Syllabus for my first grad class

For your consideration: the syllabus for the first grad class I’ve ever taught. It’s an online class through Antioch University New England, in their Next-Generation Learning concentration for experienced educators. Overall I’m proud of this. It started off as being way too structured, then I went totally in the other direction. This syllabus presents a somewhat reasonable balance between the two ends of the pendulum swing.

The funny thing about how I went through that pendulum swing is that old habits die hard. it’s been ten years since I finished grad school myself, and I’ve since been pretty firmly enmeshed in much more progressive thoughts on education. Yet when it came time to take my first crack at course design, I went back to the same old thing I was used to from my grad program. Oh sure, it was strongly influenced by one of the better classes I took, but still. In my mind, the hyper-structured, lots of tasks grad class was the way things were supposed to be done. I give a lot of credit to Laura Thomas, who didn’t rebuke me for that first shot at it, just reminded me to actually practice what I preach. She gave me the permission I needed in order to come up with this course design. Also huge thanks to Laura D’Elia for being a sounding board and reminding me at the last minute to do things the better way.

For me as an educator, this is a valuable lesson. Sometimes students are so used to doing things the old way that they need to be reminded and cajoled into doing things in newer, better ways, or else they’ll fall back on old habits.  no matter how obvious we think we’ve made it, sometimes we need to explicitly give our students permission to do the things they’re most excited about doing.

syllabus edc687