Re: Subiño Sullivan A Stand Out Syllabus
Sullivan, Carol S
My CTL offers a higher education certificate program for future faculty in which students must demonstrate mastery of fundamentals of teaching and learning and course design, complete a teaching practicum and a
teaching as research project through some combination of courses, workshops and independent projects.
As at many R1 institutions, graduate students at my university typically get little opportunity to prepare for teaching, and this certificate program provides a pathway for those who have an interest in teaching-focused careers.
In Fall 2014, I taught the Course Design course.
In it, students design their own courses using the backwards design process.
By the end of the course, students pull all of the elements together and develop a complete syllabus for a course they hope to teach one day.
This particular semester, I introduced students to some examples of graphic syllabi in order to help them think about different ways to communicate their goals, assignments, organization and other course details to their students.
A couple of years later, I ran into one of the students who had been in that semester of Course Design. He had just been offered a position as an assistant professor in a liberal arts college, exactly the type of institution he was interested in. He believes that one of the things that made him stand out from the pool of candidates was his graphic syllabus. Members of the search committee commented on it while he was there on his interview, and after he was offered the job, one of his new colleagues asked for a copy of the syllabus that he could use as a model for his own courses. I was delighted that this small element of the Course Design course could make such a difference for him!
Carol Subiño Sullivan
Faculty Teaching and Learning Specialist
Center for Teaching and Learning
Georgia Tech