Borrowing the ‘Super Courses’ coinage from Ken Bain’s 2021 book Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning acknowledges his focus on course development. A significant complement to his focus on best practices of award-winning teachers, the new book explores nearly 20 elements that can go into forming a super learning experience. Bain offers an approach that entails consideration of successive elements, each of which can create an engaging learning environment.
The reality for many faculty is not so glorious. Many faculty, hired at the last minute to teach, have received a topic-driven departmental syllabus that does not begin with any of Bain’s elements or even with the outcomes of the course.
So much design information is now available that it behooves us and our administrators to make better use of the abundance. We now know thanks to Wiggins and McTighe that designing ‘backward’ from course outcomes can lead us to activities and topics that connect to those outcomes. And we also know thanks to L. Dee Fink that there are a number of situational factors that when considered will integrate activities and outcomes.
Bain, Wiggins/McTighe, and Fink all give valuable approaches to course design, and each has become part of the course design efforts. Much work at Oxford College and later at Georgia’s Board of Regents involved redesigning of existing courses, so faculty were not asked to begin from scratch. The Inquiry-Guided Learning curricular effort at Emory’s Oxford College, for example, involved Re-Design. A contextual approach to redesign means faculty focus on redesigning course components within each of several contexts.
If we think of students engaging the course materials within three generally distinct contexts—the classroom, their assignments, and their learning experiences outside the classroom involving course content—then we can focus on enlivening these individual (and in many ways unique) contexts to create the learning environments we need. Indeed, our common goal of all course design approaches is to fashion a super course.
An Active Classroom. Active Learning strategies and activities are popular and readily available for experimentation and application. What is most effective is to select specific activities and strategies that align with learning outcomes and deepen student learning in the specific ways the faculty has designed to happen. Making students active learners only works well when the alignment occurs.
For writing courses, the improvement of writing is a no-brainer. In survey literature courses, the focus is on the ability of students to analyze selections from different genres, discern the literary elements like metaphor or other figures of speech, or identify the historical significance of particular selections. In courses like the literary memoir course, having students create an autobiographical essay toward the end of the semester is having them do the genre as they become more adept at identifying issues within the memoir genre.
To achieve these (and other learning outcomes), I have adopted daily quizzes, prompt and supportive feedback on writing assignments, student-led classroom discussion (after the initial few weeks of class), and a set of others used when applicable (think-pair-share, reflection minute, and others).
The work of Jim Lang in Small Teaching (2nd edition) is one example of a highly successful effort for faculty supporting student learning in class.
What benefits faculty most in this area is to support the alignment of outcomes with the activities and strategies. Conversations or workshops can help them achieve an effective active learning environment.
A well-planned set of transparent assignments. Assignments invite students to learn, particularly through writing and/or a research process. Arranging assignments from small to large, iterative in practice, and moving from private to public in performance builds the course in the way that students learn. Multiple drafts, prompt feedback, with eyes always set on the outcomes of the course–these are the ways to plan assignments for student learning. In every course, students will conduct some kind of research inquiry, undertake short essays and long ones, and a formal paper. And that paper will be presented either individually or within a panel of fellow students.
Giving students opportunities to practice, to fail and learn from failure, combined with prompt, useful feedback, and arranging assignments to plan for them to acquire greater facility as the semester continues, all combine to create learning through assignments.
Yet there is more. Individual assignments written for the student learner means writing them as transparent documents. The work of Winkelmes has inspired a movement fittingly named Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT). Clearly written and organized assignments indicate the Purpose of the assignment, the specific Tasks students will perform, and the ways that the products of the assignment will be graded.
For faculty then, the challenge ahead is to arrange the work of the semester for student learning in these ways–progressively more complex with opportunities to learn through feedback with the assignments written for clarity and transparency. Workshops focusing on assignment arrangement, feedback, and TiLT-ed for transparency are useful for faculty. In my courses having the work culminate in a disciplinary product is highly desirable as well.
Experiencing the course content through disciplinary immersion. The selection of a specific High Impact Practice (HIP) and ensuring that it is done well are powerful steps to enriching student learning. Of the 11 HIPS, Service Learning has been the one I have used most often. Combining an SL project with writing intensive and collaborative assignments has meant my courses integrate two or three HIPS in every course.
I write a good bit about service learning because this HIP is so flexible and adaptable to a variety of course needs and outcomes. Students interviewing military veterans to write about the veteran experience in the military, or students working with students at an alternative school setting to discern their unique outlooks on growing up in difficult circumstances, or students interviewing senior citizens for insights into key experiences in their lives. All service learning work turned into essays or research projects.
In each of these three service learning projects, the interviewees were invited to attend presentation day, a celebration of their lives as written by first-year college students who read and/or presented their research project on the effort.
For courses where the content is not amenable to service learning projects an experiential learning project can involve other HIPs such as research projects into disciplinary questions such as ‘What is Tragedy?’ or the Seminar on Place or the questions surrounding the literary canon. In each of these three courses, a writing intensive, or first-year seminar, or themed upper-level course, the HIP involved writing, collaborative assignments, and presentations of results.
The good challenge for faculty is the selection of one or more of the High Impact Practices and integrating them into the course design. Workshops and conversations that offer the menu of 11 well-researched HIPS with good examples of courses across the disciplines that have integrated one or more of these practices involve time well spent.