Perhaps the most common strategy of course design, a coverage-based approach begins with the content that an instructor determines the course must cover and designs every other part of the course around it. Typically this strategy begins with instructors listing the topics or content areas that need to be taught (some of which might be determined at a departmental level) and then deciding how much time will be dedicated to each item in that list, the sequence in which they will be covered, and, finally, the assignments students will complete by the end of the semester.

The advantage of such a strategy resides in its commonality and its emphasis on a faculty member’s subject area expertise. Indeed, this strategy is so common that many textbooks are divided into 15 chapters in order to mirror the number of weeks in a semester. The disadvantage, though, is that the effort to cover as much of a subject area as possible can lead to assignments that hover exclusively around the foundational levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, such as remembering and understanding, and allow few opportunities to engage in other forms of learning. (We discuss Bloom’s taxonomy in more detail below.) As a strategy, then, it places strong emphasis on comprehensiveness but sacrifices a learner-centered approach to teaching.

Instructors who use an activity-based design prioritize the methods of teaching they will use within a given class. Animated by an interest in exploring different forms of student engagement, this strategy begins with specific collaborations, techniques, or technologies they would like to use while teaching (such as group work or a digital tool) and designs the outcomes, content, and assignments around facilitating those activities.

The advantage of such a strategy resides, as alluded to above, in its emphasis on exploring new ways of engaging students and enlivening the classroom. However, its disadvantage derives from the exact same source: by prioritizing activities over defined outcomes and content, this strategy can generate motion while leaving the actual learning up to chance. Indeed, students can easily be engaged in a fun, lively activity that teaches them little or only lands on learning outcomes in a haphazard way. As a strategy, then, it places strong emphasis on new ways of teaching but without systematically linking those activities back to distinct goals or outcomes.

Backward design, another common strategy for developing courses, prioritizes the identification of learning outcomes and then designs the other components of the class to support those aims. The first step in using backward design is to determine the larger goals of the course and to then create assessments that will allow you to measure student progress toward those goals, select course materials that will allow students to work toward them, and adopt teaching strategies that will support the overarching aims of the course. In so many words, backward design places a strong emphasis on making sure that the outcomes, assignments, content, and teaching methods are interlocked in a purposeful manner.

The advantage of such a strategy resides in the way it braids together faculty’s subject area expertise with learned-centered approaches to teaching, as well as how it increases student engagement and investment, leading to higher quality work. Its disadvantage is that, because prioritizing outcomes before content is a somewhat counter-intuitive way of creating a course, it can be a time-consuming process the first time you use it (although it should be noted that it can save time when you are revising an already existing class). Because the benefits of backward design outweigh its challenges, it is the strategy the Center for Engaged Pedagogy recommends faculty use as they create and revise courses.

The answer to this first question will help you name the learning outcomes of your course—a list that is typically included on the very first page of your syllabus. In backward design, your learning outcomes determine the assignments, content, and teaching methods you will select.

Developing an answer to this second question will help you decide what types of assignments or assessments will allow students to demonstrate that they’ve successfully moved toward the course’s learning outcomes. In general, every learning outcome should be assessable in some way, whether that is through an essay, a series of quizzes, a group project, lab reports, a reflective journal, or participation. However, it should be noted that a single form of assessment (especially a large one, like a research paper or major exam) can and often should relate to more than one outcome.

This third question is one that can help you plan how you will spend your time with the students and what sort of pace the class will assume. For example, answering this question in light of the outcomes you identified can help you determine whether lectures or group activities might be more appropriate for specific class sessions. It can also help you determine what students must do in class (because it requires guidance, collaboration, or specific equipment) and what they can do most effectively outside of class.

The best way to identify the learning outcomes for your course is to answer the first question we posed in the subsection above: “What exactly do I want students to know, be able to think about, or do after completing this class?” The different ways that you answer this question, which will likely take into account a broad range of factors (like your expertise, departmental goals, curricular requirements, subject- and discipline-specific values, and more), provide you with the foundation for creating your learning outcomes.

