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Syllabus and Assignment Design

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Designing Your Syllabus: Backward Design

When you design a syllabus for any course, you begin with the goals that you have for your students and work backwards from these to particular readings and writing assignments. This method, formalized, is called the method of backward design. Backward design is a useful method for any professor in that it ensures that all assignments will connect students with the questions and skills that the professor deems essential to the course.

At the first stage of backward design, writing instructors should ask themselves two questions: What do I want my students to know/experience in my course? and What do I want them to be able to do, once my course is over?

You'll note that the first question—what do I want my students to know/experience—distinguishes between knowledge and experience. Indeed, this distinction is significant in a writing class, where course content (while important) does not drive the course. The best writing classes consider the students' experiential learning in their course design. To accomplish the aims of experiential learning, it's important to come up with a course question that can bring together the many smaller questions of the course and that can engage students intellectually and experientially. For instance: What is happiness? What are the roots of violence? What is the nature of the self? Technology: friend or foe?

These are the kinds of questions that can focus course readings and class discussions. They are also the kinds of questions that students can engage with outside of the context of the writing classroom. Finally, they are the kinds of questions around which professors can build an experiential assignment or exercise—for instance, asking students to chart their encounters with technology through the course of the day and then to write a paper that explores the consequences of these encounters (tracing their technological "footprint," to use the current metaphor).

The second question that the designing instructor needs to ask is, What do I want them to be able to do, once my course is over? Here the instructor needs to identify the skills that she wants the student to master. In a writing class, this list can be rather long. In terms of meta-goals, we restate here the goals for our first year courses, outlined elsewhere in this website:

Within these categories are many sub-categories. For instance, the library and the writing program have identified several research aims as necessary to first-year instruction (see Educating First-Year Students). In terms of writing, we offer the following goals:

Once you have a governing course question and a list of goals, you are ready to begin designing your assignments. Reading assignments should be limited to those books that best address the course question. If you're deciding among books, consider which ones best carve out the lay of the scholarly landscape, and which will give your students the best "experience" of the question at hand. Also consider which books might serve as models of good (or bad) writing. After all, ten weeks is a very short time, and every book should serve multiple purposes.

Assignments should serve multiple purposes, too. If, for instance, an early goal is to challenge students' existing writing models, you might assign a reading that isn't structured conventionally and then ask students to write an essay that posits a question or that prohibits students from explicitly stating their thesis. If you want to teach students how to contextualize an idea, give them a thesis sentence and ask them to write an introduction for that thesis, then share the results in class, commenting on how a particular introduction is (or is not) effective.

Whatever assignments you design, do understand that simply making an assignment does not insure that students will acquire the desired skills. For an assignment to succeed it should be transparent and progressive—that is, your students should understand your goals for the assignment, and they should be able to chart their own development in relation to these goals. Don't be reluctant to explain to your students again and again why they're doing a particular assignment. The better students understand your assignments and your vision for your course, the better they'll be able to meet the course aims.

Spacing Your Assignments

When designing your syllabus, you will want to consider carefully the spacing of your writing assignments. It's important that students are given enough time to write and to revise their papers. Professors who use a writing assistant will also want to be sure that they provide the writing assistant enough time to read and respond to students' papers.

Here are some things to consider:

Sequencing Your Assignments

Though not every professor uses them, assignment sequences offer many advantages to a course. They help students to explore the course material in increasingly complex ways, and they require students to master increasingly complex thinking and writing skills. In any case, using assignment sequences in your course can serve to provide coherence both to your course and to your students' learning processes.

To set up an assignment sequence, consider the goals of your course.

Crafting Your Assignments

Professors often wonder, when creating writing assignments, how detailed the assignments should be. Some professor don't use prompts, requiring students to come up with the topics and questions themselves. Others create detailed writing assignments, arguing that this allows students to save energy for writing their papers (as opposed to generating topics and questions). Still others craft writing prompts that offer students ideas for writing but that leave plenty of room for students to come up with ideas of their own. We'll consider the options of prompting and not prompting here.

The Open Writing Assignment

Professors who don't use writing prompts argue that an important part of scholarship is learning to raise questions that will yield a good academic argument. Instead of creating a writing prompt, these professors craft an assignment process that supports students as they work through the various challenges of scholarly inquiry. In a sense, these professors are asking students to craft their own prompts, and to write the paper that will answer the questions that they outline there. The obvious pedagogical advantage of the open assignment is that it allows students to learn to develop topics on their own. In the open assignment, students are not only permitted to pursue intellectual questions that are of interest to them, they also gain some experience in framing a topic that is neither too narrow nor too broad.

If you elect not to use prompts, you should intend to devote class and conference time to assisting students in this process. For instance, you might ask students to come up with three good academic questions about the course's reading materials. Students can post these questions on the Blackboard discussion board. You can then workshop these questions, using class time to talk about which questions will (or won't) yield a good academic argument, and why. You should also comment thoroughly on the questions submitted, raising further questions for the student to consider. You might also invite students to comment on one another's questions on the Blackboard site. Students can then revise their questions and resubmit them for another round of feedback before they write.

Some professors find it useful to offer students models of good academic questions. Other professors give explicit instruction regarding what the paper shouldn't do and leave it to the students to determine what they want to do within these parameters. All professors ask students to submit their prompts in advance of drafting so that they can determine, before the students proceed too far, whether or not these topics are appropriate and promising.

Whatever you decide, do note that a prompt-less writing assignment needs a good infrastructure in order to succeed. Indeed, Karen Gocsik's research assignment for Writing 2-3 has twelve steps, indicating the many moments of support and feedback that first-year students require as they work through the process of writing a research paper Your assignment need not have twelve steps to be effective; it may have four steps, for instance, or five. Craft your assignment steps according to the aims of your assignment.

Crafting a Good Prompt

Writing a good prompt for a writing assignment is a difficult task. Too often, professors write prompts for writing assignments knowing exactly what sorts of essays they want their students to produce, only to get papers that miss the mark. How can you produce writing assignments that clearly convey the tasks and questions you want your students to undertake?

Before writing your prompts, you will want to consider a few matters.

Once you've determined the goals for your writing assignment, you're ready to craft the prompt. Here are some things to consider:

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