Course Planning

First Day Resources

As winter term wraps up, many U-M teachers are thinking ahead to their spring and summer courses. When teaching in a short semester with a limited number of class sessions, it's especially important to make good use of the first day. How can you use an initial meeting to do more than review the syllabus and begin to learn students' names?

CRLT provides many resources to help you quickly establish a productive learning environment in your courses. This page provides an overview of resources related to goals you might have for the first day, from building rapport among students to getting them engaged with the course material. You can also click on the links below for great ideas about:

As always, CRLT staff are available to consult with individual instructors about effective teaching strategies before, during, or after your course. 

Submitted by tbraun on Fri, 04/26/2013 - 8:27am
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Preparing for Winter Term: Creating Inclusive Classrooms

Getting ready to meet your Winter Term classes? As you gear up for a new semester, it's a great time to make sure you're keeping a broad range of students in mind. CRLT provides many resources to help you effectively teach diverse students, no matter what your area of specialization. One of our "Preparing to Teach" resources, this page on Creating Inclusive Classrooms offers concrete guidance on several aspects of inclusive teaching, including:

  • course content
  • classroom dynamics
  • instructor assumptions

For additional resources to support your teaching of U-M's diverse student body, you can visit our Multicultural Teaching page or click on the "Multicultural Teaching" link at the bottom of any CRLT page. The printed version of our GSI Guidebook--distributed to everyone who attends one of our GSI Teaching Orientations and available to U-M instructors upon request--also contains helpful guidance on these issues, including the chapter "Diversity and Inclusion in the Classroom" from Barbara Gross Davis's book Tools for Teaching. More general resources to help you finalize your Winter Term plans can be found on our Preparing to Teach page (under the "Resources and Publications" menu above).

Submitted by tbraun on Mon, 01/07/2013 - 12:16pm
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Good Reads: Designing Your Courses around Student Learning Goals

Planning your winter term courses over the break?  Hoping your students will turn in stronger final essays and exams than the ones you just finished grading?  Much research on learning and teaching suggests you can start getting them on the right path now, by designing your syllabus around student learning goals.  Here are a couple of online resources about applying the principles of "Backward Design" to the planning of college courses.

  • In this ProfHacker blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education, literature professor Mark Sample offers a short, simple introduction to Backward Design, discussing his shift from asking the conventional question "what should my students read this term?" to considering instead, "what do I want them to learn?"
  • Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching provides this overview of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's influential book Understanding by Design and provides links to resources that assist instructors in applying the book's principles in their course planning.  (The full book is available electronically through the U-M library system to authenticated users.)

CRLT also offers a range of resources to help you build your syllabus on our Course Design and Planning page. 

Submitted by tbraun on Fri, 12/21/2012 - 9:44am
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