In general, a learning outcome should specify what students will learn, what they will be able to do, and/or what habits of mind they will cultivate as a result of taking your course. An outcome is also measurable in some form. In educational research, this is what distinguishes learning outcomes from learning goals (which tend to be more broad) and learning objectives (which tend to refer to aims of individual sessions rather than entire courses).

While learning outcomes might at first appear bureaucratic, technical, or constraining, taking the time to identify them can present several advantages. From the student’s side, clearly and concisely written learning outcomes explain what they’ll learn, how they’ll learn it, and how they’ll be assessed within your course. In this regard, learning outcomes are one means of telegraphing what is important to you as an instructor, how students can focus their attention, and how they can monitor their own progress. 

From the side of instructors and departments, concrete learning outcomes present other advantages. For departments, they can help clarify the ways that individual courses contribute to broader program goals, which is useful information when doing departmental assessment or curriculum reviews. For individual faculty, they can serve as guideposts that assist you in developing class-specific objectives and maintaining a sense of what is most important to you if there is an upheaval in the middle of the semester that requires you to rapidly adjust aspects of your course (see the note on “Planning for contingency” in this subsection).

A first step to producing an effective learning outcome is to write it in a way that emphasizes the student action. Rather than framing it from the position of the course (“This course will cover…”), write the outcome so that it specifies what students will be expected to do (“Students will…,”).

A second step is to use action verbs that point to observable behaviors. It is tempting to say that students will “learn about” or “understand” something as a result of taking your course. While it is certainly true that students will learn and understand all kinds of things over the course of the semester, how will you, as the instructor, know that they’ve done so? To write your outcomes, use terms that point to observable actions, such as analyze, compare, design, present, solve, create, evaluate, translate, and so on. All of these point to specific actions that you can assess and provide feedback on (through a final paper, a group presentation or project, a multiple choice quiz, a creative assignment, a series of forum posts or reports, and more). 

A third step (closely connected to the first two) is to name what the student will gain or what will transform for them as a result of taking your course. Outcomes that are written with a learner-centered approach, in other words, do not stop at describing the content of a course but name what students can take away from it and do with the knowledge they’ve gained.

A fourth, final step is to keep the outcome as simple and clear as possible. To reiterate, an effective learning outcome is one that conveys to students what they’ll do in your course and how their progress will be measured.

There are several tools that you can use to write effective learning outcomes. The most common one is Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, which identifies six different “levels” of cognitive learning. Often graphically represented in the form of a pyramid, these levels build on each other and proceed from remembering (the foundation) to understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating (the peak). It is helpful to draw from the vocabulary of Bloom’s Taxonomy and any of the more specific action verbs associated with its levels as you write learning outcomes.

Another tool that you might use is Fink’s Significant Learning Taxonomy, which the education researcher L. Dee Fink developed to account for value-driven forms of learning that are harder to represent within Bloom’s Taxonomy. What Fink calls “significant learning” is situated at the intersection of six different categories of learning:

• Foundational knowledge—what key information students will learn;
• Application—what kinds of thinking or skills students will develop;
• Integration—what connections they’ll learn to recognize or make;
• Human dimension—what students will learn about themselves and each other;
• Caring—what students will become interested in, value, or feel in the course;
• Learning how to learn—what self-directed learning skills they’ll develop.

To be clear, significant learning can be articulated by the intersection of just two of these categories; not every single one must be in effect at the same time. Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning might be most useful to use as a tool for revising your first draft of learning outcomes or altering a course’s already existing learning objectives. But taking the time to identify the forms of significant learning that your course offers can be helpful in developing a narrative about how the individual learning outcomes of your class combine to create an enriching experience.

As you develop and draft your learning outcomes, you might spend some time identifying the broad range of ways students can work toward them. By doing so, you might not only land upon creative assignments but also understand where you have some flexibility in your course design, should you need it. 

