2016 Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars Program Center for Engaged Teaching, UC San Diego sgts.ucsd.edu Peter Newbury CC-BY

1. Summer GraduateTeaching Scholars
Preparing toTeach 1:
Student-facing Syllabus
May 12 and 13, 2016
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Name
Course Dept/School
Summer I or II # students
Peter Newbury

2. Preparing to Teach Workshops
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The aim of these workshops is to give you a well-
supported head start on many of the things you
should do to prepare for your classes, like
 creating a syllabus
 working out an assessment scheme
 drafting learning outcomes
 choose active learning strategies
 identify something you want to learn about
your students and design a way to figure it out
 and more…

3. How are you feeling?
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4. Who are you?
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Introduce yourself to the others at your
table.
Make lists on your whiteboards:
what are you excited about?
what are you nervous about?
excited nervous

5. Scholarly Approach to Teaching
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What should
students
learn?
What are
students
learning?
What instructional
approaches
help students
learn?
Everything
you value,
from learning
outcomes, to
what will happen
in class, to how
your students will
be assessed, should
transparent to your
students on the
course syllabus.
CarlWieman
Science Education Initiative
cwsei.ubc.ca

6. 3 Syllabi for
MyDNA (Biochem 100)
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7. Example Syllabi
HIEU 131:The French Revolution
(Heidi Keller-Lapp)
MMW 11: Making of the Modern World
(Matthew Herbst)
CSE 3: Fluency with Information Technology
(Beth Simon)
Take 10 minutes and look over these syllabi.
Does anything surprise you?
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Syllabus Checklist

8. Course Description
Take __ minutes to draft/revise your
course description.
Later, you’ll share it with a peer, get
feedback, and give them feedback on theirs.
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9. Resources (like today’s syllabi)
Printed
Online
Both
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10. Next week: Learning outcomes
Watch the blog
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for details about what you should do to
prepare for next week’s meeting.
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12. Reminder: How People Learn
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13. How People Learn: Key Findings
1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how
the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they
may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are
taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert
to their preconceptions outside the classroom.
2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a)
have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts
and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c)
organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and
application.
3. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students
learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning
goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.
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14. Sort your cards into 3 sets of 3:
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Key Finding
2
Implication
forTeaching
Implication
forTeaching
Implication
forTeaching
Designing
Classroom
Environments

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16. More than anything else, the best teachers try to
create a natural critical learning environment:
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(Bain, p. 99)

17. More than anything else, the best teachers try to
create a natural critical learning environment:
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natural because students encounter skills, habits,
attitudes, and information they are trying to learn
embedded in questions and tasks they find
fascinating – authentic tasks that arouse curiosity
and become intrinsically interesting,
(Bain, p. 99)

18. More than anything else, the best teachers try to
create a natural critical learning environment:
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natural because students encounter skills, habits,
attitudes, and information they are trying to learn
embedded in questions and tasks they find
fascinating – authentic tasks that arouse curiosity
and become intrinsically interesting,
critical because students learn to think critically,
to reason from evidence, to examine the quality of
their reasoning using a variety of intellectual
standards, to make improvements while thinking,
and to ask probing and insightful questions about
the thinking of other people. (Bain, p. 99)

19. In natural critical learning environments
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students encounter safe yet challenging conditions
in which they can try, fail, receive feedback, and
try again without facing a summative evaluation.
fail
receive
feedback
(Bain, p. 108)
try