In Praise of Reading the Syllabus

Dear Friends,

I once had the chance to sit in on an orientation for new graduate instructors, made up of sessions led by experienced graduate instructors. This setup is generally a good one, with veteran TAs well prepared to anticipate the challenges faced by new instructors—it hasn’t been that long since they were in that position. At the orientation I observed, a new instructor asked the student leading one session how much of the syllabus she should actually read to her students on the first day of class. The session leader gave a perfectly reasonable answer, saying that she didn’t have to read everything—just the important stuff, enough so she could rest assured that the students at least had the chance to hear and understand the rules and regulations.

As I said, I think this is a perfectly reasonable answer. Many people, myself included, have argued that the first day of class is an opportunity to show students that the course will be fascinating and useful. You don’t want to weigh down your first meeting with students with the boring and legalistic task of making them sit through the equivalent of someone reading aloud the terms and conditions of the purchase of a new car. The first class should be fun, inviting, unexpected—or at the very least it should give students a taste of what kinds of things you’ll do together in class. Nobody wants to come to class just to find the professor standing at the front and reading from the syllabus.

I agree with this logic wholeheartedly, and yet I think it comes at the question of reading the syllabus the wrong way round. Both the novice and veteran graduate instructors in the orientation seemed to conceive of the syllabus as primarily an official document, a contract specifying expectations of the students and guidelines for their participation in the course. It is in this sense that we resist centering the first class around the syllabus. And yet, despite our seeming consensus around the idea that the syllabus is not worth reading, there is nothing that annoys instructors more than finding out later in the semester that students haven’t read it. Go to any forum for college instructors and you’ll quickly find someone telling the tale of a student asking a question easily answerable by just glancing at the very document designed to answer such questions. We want students to read the syllabus, expect them to. And yet we ourselves treat the document as something no one would want to read, something not meant for reading, a sort of legal necessity forced on us by the institution, something we can’t wait to file away. If we can’t be bothered to read the thing, why would students?

The solution to students not being interested enough in the syllabus to read it is not to avoid reading it ourselves on the first day in favor of some more compelling activity. It’s to make the syllabus interesting. And if the course itself is interesting (which it should be!), there’s no reason why an introduction and guide to that course shouldn’t be interesting, too.

The reason I read my syllabus to my students is that I think of the document not as a contract governing the students’ conduct in the course, but rather as an introduction to the course, a kind of guide to the class designed equally to lay out how things will proceed and to entice the students to be excited about it. I think of it as a kind of script for the first day; it gives me the chance to take my time and write out exactly how I want to present the course to the students, how I want to introduce the kinds of questions we’ll try to answer, the kinds of things we’ll spend our time doing in class. I do my best to write it in my own voice, avoiding the officialese that plagues many syllabi, instead looking to warmly and congenially convey some of my own excitement to work with students toward achieving the course’s goals.

But what about policies? Doesn’t the syllabus actually have to contain some of that intrinsically boring material that details what happens when x, y, or z occurs? Here’s the thing: every policy for your course that you have control over should be connected with your goals for the course. The syllabus—and the reading of it—gives you the chance to show students that every aspect of the course has been designed with their learning in mind, even the boring stuff. That’s part of the job of enticing students as well—part of showing them that they can trust you.¹ If there’s truly boring policy that you can’t bring yourself to read (for me, much of this is departmental or collegiate policy that I have to include by institutional fiat), put it in an appendix, tell students it’s there, and don’t include it in your dramatic monologue.

The syllabus is part of the main job of the first day of class, which is to sell students on the course. You will never have success teaching a college course unless students are on board. This is a fact that springs from the central insight of the last, oh, fifty years of teaching and learning scholarship: only students can do the work of learning. We can’t learn for them. We can’t pour knowledge into their heads. We can’t make them into smarter people. All we can do is create the conditions that make it more likely that they’ll do the work of learning. That has to start on the first day of class, by beginning to persuade them that the work we’re going to ask them to do will be valuable, fascinating, rewarding—that it will lead to success. That they’ll like coming to class! This is difficult work, but it is absolutely necessary. The syllabus is a tool to deploy in carrying out that task. It’s not the only tool—certainly, getting students talking, piquing their curiosity about central concepts you’ll explore, and starting to nurture a community are all valuable, too. But the syllabus is an opportunity to think through, compose, and present your best case for why students should throw themselves into the course. That’s not something to cast aside.

See you next week.

1  Also—and it kind of annoys me that people overlook this—students want to know what the course is going to be like! These students have shown up to class having only read a one-paragraph course description (maybe), and you spend the whole first class period doing ice-breakers and community building and group activities? I do think that at a certain point we can overthink the first day and forget that many students come to the class looking to find out what they’re going to read, what work they’ll have to do, what they’ll be assessed on. We don’t do ourselves any favors by withholding this stuff.