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Organizing Your Course

Resources & strategies to ensure your class sessions are well organized.

At a Glance

  • Align Goals, Activities, and Assessments: Design your course so that learning objectives, classroom activities, and assessments are interconnected, enabling students to build conceptual understanding and synthesize ideas.
  • Enhance Engagement with Strategic Practices: Incorporate techniques such as starting lessons with intriguing questions, providing clear lesson roadmaps, and summarizing key themes to boost student motivation and retention. 
  • Implement Active Learning Strategies: Use methods like think-pair-share, varied seating arrangements, and low-stakes assessments to encourage participation and critical thinking. 
  • Apply Backward Design Principles: Begin course planning by identifying desired learning outcomes, then develop aligned activities and assessments to achieve those goals. 
  • Foster Inclusive and Reflective Learning Environments: Understand diverse student backgrounds and promote inclusivity by integrating reflective practices and experiential learning opportunities.

Teachers are designers. An essential act of our profession is the design of curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes.

                                                                                             

—

Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design (2005)

A recent analysis of Yale’s Online Course Evaluations revealed that high ratings for a course’s “organization to facilitate learning” are a strong predictor of high overall course ratings. Additionally, the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education found that clear course structure and teaching clarity motivates students, improves their persistence, raises their performance and grades, and supports first-generation and low-SES students (Wang, et al. 2015 and Roksa, et al. 2017). The following resources are intended to help instructors consider ways to 1) Enrich student learning in their classes today, 2) Organize their courses, and 3) Facilitate students’ knowledge and skill development. 

Strategies for Organizing Daily Classes

Instructors might consider opening lessons with a provocative question, an interesting demonstration, or a problem related to forthcoming content. This approach hooks student interest, gets them thinking critically from the start, and helps them connect previous learning to new ideas.

After engaging with students, instructors can provide an overview of the day’s lesson. Students appreciate having a sense of direction and knowing how ideas emerge and connect. Because students learn by connecting new knowledge with previous knowledge, a roadmap can help facilitate their learning.

Like providing a roadmap, instructors can also ask students to summarize key content, individually or in groups. Instructors might also forecast future content, in order to draw out connections among major class themes. This practice helps students improve recall, grasp major content, and practice owning their knowledge.

The physical layout of a room can impact how students think about content and interact with others. Given the opportunity, instructors can consider various seating arrangements like the horseshoe or group pods that naturally stoke discussion and collaboration among learners. Switching up the seating can refresh student focus and encourage different modes of thought.

As a way to quickly reinforce ideas or get students thinking during a lesson, instructors can ask students to: 1) ponder a question or problem for a few minutes, perhaps with free writing, then 2) turn to a partner, share their ideas, and discuss, and finally 3) share the results of their discussion with the class. In less than 10 minutes, students think critically and analyze course content.

Students appreciate opportunities to check in on their learning progress, especially when those check-ins do not impact their grade. Some brief formative assessments, like clicker questions, 1-minute reflection writing, or in-class discussion can help instructors gauge student progress while reinforcing key concepts.

Because people learn by making connections between known knowledge and new ideas, moments of reflection and big- picture thinking can give students time and opportunity to organize their knowledge into meaningful structures. Instructors might remind students of the broader arc a course is exploring, and then ask students to reflect (through practices like 1-minute papers, think-pair-share, or freewriting) on how major ideas they have learned fit within that arc.

  • Course Goals - When designing a course, instructors may start by asking, “What do I want students to be able to know and / or do by the end of the semester?” or, more broadly, “How do I want my students to be different or think differently as a result of this learning experience?” Writing effective learning outcomes can be a powerful first step when framing the goals of a course.
  • Course Activities - Equipped with goals for learning, instructors might next ask, “What kinds of activities and assignments will best engage my students and help them meet course goals?” A variety of teaching strategies, including effective lecturing and active learning, can help students make progress towards goals for learning.
  • Course Assessment - With goals and lesson ideas in place, instructors can also ask, “How will I determine if students are progressing towards my goals and gaining the most they can from content and activities?” Formative and summative assessment (during the course and at the end of the course, respectively) can help instructors gauge the pace of student learning.
  • Course Syllabus – Once an instructor has established activities and assessments that work together to meet course goals (a principle called “alignment”), they can assemble everything into a syllabus. The syllabus can be an effective tool for helping students approach their learning, especially when instructors take time to discuss it in class.  
  • Course Meeting Space – Instructors at Yale have exciting opportunities to convene with students in flexible learning spaces. Active Learning Classrooms like the TEAL and Poorvu Center classroom spaces can facilitate teaching practices and learning activities that might otherwise be restricted by fixed- and stadium-style seating. 

  • Understanding Student Minds – Ongoing research in the cognitive, educational, and sociological sciences continues to reveal that students – and all people – tend to construct knowledge and develop their learning in specific, predictable ways. Understanding how people learn can help you design teaching approaches that meet students where they are and motivate their confidence and desire to grow.
  • Ensuring All Students Learn – When preparing to support students with a variety of life experiences, identities, and backgrounds, you can use our equity-minded teaching framework to develop teaching strategies that support the engagement and learning of all students.
  • Instructional Tools – Instructors can consider integrating a variety of instructional tools, from whiteboards to 3D models, that invite students to engage with each other and with course content. For instance, polling software can give students additional means for expressing their developing understanding or empower quieter students to express an opinion. Yale’s Learning Management System, Canvas, also features a variety of supports that can engage students and facilitate collaboration, including peer review tools, module organization, and integration with Panopto video capture.
  • Experiential Learning – Instructors at Yale have a treasure trove of resources at their fingertips, many of which have been used to expert effect. Instructors can carefully design field trips and other experiential learning that refresh student attention, connect course content to their lives, and bring new ideas to life.

References

Roksa, J., Trolian,T., Blaich, C., and Wise, K. 2017. Higher Education 74: 283-300.

Wang, J., Pascarella, E., Laird, T., and Ribera, A. 2015. Studies in Higher Education 40.10: 1786-1807.

Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. 2005. Understanding by Design: Expanded Second Edition. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.