The syllabus reconnaissance
Let's just get this out there. I'm exhausted. I love my job, but five straight semesters of teaching in a pandemic without any break have me very nearly burned out. I had all of two workdays off between the summer and fall semester, a far cry from the university's claim that the interim provides nine days teaching faculty can take off. I guess whoever decided that policy never considered that teaching takes preparation.
I spent most of the interim revamping a graduate course I teach in the fall. In particular, the readings I use for the class have morphed considerably, though you wouldn't have known it from reading the syllabus. I still had required texts on the reading list that students barely touched at the same time I was drawing heavily from texts that I'd never put on the list at all. In short, it had become an unwieldy mess and it took a lot of pruning to get things back into shape.
Combing through the readings was a solid investment in time. However, it left me with little energy and even less time to implement a practice I put into place at the start of the pandemic. Namely, I ran out of time and bandwidth to record a video for my undergraduate course to explain the syllabus.
In lieu of recording a video, then, I decided to adopt a practice known as a syllabus reconnaissance. I'd like to say that I selected this practice for deeply considered, noble reasons. The simple truth, though, is that it was expedient. That isn't to say there weren't good reasons to recommend it. Nevertheless, I don't think I would have implemented it this semester if I'd had more time.
I used the syllabus reconnaissance for both my undergraduate course, which I teach asynchronously online, and for my graduate course, which I'm teaching face-to-face. Naturally, this required two slightly different implementations.
For my graduate course, I sent out a rough draft of the syllabus the day before class. I chose a rough draft because these are incoming students to a Science and Technology Journalism program. Editing will be a big part of their careers so I thought giving them a draft would help set the stage, modeling some of the vulnerability that's intrinsic to a writing career. I asked them to mark any mistakes they found in the syllabus, any information they thought was important, anything they found confusing, anything they found exciting, and anything that made them nervous. In class, then, I had them pair up to discuss their annotations. After giving them some time to talk about it in pairs, I brought the class together for a group discussion.
I feel this worked extremely well. It's a small class, so I was able to eavesdrop on a lot of the discussions, making notes of points I can clarify in future syllabi. I was particularly impressed by how the activity catalyzed open and frank discussions between students about their feelings about embarking on a new stage in their professional development. Moreover, talking about what things excited them and what things made them nervous gave me a better handle on where they imagine their careers to be headed and what some of their anxieties might be. In fact, I was able to use some of their voiced concerns as a springboard to talk about imposter syndrome, a topic I like to bring up for incoming graduate students to let them know we have faith in them and that what they're feeling is perfectly natural.
For my undergraduate course, I made the syllabus reconnaissance part of their first week's discussion activity. Each week, I give students a discussion prompt. I require them to submit a response to the prompt by Thursday night and to reply to their other group members' posts by Saturday. This semester, I asked them as part of my discussion prompt to share anything from the syllabus they found important, confusing, exciting, or anxiety-provoking. My plan, then, is to read their discussions at the end of the week and respond to the most common comments. So far, I haven't had to field many questions but it's still too early to tell how well this worked for students.
Will I make changes in the future to my implementation of the syllabus reconnaissance? It's really too early to tell. I'm pretty happy with how things went in my graduate course and, at the moment, it's hard for me to think of any way that could be tweaked. I keep detailed notes of my teaching in each class, so I'll certainly record if any problems crop up later that can be traced to misunderstandings of the syllabus but, in my experience, that's rare in graduate courses.
I won't, however, be surprised if questions come up in my undergraduate course that didn't get covered in the syllabus reconnaissance. Again, I keep detailed notes so I'll be monitoring for places where this activity can be bolstered. Even without those notes, though, I plan to record short videos detailing a few aspects of the syllabus. I may even record and release those before the end of the semester.
In particular, I want to record something about academic integrity, not because I have serious problems with students cheating, but because I traditionally use the academic integrity statement in my syllabus to begin a semester-long discussion about student mental health. In every plagiarism case I've run across in the past 22 years, the student responsible had gotten themselves into a bind. Something had happened to put them under extreme stress and they had plagiarized as a kind of pressure release valve. I explain to students that there are a lot of things I can do to help them cope with stress before they decide to plagiarize, but that my hands are bound once they've gone down that path. I invite them to come to me if they have any trouble so we can discuss ways I can support them before they reach a crisis, and that goes a long way to helping students open up to me later in the semester.
Overall, though, I'm already extremely happy that circumstances forced me to try something a bit different. If nothing else, I'm sure it was far more interesting than listening to me drone on the first day about my syllabus!
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