In the CEP, we frequently consult with faculty who are figuring out how to respond to some sort of unanticipated disruption, which might be political, environmental, or technological in nature, to both their teaching and their students’ learning. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps the most obvious case where every instructor was forced to confront this question, but it is far from the only example where instructors have sought to maintain the integrity of their course while also accommodating some contingency. When we have consulted with faculty about this challenge, we tend to work with them to find the flexibility that they already have within the structure of their course by returning to their learning outcomes.

Some examples of adjustments that faculty have made in moments of uncertainty include:

• Granting leniency on assignment deadlines (e.g., giving all students a bank of days for turning assignments in late)
• Dropping the lowest score of the semester
• Changing an in-class exam to a take-home
• Eliminating an assignment
• Reformulating a higher-stakes exam or assignment into smaller low-stakes quizzes or assignments, including creative alternatives to traditional assignments
• Paring down the number of texts on the syllabus or providing guidance on particular passages or pages that will be most relevant to class 

The best way to link your learning outcomes to your assignments and assessments will be to revisit your answer to the second initial question that we posed above (that is, “What evidence would demonstrate that students have made progress?”). Having now drafted your learning outcomes, you also can rely on the verbs that you used to determine the assignments that will best allow you and students to monitor their progress on any of those outcomes.

For example, if one of the learning outcomes you identified is, “Apply essential course concepts in an original and insightful manner to real-world examples,” then there are a range of assignments that you might develop in order to assess how students have progressed toward this outcome. A final research paper (in which students determine their subject and the course concepts they will apply), a midterm exam (in which an instructor provides the examples and students select the concept they will apply to them), or brief essays (in which students apply a course concept from a single, recently completed reading to an example of their choice), as well as others, are all potential assignments that you can use to provide feedback to students on this outcome.

A strategy that you might use is to think backward from the final exam or project from the class and determine what sorts of feedback you can provide along the way that will allow students to work up to that large assignment that serves to encapsulate their learning. Doing so will allow you to distinguish between what are known as formative assessments and what are known as summative assessments, and create corresponding assignments and feedback mechanisms.

When we talk about formative assessments, we are talking about any evaluative assignments that allow you to provide feedback to students on their progress toward a course’s objectives while they are still in the process of learning. Typically, these types of assessments count toward a lower percentage of their overall grade, at least individually (cumulatively, however, they may add up to a significant percentage).

Common examples of formative assessments include: in-class discussions; weekly quizzes; low-stakes group work; brief, reflective writing assignments (posted to message boards, as part of journals, or as individual assignments); and so on.

The major purpose of these assignments is to give you an opportunity to provide students with feedback in advance of larger assignments, particularly insofar as this feedback helps students understand how they are progressing toward the course’s learning outcomes.

When we talk about summative assessments, we are talking about any evaluative assignments that provide opportunities for students to demonstrate what they have learned. Typically, these types of assessments count toward a higher percentage of the overall course grade and often occur at the ends of units, during the midterm, or at the end of a class.

Common examples of summative assessments include: final exams; research papers; substantive group projects; midterm exams; final presentations; research posters; and so on.

The major purpose of these assignments is to evaluate the sum of what students have learned at specific designated points. Summative assessments, as alluded to earlier in this section, will also frequently be used to assess more than a single learning outcome.

While the guidance so far might seem constraining, a backward design approach can actually be useful in encouraging students to develop assignments where they experiment with the ways they demonstrate what they have learned. Students frequently report that barriers to their decision to take greater risks with major assignments involve some combination of a lack of time, a lack of familiarity with tools that would help them (e.g. equipment and programs for audio/video), and a lack of clarity or guidance on what a successful experiment looks like. Some of these, like students feeling they do not have sufficient time, are clearly out of your control as an individual instructor. But being able to use your learning outcomes to clearly identify what you will be assessing and providing them feedback on might actually contribute to lowering the barrier to experimentation. What’s more, taking a backward design approach can help you develop formative assessments that either have the flexibility to be creative options themselves or will make the students feel confident they’ve already received the type of feedback that will allow them to take more creative risks with their larger assignments.

