach your own courses, then this can feel like a big leveling up process for you.
When I was a PhD student, I only served as a teaching assistant and a head teaching fellow. I had the chance to create my own syllabi for my discussion sections, but I was never the instructor of record for my own course in graduate school.
So I had to upskill quickly during my first year on the tenure track.
In the preparation for developing my first courses and course syllabi, I did what I imagine many new faculty do in my situation:
-I asked my senior colleagues for previous syllabi for the core courses that I inherited.
-I asked my academic peers for sample syllabi to draw ideas and inspiration from.
-I skimmed through readings that I thought would be effective and interesting for undergraduate courses and also for graduate seminars.
-Started to conceptualize the arc of each course, the course goals, and learning outcomes.
-Decided on what assignments, readings, and final assessments I would have.
-Decided on what kind of course policies and institutional resources I needed to include in the syllabus document.
So I drafted syllabi for several courses that eventually became a template for what I would use in later years.
Additionally, being a music department faculty member, I also selected and digitized music examples that needed to be integrated and uploaded into the Learning Management System (LMS), which was connected to the course syllabus.
And lastly, I also contacted and arranged for guest musicians to come to some of my courses. So I also had to learn how to apply for honoraria and funding in my new institution.
These days, one could probably add the following to this course prep stage:
-Use social media to crowdsource possible readings and ideas for a new course
-Peruse related syllabi that are online or on a website such as Open Syllabus
-Utilize AI to generate a list of readings related to your course
Now that’s a lot that goes into conceptualizing, planning, and developing a good course syllabus! If you’re teaching several courses this coming academic year, syllabus planning can entail a lot of time and work.
The Syllabus: “One of the Few Formal Tangible Links Between You and Your Students”
I want to read a short description for you about the course syllabus. This comes from an essay that’s on the website of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. I’m going to go ahead and link to this essay by Jennifer Sinor and Matt Kaplan in the written transcript, as there are other practical suggestions for what goes into constructing a good syllabus.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
The syllabus—what students eagerly await on the first day; a record of the class; one of the only artifacts to remain after the students move on. Your syllabus represents both an end and a beginning—a final product of your course planning and a valuable way to introduce yourself and the course to your students. Because your syllabus is one of the few formal, tangible links between you and your students and because it will be referred to throughout the semester, time and energy should be spent on constructing your syllabus. Research indicates that outstanding instruction and a detailed syllabus are directly related (Grunert, 1997). Students will appreciate and respond positively to a syllabus that bears the marks of being well planned.
Later on in the essay, there’s also a section on establishing tone in your syllabus. You want to set the right tone for what kind of professor you’ll be and set clear expectations for your students. You also want to establish your course policies about participation, attendance, grading, academic integrity, and any accommodations.
But what does tone mean exactly? And how do you capture the right tone for you and your teaching style in your syllabus?
I wonder if women of color faculty have an added challenge when creating their syllabi for the first time. Since many women of color faculty are often not viewed as authority figures in the classroom, the syllabus serves as a textual validation of your authority as a professor.
Moreover, the syllabus gives you an opportunity to document your course policies clearly. If students are unsure about grading expectations or there are grading disputes in the future, you can refer to them back to your syllabus.
It’s almost like you’re building in pre-emptive defensive measures into this one document. But at the same time, some of you also want to extend compassion to your students and communicate that you’re creating space for feedback and engagement. This is a fine balance to strike in one document.
I think this concept of tone is really quite interesting, especially when thinking about this from the perspective of women of color faculty. And it really does merit further discussion.
But in the meantime, I would like to offer 6 tips for those of you who are new to teaching and who are currently preparing course syllabi for the first time this summer and maybe stressing out a little bit.
Here are 6 Tips for Preparing Course Syllabi for New Faculty
1) Think of the syllabus in terms of a puzzle that you’re putting together. Some parts will be easier to fill in than others. Know that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for certain sections like your institution’s academic integrity policy. You can reuse these sections in future syllabi.
2) When you have a syllabus draft, ask a trusted colleague to look it over for you. There may be some language that you might want to include that is specific to your institution. Or you may receive some suggestions from a senior colleague that would be important for the teaching portion of your tenure evaluation down the road.
3) Build in some flexibility into your syllabus. You can do this with a simple sentence saying that certain aspects of the schedule may be subject to change, and that all revisions to the syllabus will be announced in class and online.
We’ve learned during the pandemic that there are some circumstances that are just beyond our control. School closures, campus protests, sudden top-down requests to shift to remote instruction, and who knows what else is coming our way?!! All of these things can impact your ability to deliver your course effectively. So make sure to allow for some flexibility in your syllabus.
4) If you have a discussion-based course, I’ve found it very rewarding and interesting to have students decide on a topic for discussion towards the end of the semester. You can take a class poll when it comes closer to the time but just list it as TBD (to be determined) in the syllabus for that week. I’ve had some of the most engaging and fascinating class discussions when I’ve allowed students to decide on a topic for reflection.
5) For graduate seminars, I usually scheduled one workshop session in the middle of the course just for syllabus design. This was to give graduate students the opportunity to conceptualize and design their own syllabus and discuss their process with their peers. Then they’d come away with a great first draft of a syllabus that they tailored themselves—that they could incorporate into their teaching portfolio if they chose to go on the academic job market.
6) Keep in mind that if you’ve never gone through the process of creating your own course syllabi, that you are learning, too. There is a learning curve to this. Adopt a growth mindset and know that you’ll develop your own tone and style in good time. Give it your best shot this first time around, but try to resist the temptation to spend countless hours working on your first set of syllabi.
So I hope that some of these tips resonate with you and can alleviate some stress with this first-time activity. Also feel free to check out my previous podcast episodes 3 and 14, where I discuss How to Manage your First Semester as a Woman of Color Faculty on the Tenure Track and Teaching Graduate Seminars for Your First Time.
If you’ve been teaching for a long time and you have additional suggestions on what has helped you with syllabus prep over the years, please reach out to me. I would love to hear from you and add these suggestions, resources, and wisdom to the written transcript for this episode.
And lastly, if you know somebody who is just starting out their journey as a new professor, please feel free to share this episode with them!
