Skills for Scholars

The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything

William Germano, Kit Nicholls

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691209876
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

How redesigning your syllabus can transform your teaching, your classroom, and the way your students learn Generations of teachers have built their classes around the course syllabus, a semester-long contract that spells out what each class meeting will focus on (readings, problem sets, case studies, experiments), and what the student has to turn in by a given date. But what does that way of thinking about the syllabus leave out—about our teaching and, more importantly, about our students' learning?In Syllabus, William Germano and Kit Nicholls take a fresh look at this essential but almost invisible bureaucratic document and use it as a starting point for rethinking what students—and teachers—do. What if a teacher built a semester's worth of teaching and learning backward—starting from what students need to learn to do by the end of the term, and only then selecting and arranging the material students need to study?Thinking through the lived moments of classroom engagement—what the authors call "coursetime"—becomes a way of striking a balance between improv and order. With fresh insights and concrete suggestions, Syllabus shifts the focus away from the teacher to the work and growth of students, moving the classroom closer to the genuinely collaborative learning community we all want to create.

1

What You Do, What They Do

What really is a syllabus? Is it a tool or a manifesto? A machine or a plan? What are its limits? Its horizon? And who is it really for? And what would happen if you took the syllabus as seriously as you take the most serious forms of writing in your own discipline?

It’s so familiar. The first day, the first class meeting, the noises, the competing interests of choosing seats and choosing neighbors, the geometry of students and backpacks, tools, food, books. For you, it’s curtain up. You’ve brought with you a set of handouts, the ones you quickly say are also and always available online in the course learning module. You distribute the handouts, making eye contact as you do it—everyone is so young, and the class is more diverse each time you steal a glance. You’re looking for their response, even before they’ve read a word of what you’ve set down.

You remind yourself that your students are there for one of two reasons. Either they have to be there, or they want to be there. Either your course is a) required of everyone or maybe required in some specific track, or b) it’s an elective. You know that neither category guarantees an easy ride, and you wouldn’t want it any other way. Teaching is hard. One of your goals is to have the students who have to be there want to be there. Another goal is surely to make students who choose your course tell others that it was amazing, that you were terrific. Teaching is hard, you tell yourself again. Knowing that is part of being a teacher.

You feel the electricity of performance, the responsibility of winning students over to your discipline. You run through what you’re going to say this hour in a distracted, internal monologue. A few moments later, and the class has settled down into what looks like an attentive reading of the handout. It feels as if it’s your moment to lose: students poring over the little world you’ve created for them, a place where the hierarchy of the university—your mastery, their innocent but open-minded ignorance—is mediated by a simple document and the set of rules to which it conforms. Their eyes turn to you. Electronics are stowed. You pick up a piece of chalk. House lights down. You begin. You will be at that blackboard, chalk in hand, for sixteen weeks, and during that time your voice, and your brilliance, will fill the space.

You begin talking, but something strange is happening. All your expertise seems to have left you, and you’re jabbering on in what you recognize as a steady stream of amateurish nonsense. But that’s not the most horrifying part. What’s truly frightening is that the students are looking at you as if you’re making perfect sense—or, more accurately, as if it doesn’t matter whether you’re brilliant or banal.

Then the alarm clock goes off and you wake up. It’s four a.m., still dark, and you don’t have to be on campus for another two weeks. You spent last night fine-tuning your syllabus one last time and in the process ratcheting up your own anxiety.

You’ve just awakened from one version of the Academic’s Performance Dream. In the dream-class, you were about to tell the students something for sixteen weeks, which might be fine if your course were a one-way transmission to an adoring audience and nothing more. You wouldn’t really teach a class that way.

And yet you’re beginning to concede that the dream that woke you is more or less a critique—your critique—of your own teaching, your unconscious mind accusing you of a particular kind of earnest, hardworking—what to call it?—laziness. You’re half-awake now and recognize too much of your own teaching style. It isn’t a horror show—far from it. Reasonably genial, largely inert, a series of solos in which you enacted knowledge of the subject, underscoring memorable points with chalk, points dutifully copied by a silent room of students whose own thoughts remained locked away for the semester or at least until the final exam.

