ACUE Lunch and Learn – Using your syllabus as a roadmap to learning: Strategies to enable reflection and engagement

Facilitator: Lydia Wilkinson, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Engineering Communication Program (ECP), Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), FASE

Your course syllabus is an important tool for communicating expectations, including learning outcomes, course structure and assignment design. Yet while we often invest significant energy in creating our syllabi and spend time in the first weeks of class reviewing these, it is easy to overlook their value as a learning tool throughout the rest of the semester. Like any good teaching tool, a course syllabus presents an opportunity to check-in with our students, to align our expectations and help them understand how they are learning what they are learning.

This lunch and learn session takes as its starting point the ACUE module on “Preparing an Effective Syllabus”, and shares strategies on how a well-designed syllabus can be used as a touchpoint to enable student goalsetting and assessment from the beginning of the semester to completion of the course. Specifically, we will review approaches to developing a graphical syllabus that can work as a roadmap for students, learn about goalsetting activities that will help students locate course learning outcomes and apply these to their learning outside the classroom, and discuss ways to use the syllabus to reflect on success in achieving these learning outcomes throughout the semester.

Our faculty facilitators in this lunch series have completed 25 modules and earned the Certificate in Effective University Instruction offered by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) in partnership with CTSI.

Learn more about the ACUE Lunch and Learn Series