Description of the Course in College Teaching:  GRAD 5910

Sample course description from Ben Roth and Joe Stepans
   
As a student in our course, your voice matters to us and you will be heard, both as we design the course and as we teach the course.  We will provide opportunities for you to learn about yourself, about your discipline, and about your students.  You will be able to articulate your own ideas and feelings about teaching and learning, and we believe that by the end of the course these ideas will blossom into a coherent personal philosophy of teaching.  You will be encouraged to investigate the local and national teaching scene in your field.  And you will be given the opportunity to learn more about the students you teach.  (If you aren’t currently doing teaching of any kind, we’ll try to help you find some collection of students that you want to know more about.)

Rather than simply listing some possible topics for the course, we would like to provide a context for these topics by looking at one useful model for course development.  This model asks all of us as teachers to view planning a course as a four-stage process of a cyclical nature.  The first stage deals with the development by the teacher of clear expectations for students in the course.  That is, what does the teacher expect students to get out of the course?  The second stage focuses on the activities, opportunities and experiences to be made available to students in the course.  That is, what will students do in the course?  As teachers plan these activities, teachers must be knowledgeable about theories of learning and teachers must have an array of teaching strategies at their disposal.  Teachers also need knowledge of student misconceptions in the subject as they plan experiences for their students.  Stage three involves assessment.  That is, were the course expectations met by students?  What assessment instruments and strategies can reasonably be used to gauge the attainment of course goals?  Of course, this stage encourages us as teachers to investigate various aspects of testing.  And it encourages us to take a hard look at improving our own teaching.  Finally, stage four is evaluation.  We evaluate in light of assessment results and feedback from students the appropriateness of the course expectations (stage one) and the efficacy of the course experiences (stage two).  In our experience, it is a rare course that doesn’t cry out for iteration of the process!

Summarizing, we see that viewing course planning as a four-stage process will lead us in a natural way to discussions of the following topics:

·        Learning theories and implications for teaching

·        Student misconceptions

·        Teaching strategies

·        Questioning

·        Assessment

·        Improving teaching

·        Planning course materials