Thriving in Academe

Neglect Not the Syllabus

The Humble Syllabus as Creative Catalyst
by Mike Strada, West Liberty State College

Striving for a model syllabus fosters our creativity and student learning. It also exposes our teaching to peer scrutiny.

Long an underachiever in the halls of academe, the course syllabus is not unlike those late-blooming students whom we love to teach—the ones unaware of how good they can be.

Transforming and enhancing our syllabus is a truly reflective exercise that can help clarify our beliefs and assumptions about teaching. The effort to change our humble syllabus into an elegant one can reveal something of our academic soul.

There are several reasons for giving serious attention to the syllabus. A rigorous syllabus enhances student learning by improving the way we teach our courses. It also provides a cognitive map that can broaden and deepen how teaching is evaluated in the academy.

Finally, the assessment movement, led by non-teaching institutional researchers, has generated bushelfuls of hard (quantitative) data by giving students standardized tests in areas like critical thinking and math skills. But a feedback loop between such tests and the classroom has not been established.

Relevance can be breathed into assessment by matching hard data with soft (qualitative) data. The detailed syllabus is the richest source of soft data, and it enables us to anchor assessment firmly in the classroom experience.

Meet Mike Strada
Mike Strada splits his time between teaching international studies courses at West Liberty State College and co-directing a statewide consortium based at West Virginia University, where he is a visiting professor. His research interests include the role of the syllabus in higher education and the war and peace attitudes of Vietnam War draft resisters in Canada. Currently, he oversees a syllabus-enhancement project at West Liberty State College. In 2000, Strada won the West Liberty Excellence in Professional Activity Award for the third time. The extended Strada family's rituals of choice favor leisure sports, and two grandsons rule the roost in soccer, baseball, and hockey. He can be reached at mjstrada@cs.com.

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