Developing a Course

Design Learning Goals

Defining clear and succinct student learning goals is at the heart of developing a student-centered course. These learning goals shape your teaching strategies, student assignments, and student assessment. So start with the learning goals – just what is it that you want students to learn? – and work backwards from there. The “Backward Design” model described briefly below is developed in considerable detail by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their book Understanding By Design.

Defining learning goals requires you to establish priorities, sorting out the many different things that students might learn in a particular course and establishing how these many things are related to each other. Wiggins and McTighe suggest that you begin this process of sorting by distinguishing three different categories of things that students might learn in a particular course:

Putting something in this category is not to say that it’s unimportant. Instead, it is to say that students don’t need to know these things in intricate detail at this level of study. For example, an instructor in an introductory course might decide that even though students don’t need to know all of the details of the debate between two influential scholars in the field, he or she could still expect students to know the names of these scholars and the general terms of the debate between them.

This knowledge and set of skills are also crucial for the field of study. They enable one to unpack and express the enduring understandings.

The enduring understanding includes the central themes that hold
everything together for the course and the material being studied.

Working with these three big questions should help you to define learning goals that describe just what you hope your students will learn. You might construct a course-level learning goal for each item that you value as “enduring” or “important.” In fact, though we are speaking right now at the course level, organizing content and then developing learning goals are good design practices whether you are developing a lecture, class, course, or whole program of study. Moreover, many instructors distribute the learning goals for a course to students as an explicit statement of what is expected of them.

Here’s an example of a student learning goal, targeted to the chapter level:Diagram and explain the function of a synapse. Notice that this learning goal is phrased in active terms, describing what the instructor expects the students to be able to do. Moreover, the goal sets the stage for students to learn just what sort of diagram and explanation is appropriate to the task.

Points to remember:

• Note that student learning goals are different from teaching strategies and content. As noted above, student learning goals focus on student outputs. In contrast, teaching strategies specify inputs such as content, instructional materials and delivery, readings/text, and guest speakers. We’ll discuss teaching strategies below; they are an important aspect of course development but they are not the same thing as learning goals!
• Work toward precision and specificity in your learning goals. Use verbs that clearly state actions that are observable and measurable. For example, consider this alternative version of the example learning goal given above: Understand the function of a synapse. What does it mean to understand the function of a synapse? This will be ambiguous to students. Furthermore, it will be difficult to assess. The advantage of the earlier stated learning goal is that it states clearly just how the student will be expected to demonstrate his or her understanding. Likewise, it is clear how the learning goal will be assessed (via diagram and explanation).
• Be aware that there are degrees of understanding, and that your learning goals should reflect the sort of understanding you expect your students to demonstrate. Perhaps the classic schematic representation of these degrees of understanding is Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The chart at right shows how different verbs can indicate different levels of understanding. You can find a brief description of Bloom’s taxonomy on the web at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/resources/teaching_resources/theory/blooms.htm.

Gather Evidence that Learning Goals Have Been Met

Once you have established clear learning goals for students, you must decide what you will accept as evidence that they have met those goals. This thinking leads to the design of assignments such as examinations, papers, and other formally graded work. Designing and then assessing these assignments will be much easier if you have formulated your learning goals using active verbs that are appropriate for the cognitive level you desire. (See the discussion below about assessing student work for further information about the grading of assignments.)

Set Teaching Strategies

You have established what you want students to know and how you will know when they know it. Now it is time to establish practices that will help get them there—these are your teaching strategies. What will you have students do during class (take notes, discuss, engage in other activities) and outside of class time (paper writing, problem sets, reading) to help them to learn and then to demonstrate their learning?

Student learning goals should also shape the design of other class activities, even of those that don’t contribute explicitly to the final course grade. Often, faculty want evidence of student achievement at the highest of cognitive levels of Bloom’s taxonomy but we do not ask them to demonstrate this until test time. For example, the stated learning goals might stress discussing, identifying, and diagramming from the lower levels of the taxonomy, but our tests ask for proposing, evaluating, and comparing which are all from the higher taxonomic levels. Students learn better if they are given opportunities to practice the skills you are expecting them to master. Finally, students learn in different ways and their learning can be better supported by the use of multiple teaching methods (see discussion of teaching to different student learning styles at http://www.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm.

In short, review and select learning experiences and teaching strategies that target your learning goals for students, that give them practice processing material in the ways that you desire, and that provide opportunities for you to give formative feedback to your students on their progress. In other words, develop assignments that discipline students into the way the field thinks and communicates.

Teach Through Your Syllabus

You might think of the course syllabus as your opening gambit in the teaching of a course. The syllabus should communicate clearly to students the goals of the class, the assignments, and class logistics.

Once again, the student learning goals are central. Introduce your
syllabus by stating the fundamental student learning goals for the
entire course rather than chapter or topic goals. Explain to students why these are the course goals, showing how they relate to the themes, disciplinary questions, issues, and topics that will
be addressed over the course of the semester.

A step out from the goals is assignments (including assessments).
We provide more information later about designing and assessing
such assignments; the crucial point here is that you should use the
syllabus to communicate to students the expectations and grading
criteria for each assignment and its assessment. You can also show how these assignments are rooted in the student learning goals.

Logistics tend to be fairly standard with typical content including:

• Instructor & course basic information
• Course description
• Readings
• Course calendar

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