The sun’s coming up, and your morning resolution is not to teach that way again. You’re not even sure what kind of teaching that was, but it felt deeply incomplete. You’re awake now and, breaking the rules you’ve set for yourself, you’ve got your laptop open in bed. You’re anxiously looking over that syllabus one more time. Is it too much, too little, too complicated, too filled with arrows that point the student to side roads? Could you read your own syllabus and make a reasonable guess as to what the course wants to accomplish, as opposed to what your department’s course catalogue says that the course studies or describes? Could you recognize what the course challenges students to do? And how exactly would you, the teacher who wrote that syllabus, follow through on your own expectations for students?

Dreaming or waking, these questions never seem to go away. Teachers aim high. Big targets, big goals. A class that sings with intellectual engagement. Rigorous but fair grading, and each student doing better than you had hoped. The gratification of giving the exemplary lecture to a room of attentive students. Your own delight in the difficulty that comes with thinking seriously about things that count. All good goals, which, taken together, add up to an ideal of the teacher-focused class. “You’re a star!” says somebody in the hallway, possibly without irony.

But stars are bright, distant things, and the light they throw off is old, old news. What might it mean to teach now, to shine now, in the present, close to the moment and our students? This question is about more than diversity or age or ethnic sensitivity or a sympathetic engagement with the complexities of gender, or disability, or any of the other qualities that distinguish person from person. First or last, teaching is inevitably about all of these things.¹ But to be present asks that we do so much more. Our students, hungry for something that starry light can’t provide by itself, need from us not just knowledge—even knowledge tempered by sensitivity—but craft.

The myth of Prometheus—the Greek name means “forethought”—tells us that this most generous of Titans stole fire from the gods and brought it to us clay-built human creatures, functionally kindling life in our dark world. Teaching in the present is a bit like stealing fire. Here, o starry teacher, the fire is your own but briefly. Teaching is renouncing the glamour and assurance of the well-executed solo and sharing that light with your students, moving the focus from something we’ve long called teaching and giving the torch to learning. You can teach by yourself, or at least tell yourself that you can, but you can’t learn (let’s for a moment allow it to be a transitive verb meaning “to make them learn”) by yourself.

Modern English learn has as one of its antecedents the Old English form gelaeran, which meant “to teach.” This etymological paradox isn’t a paradox at all, of course. If teaching is the thing that happens when students are learning, subject and object come to be bound together, like Aristophanes’s conception of the sexes balled up inseparably in The Symposium, a Möbius-like continuum of teaching and learning, enacted by teacher and student.

We begin to discern the contours of this perplexing space of learning when we awake from the dream (it was always only a dream, never a solid reality) of the masterful teacher delivering knowledge. We can map out something so complex only by making a concerted effort to describe its nuances, conundrums, its areas of density and lightness. We perform this mapping and engage in this forethought when we compose a syllabus, but only if it is indeed an attempt to map the space of learning. Which means that, as we’ll say in several ways throughout this book, a syllabus isn’t so much about what you will do. It’s about what your students will do.

The Syllabus We Have

The syllabus is the most remarkable, unremarkable document in the history of education. We depend on it as if it were always there, always reliable, always true. We depend on it as a transparent summary of what a classroom can and must accomplish. Some few are better than others. Most aren’t nearly as good as the best. The syllabus as we traditionally know it may read as if it’s all about what will happen in the next sixteen weeks, but to a great extent it’s really about what the teacher has experienced as recently as last year and as long ago as graduate school. A teacher crafts a syllabus based on the teacher’s own prior experience as a student, in conversation with peers, as a result of the bruises and exaltations last time teaching the course, or some combination of all three.

