Tapping into Your Real Course Goals
Before you tackle the questions of how to set up your course and create online activities, give yourself some time to think about what excites you (or could excite you) about this course. It is difficult to create an engaging course for your students without tapping into your own fascination for the material. In his article "What Will Students Remember from Your Class in 20 Years?" Links to an external site. James Lang talks about the power of this simple question. Lang claims that for most instructors, four primary teaching aspirations emerge:
Passion for the subject
"Their most fundamental wish is for students to see the beauty, wonder, or joy that can come from encounters with the material. This year a biologist wrote about a protein that she totally "geeks out" on, and wished the same for biology majors in her courses: "I imagine that most students felt some spark of curiosity and joy along their own journeys in science. I want them to keep that curiosity and joy for as long as they can." I feel that myself in relation to the literary works I teach: I would love for students to never lose sight of the joy of reading great literature."
A sense of disciplinary literacy
"That isn’t about recalling certain facts. It’s about students maintaining a critical, reflective stance toward the subject matter throughout their lives. For example, many faculty members hope students will keep an informed and skeptical perspective toward popular press accounts of science, psychology, or anthropology. Professors want students to remember to check the sources or examine the logic behind the latest diet fad, happiness cure-all, or revolutionary new theory about human nature."
An understanding of how the discipline matters in other realms
"Some faculty members hope their students can continue to use the tools of their discipline to consider and negotiate other fields and issues in the wider world. The scientific method is not just for science, after all. Almost everything we encounter in life can — and probably should — be historicized. And attentiveness to the power of language, which I hope students will obtain in my writing courses, should serve them well in many contexts."
An eye for the big picture
"This one is hardest for faculty members to articulate, and they raise it tentatively. But I frequently hear them express a hope for some fundamental, long-term transformation in students — that they will become better citizens in a democracy, more empathetic humans, more ethical practitioners in their fields of work. "I seek to emphasize the skills and qualities," one historian said, "that will allow students to engage in thoughtful citizenship throughout their lives."
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"Scratch almost any of those four objectives, and you’ll find a larger desire — perhaps the very deepest one of all — even if it never comes out in precisely these terms: the hope that our courses will help students live better lives. We want them to live lives of wonder, to be happy, to thrive, to be successful, to be good people. We believe that our disciplines and courses have the capacity to contribute to those goals." JAMES LANG |