Thinking about what a good course looks like

At the end of last school year, I reread Grant Wiggins' post "Critically Examining What You Teach". His words resonate with me as I work on teaching a history course with a slightly new big idea and an English course I'm teaching for the first time. It also made me reflect on past courses that I have taught.

I think one of the struggles that I face(d) in teaching history is content coverage. There are so many people, places, and events that help create the story, and therefore, are valuable for students to learn. Wiggins forces me to think beyond just the "valued stuff", when he writes, "I am claiming that to be a valid course, there has to be more than just a list of valued stuff that we cover-even if that list seems valuable to me, the teacher." When I began teaching the Grade 10 history course, there was a list of "valued stuff" that had to be taught in each unit  for students to be able to write the final exam. About six years ago, the department struggled with deleting some of the "valuable stuff", because in light of big ideas and essential questions, the "stuff" was valuable, but not necessarily needed or useful for students to know in order to understand the big idea.

Wiggins also challenges the idea of using the textbook as the driving force for a course, as he notes, "the textbook does not know your personal or school priorities; the textbook does not know your students; the textbook doesn't identify any priorities or through lines that unite all the chapters, etc." Since I'm at a school that values big ideas and essential questions, a textbook can't know what our specific priorities are, nor what my students necessarily want to learn in order to understand. A textbook is a useful way to transmit knowledge, but as the teacher, I need to create questions that allow students to make meaning of the content they will consume. And the end goal isn't to simply consume content, but to use the content in meaningful ways.

Arguably the most valuable excerpt from Wiggins' article are the prompts below:

7 Prompts That Every Teacher Of A Well-Designed Course Should Be Able To Answer

Here are some simple prompts that a teacher who has really thought through the course as a course should be able to answer:

1. By the end of the year students should be able to…. and grasp that…
2. The course builds toward…
3. The recurring big ideas about which we will go into depth are…
4. The following chapters and sequence support my goal of…
5. Given my long-term priority goals, the assessments need to determine if students can…
6. Given my goals, the following activities need to build insight and incentive…
7. If I have been successful, students will be able to transfer their learning to… and avoid such common misconceptions and habits as…

Over a year ago, one of my department heads shared this with the department and asked us to think about it. I began completing it for ENG3U. The questions helped me get a clearer direction for myself, and I would benefit from carving out some time to go over the prompts for ENG3U again, as well as my other courses. I challenge everyone to consider these prompts when thinking about their courses.