I really like transparency in the way we teach students. In particular, and this relates to Zoe's post of "Why", I like to share with my classes what motivates me to teach a course: the learning outcomes. We all have them in our syllabi, but these mostly don't get revisited with the students after the first day of class. Today I dedicated part of my HNRS 170 class to sharing the learning outcomes again with my students, then reviewing which outcome we've reinforced so far with a given class activity.
Now, from an assessment standpoint I don't yet have a metric to go by for evaluating this, but I believe it is a good practice for aligning where we are as a class in the semester with the syllabus, and giving the students a sense of progress. What is your perspective?
When it comes down to the wire and I HAVE to have an exam, I go back to the syllabus objectives that the students have in syllabus and that we talk about about 2-5 lectures before the midterm. I write to those critical things about why we have this topic and not that one. I think the syllabus objectives and review of progress are critical to our role in getting them to integrate the whole class into their curriculum. Thanks for sharing your comment Tom.
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