Your Pedagogy and the Syllabus

Consider the various teaching methods that you use. The combination of methods used and the reasons why they’re implemented essentially compose one's teaching pedagogy. Your teaching pedagogy should encompass the theories, practices, principles, and core values that you use to guide student learning. As opposed to teaching methods, your teaching pedagogy is unique to you and constructed by your specific values, as opposed to being merely strategies you employ.

In essence, it would be reductive to describe your teaching pedagogy by a broad name, while you may mostly agree with one person, perceptions of the various methods and named pedagogies are never quite the same. Nevertheless, attempts to categorize them are helpful in the sense that they give individuals a base point to begin crafting their own growing pedagogies.

This resource does not exist to instruct you on how to form your own pedagogy, but to instead consider how your pedagogy is worked into your syllabus, what benefits your pedagogy offers the students of your course, and whether your methods and strategies towards teaching are supported through up-to-date research. This step understandably involves the most homework. To develop your teaching pedagogy and ensure you are using up-to-date teaching practices, it’s encouraged that you:

Occasionally, read peer-reviewed journals on teaching:

• Journal of Teaching Education
• Teaching in Higher Education
• Journal of College Student Development
• There may be ones specific to your own field:
  • Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
  • Journal of Research in Reading
• Attend Professional Development sessions offered by your institution.
  • Most schools offer these kinds of opportunities every year. Sometimes they are designed as training for new educators, but it can always be helpful to get involved.
• Discuss your current thoughts on education with colleagues.
  • You’re a member of a department and have several other instructors working alongside you who also work with students. Rely on their knowledge and experience as well as your own to create ideas and thoughts relating to teaching.

Use your syllabus as a way to express your teaching pedagogy, making it clear to those who read it explicitly what your values as an educator are and how you set out to accomplish them.
 

The intention behind this guide is to help craft a working/functional syllabus and use popular opinions of what a syllabus is used for as a metric for how well it is written. There is simply too much about teaching to summarize in a single guide. To that end, you may have teaching techniques, ideas, methods, concepts, activities, etc. that are not touched upon or discussed here. Perhaps there have been things written here that do not apply to you/your class or that you disagree with.

That view is welcome.

Engaging with this activity to that degree is essentially the point of the activity itself. Pushing you to consider what is valuable as an instructor and how to use the syllabus to help achieve those goals. The syllabus is a humble and often overlooked tool, but also one of the most universal. To this end, if you have anything to contribute that hasn’t been mentioned here that you value, include it in the syllabus.