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Best Teachers Summer Institute, June 20-22, 2012
Reflective Exercises: Excercise One

Teaching as Scholarship:  Reflections on the Syllabus
 

Introduction
 
You may find the juxtaposition of "scholarship" and "teaching" a strange liaison. Teaching is often seen as technique, as presentational method, rather than as the kind of serious intellectual invention we associate with scholarly work. But for this assignment, we want you to think about the ways your courses and syllabi represent profound acts of scholarship.
 
Part I
 
Select the syllabus from one of your courses as the subject of a reflective memo (no more than five pages). The memo should provide a peer in your field with a window on the choices and rationale that underlie your syllabus. We offer the following prompts to guide you in this task--but we certainly don't expect you to respond to each question. Our purpose here is to get you engaged in a certain kind of scholarly reflection about your teaching.
Every course we craft is a lens into our fields and our personal conceptions of those disciplines or interdisciplines. Give careful thought to the shape and content of your course as if it were a scholarly argument. How does the course begin? Why does it begin where it does? (What is the thesis of the argument?) What do you and your students do as the course unfolds? What do you lecture about or lead discussions around? What are the key assignments and/or student evaluations? (What are the main points of the argument? What are the key bodies of evidence?) How does it end? Why does it end as it does? (Most scholarly arguments carry the intention to persuade. What do you want to persuade your students to believe? Or question? Or do you want them to develop new appetites or dispositions?)

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How can a colleague develop a sense of you as a scholar by examining the various features of your course? In your field, or even in your own department, are there distinctly different ways to organize your course--ways that reflect quite different perspectives on your discipline or field? Do you focus on particular topics while other colleagues might make other choices? Why?
In what ways does your course teach students how scholars work in your field--the methods and values that shape how knowledge claims are made and adjudicated within your field? How does it teach them the logic of your discipline, that is, how scholars in your field reason from evidence, what concepts they employ, what assumptions they make, and what implications their conclusions have? How does it open doors to the critical dialogues and key arguments in which scholars on the cutting edge of your field are engaged? What big questions will your course help students answer? What intellectual abilities (or qualities) will it help students develop? What reasoning abilities must students have or develop to answer these questions? How will you spell out explicitly the intellectual standards you will be using in assessing their work and why you use those standards? How do those standards reflect the intellectual standards of your discipline? How will you help students learn to assess their own work using those standards? How will you lead the students to become conscious of the patterns of thinking and reasoning in which they have engaged, and if possible, connect this experience with experiences they have had in other courses?
What do you expect students to find particularly fascinating about your course? Where will they encounter their greatest difficulties of either understanding or motivation? What reasoning abilities will students need to do well in your course? How does the content of your course connect to matters your students already understand or have experienced? Where will it seem most alien? How do you address these common student responses in your course? How has the course evolved over time in response to them?
You might try playing with some metaphors for characterizing your course and its place in the larger curriculum or in the broader intellectual and moral lives of your students. Is your course like a journey, a parable, a game, a museum, a romance, a concerto, an Aristotelian tragedy, an obstacle course, one or all or some of the above? How does your metaphor(s) illuminate key aspects of your course?

Part II
 
Now give your report and syllabus to your project teammate in your department and take your teammate's syllabus and memo in exchange. Using your colleague's syllabus/report as your base data, imagine yourself writing a recommendation to a university-wide faculty committee that is considering your colleague for an award for distinguished service as a teacher-scholar. Your task, based on this syllabus/memo as a piece of evidence, is to interpret your colleague's work and thinking to colleagues beyond your own field (3 pages or less).
The same questions that we offer as a guide to construct the reflective memo may be helpful in preparing your commentary, but we also encourage you to think about the standards by which your colleague's work should be reviewed. What is important to take into account? Coherence of argument? Distinctiveness of approach? Quality of reflection? Inventiveness of the course? Does this course have the potential to make a sustained, substantial and desirable influence on students? To what extent are your standards in this exercise similar to those you would use in judging the quality of your colleague's research?
This exercise was originally developed as part of the Peer Review Project largely by Lee Shulman.  It is modified here by Ken Bain

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