Students taking a first-year composition course produce essays portraying the life experiences of military veterans, or those of senior citizens, or of alternatively educated secondary school students. 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.

Flashbackward. You pursued advanced degrees for the love of your discipline or particular subject. Blessed to receive a position at a college or university, you begin a new journey into teaching, research, and service (for some with tenure and promotion as a laudable and reachable goal). In your teaching, you perhaps assume that your students will learn as you did, or benefit from your enthusiasm for the subject. Your department also needs you to teach general courses outside your discipline, and most students in the intro first-year and even second-year courses will not be students majoring in your particular subject.

In working with undergraduate students, particularly those in the first two years, we learn that enthusiastic telling in most courses is insufficient for the majority of students to experience deep learning of the content and skills. Experiencing disappointment indicates we have arrived at the point where the master academic can begin to become the scholar teacher. It may seem obvious, but to say all that we offer students must be designed for how they can best learn is foundational.

A well-designed course offers clearly defined outcomes for success, meaning the specific knowledge, skills, and intellectual attitudes that students will possess after completion of the course. Where the passion for my discipline enters is in the creation of individual paths or bridges for students from initial concepts to doing the working of the discipline even in introductory courses. Courses designed in this way, when also well-delivered, are set to become what Ken Bain has called the Super Course.

As in the Sierpinski triangle, the larger triangle is composed of many individual triangles, so individual courses belong to or fit within a larger curricular design of a particular degree. But curricular program design is another topic!

In literature, composition, and literary theory courses taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, I learned to embed at least one High Impact Practice as a solid first step. My courses were by nature all Writing Intensive/Writing Rich courses, so my first efforts involved making the writing assignments more truly impactful.

Over time, embedding a service learning project into the course content proved an invaluable addition to student engagement and learning. These two HIPs took place outside the classroom, for the most part, so the push to examine the minutes of each class for possible enrichment led to the employment of a set of classroom practices that accompany the HIPs.

But to this point all has been general qualities and description–course design, HIPs, and classroom practices. What meant the most to my students was taking the journey into the topic, discipline, and content with them each day of the semester.

I am happy to share in greater detail my transition from an enthusiastic talking head (which actually led to a number of teaching awards, I am embarrassed to say) to a more intentional and more deeply grateful teaching scholar with every bit as much enthusiasm. Essentially, the more I invited students to do the work that had most excited me as an undergrad or graduate student, the more they carried away from my courses what I had hoped.