The traditional syllabus is that starry, bright light from the past shining into today’s classroom, even if it looks as if it’s news. (Prospero’s response to Miranda in The Tempest—“Tis new to thee”—is a phrase you may have heard to describe a student’s response to something, but Prospero’s not the most reflective character in Shakespeare.) It’s never enough, then, for a syllabus to be, as one often hears, “freshened up” for another semester.

The word syllabus itself has a curious history. The Oxford English Dictionary helps us see syllabus as not just a word but a scribal mistake. The story of syllabus stretches back to the fourteenth century, when Petrarch was gathering everything he could find of Cicero’s writings. Among the period’s discoveries were the so-called Medicean manuscripts, which contained Cicero’s letters, including those to his great friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. In one of the letters to Atticus (the document in question is Cicero Epp. ad Atticum iv. iv.), the word sillabos appears. As the OED explains, in the fifteenth century, editions of Cicero’s letters printed the word syllabus, “a corrupt reading” of “sittybas or Greek σıττύβας, accusative plural of sittyba, σıττύβα parchment label or title-slip on a book.” From the corrupt reading, scholars posited “a spurious σύλλαβος,” which was then treated as a derivative of the verb συλλαμβάνειν, “to put together, collect.” Every mention of every syllabus since then can be traced back to the misreading of one classical manuscript. So is it syllabuses or syllabi? There’s probably not much point in worrying about the correct plural of an “ancient” word that was accidentally invented in the fifteenth century.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer, which scans the contents of some five million books, records the first significant appearance of syllabus in the second half of the eighteenth century. That would suggest that the concept of the syllabus is one of the Enlightenment’s many undertakings. It’s not until the period after World War I, however, that syllabus begins its meteoric rise. The word itself is almost a synonym for the methodical organization of modern educational practice: Syllabus equals authority, or at least stands as authority’s flag.

From the Enlightenment through the middle of the twentieth century, the syllabus was most often understood as a table of contents—or simply the content—of a course, a listing of the expert knowledge that the professor would deliver to students. The syllabus has even been invested with a religious aura; the OED records one definition of the term as “a summary statement of points decided and errors condemned by ecclesiastical authority,” a usage with its own surprising history.

In 1864, the papacy of Pius IX issued a “Syllabus errorum”—syllabus here meaning simply a list, or catalogue, of condemned practices, attitudes, and opinions. The “Syllabus errorum”—a list of errors, or heresies, that had crept into earlier documents concerning points of theology and other Church matters—culminated in a stance against “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization,” clearly meant as a blanket defense against the breaking news of the late nineteenth century.² Four decades later, Pope Pius X renewed the Vatican’s defenses with another syllabus—“Lamentabili sane”—to which the Church gives the explanatory English subtitle “Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists.” “With truly lamentable results,” it declares, “our age, casting aside all restraint in its search for the ultimate causes of things, frequently pursues novelties so ardently that it rejects the legacy of the human race.”³

Neither papal syllabus is meant as a teaching tool in the ordinary sense. They’re more like manifestos. In the twenty-first century it would be the rare classroom indeed that was organized around a syllabus that included refutation of modernism—much less modernity—as a learning outcome. Though as a teacher you might be tempted to gather up your own catalogue of errors—from common grammatical mistakes to the tried, true, and oh so tired default of the five-paragraph essay—into a classroom handout.⁴

Much of what happens in the classroom involves rules. For those of us who teach, the syllabus is not only document but rule book, canvas, and plan, and perhaps most of all a model for imagining a sphere of operations for a course’s ideas. Think for a moment of the armillary spheres that Chinese and then Renaissance astronomers built as they tried to envision the universe. Like this or any model, your syllabus is reductive: It can’t possibly name every potential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Reality Check
• 1. What You Do, What They Do
• 2. Turning the Classroom into a Community
• 3. Clock and Calendar
• 4. What’s a Reading List? And What’s It For?
• 5. Their Work and Why They Do It
• 6. Our Work and How We Do It
• 7. What Does Learning Sound Like?
• 8. For Your Eyes Only
• 9. The Syllabus as a Theory of Teaching
• Further Reading
• Index