Melissa Thomas

Christine Harrington

A thoughtfully constructed syllabus can be transformative for your students’ learning, communicating the path they can take to succeed. This book demonstrates how, rather than being a mundane document to convey policies, you can construct your syllabus to be a motivating resource that conveys a clear sense of your course’s learning goals, how students can achieve those goals, and makes evident your teaching philosophy and why you have adopted the teaching strategies you will use, such as discussion or group activities. Developing or revising a syllabus also presents you with a perfect opportunity to review the learning possibilities for the semester. Well-designed, it can help you stay focused on achieving the learning outcomes, as well as determine if the class is on track and whether adjustments to the schedule are needed. The authors show how, by adopting a welcoming tone and clearly stating learning outcomes, your syllabus can engage students by explaining the relevance of your course to their studies, create an all-important positive first impression of you as an instructor, and guide students through the resources you will be using, the assignments ahead, as well as clear guidance on how they will be assessed. Referred to frequently as the course progresses, an effective syllabus will keep students engaged and on task.Christine Harrington and Melissa Thomas lead you through all the elements of a syllabus to help you identify how to present key messages and information about your course, think through the impressions you want to create, and, equally importantly, suggest how you can use layout and elements such as images and charts to make your syllabus visually appealing and easy to navigate.

Creating a Learning Path for Student Engagement

Designing a Motivational Syllabus

This book offers faculty practical strategies to engage students that are research-grounded and endorsed by students themselves. Through student stories, a signature feature of this book, readers will discover why professor actions result in changed attitudes, stronger connections to others and the course material, and increased learning. Structured to cover the key moments and opportunities to increase student engagement, Christine Harrington covers the all-important first day of class where first impressions can determine students’ attitudes for the duration of the course, through to insights for rethinking assignments and enlivening teaching strategies, to ways of providing feedback that build students’ confidence and spur them to greater immersion in their studies, providing the underlying rationale for the strategies she presents. The student narratives not only validate these practices, offering their perspectives as learners, but constitute a trove of ideas and practices that readers will be inspired to adapt for their particular needs. Conscious of the changing demographics of today’s undergraduate and graduate students – racially more diverse, older, and many employed – Harrington highlights the need to engage all students and shares numerous strategies on how to do so. While many of the ideas presented were used by faculty teaching face to face classes, a number were developed by faculty teaching online, and the majority can be adapted to virtually any teaching environment. Based on student-centered active learning principles, structured to allow readers to quickly identify practices that they may need in particular instances or to infuse in a course as a whole, and presented without jargon, this book is a springboard for all faculty looking for ideas that will engage their students at any level and in any course.

Student Perspectives (and Research-Based Strategies) on What Works and Why

Keeping Us Engaged

Raise the academic bar for your students and watch their confidence and success skills increase. STUDENT SUCCESS IN COLLEGE: DOING WHAT WORKS!, SECOND EDITION provides an accessible and relevant way for students to move beyond opinions and advice about how to succeed in college by offering an integrated approach of research-backed student success practices paired with student success research studies. Students learn how to put skills for success into practice as they strive to accomplish their academic goals. With an overall theme of reading, critical thinking, and information literacy skills, the text helps students feel comfortable with the structure of research study articles, making it more likely that they will successfully use these higher level sources earlier in their academic careers. By increasing academic rigor, STUDENT SUCCESS IN COLLEGE: DOING WHAT WORKS!, SECOND EDITION builds research-based knowledge about what study skills work; teaches students how to engage with scholarly sources; provides opportunities for students to actively read, critically think, and enhance information literacy skills; and supports students to increase their self-efficacy and motivation. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Christine Harrington

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