Once you are clear on your learning outcomes, you might also realize that there are a range of suitable ways that students can demonstrate learning. You might consider offering students a creative alternative to a traditional assignment, which sometimes incorporates technology or multimedia as an outlet for student creativity. For example, if you have an essay as a final assignment in your class, you could consider inviting students to pitch alternatives to this such as creating a game, writing a piece of short fiction, crafting an alternate ending or speculative counter-narrative to a text you’ve read in class, making a short video or podcast, designing an exam, etc. A key component of such a creative assignment is to also ask students to reflect on how they have demonstrated the required learning outcomes. This could take the form of a supplemental reflective essay, a conversation with you, or a presentation in class. Ideally, the creative assignment would be assessable using the same rubrics or grading criteria as a more traditional assignment.

Instructors who are interested in alternative approaches to grading should consult the CEP’s resource on this topic.

As strong advocates of academic freedom, the CEP defers to instructors about the content that they will assign in their courses. As an expert, your knowledge about your field and subject area is your best guide. According to the framework of backward design, a helpful method for making decisions about specific weeks or choosing between multiple possible materials, is to return to your learning outcomes: what readings or other forms of content will facilitate students’ movement toward those goals that you’ve established? 

You may also take into account the schedule of formative and summative assessments you’ve created, as well as the academic calendar of the college, as you make decisions about the length or intensity of your class content. For example, a faculty member who incorporated peer review sessions at the end of units would not assign other readings on those dates so that students had time to engage with one another’s drafts and discuss the unit they’d just completed.

The final step in the backward design process is to identify the teaching methods that will best help your students move toward your course’s learning outcomes. As implied by the third question in the subsection on starting the backward design process, the strategy of instruction that you use, whether it is lecture, discussion, active learning, or some combination, should be guided by the learning outcomes that you established. 

However, given that the type of class you will be teaching will often be determined at the departmental level, it is likely that the level and format of your class will inform the learning outcomes you identify in the first place (for example,, introductory courses with large enrollments will mostly demand lectures, whereas more advanced courses will likely have smaller enrollments and can accommodate a mixture of teaching methods). 

Whether you have significant control over your course or you are teaching a course that is largely developed at the departmental level, thinking through the backward design process can be useful in deciding both the general teaching methods you will use and when you might deploy multiple teaching methods in specific class sessions. Just as a student’s progress toward one of your learning outcomes can be assessed through multiple kinds of assignments, you can also ask whether those outcomes invite a variety of teaching methods.

In any class, but especially in those with large enrollments, you might familiarize yourself with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines and the ways you can draw on them at the levels of instruction and design. UDL is a research-based educational framework that takes into account the multiple needs of learners and places a strong emphasis on supporting learner agency. It makes a case for integrating multiple representations of course materials into teaching and course management systems, varied means for student expression and engagement, and a range of strategies to motivate student learning. At its most basic level, UDL is a tool that can help instructors think about, and design in anticipation of, the range of learners they might encounter in each iteration of their class.

Earlier in this resource, we talked about how you might be able to determine where you have some flexibility in your course by reflecting in advance on the multiple ways that students can reach the learning outcomes you identified. While the advice there largely revolved around adjusting assignments, you can apply the same principle when considering your teaching methods. 

Barnard has seen examples of instructors who, when faced with unanticipated circumstances, have adjusted their teaching style without sacrificing their aims. For example, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced instruction online in the middle of the semester, one faculty member had to confront how he would conduct the second half of his seminar, which was structured around group presentations about a series of plays and class discussions of secondary literature related to them. In order to accommodate students (who, like him, were reeling from the shock of the pandemic) and to make the most out of Zoom’s capabilities, he looked back at his learning outcomes and revised his strategies in the classroom in order to work toward two (“Analyze the relationship between historical and theatrical modes of representations and narrative” and “Assess critical and creative ways of working with archival sources”). Ultimately, he decided to convert the group presentations into an in-class jigsaw activity, which the students drew from to develop their final projects, and transformed the discussions of secondary literature into brief lectures that served as supplements to their collaborative analyses of the plays.

Instructors’ abilities to adopt flexible teaching methods will depend on many factors, including their personal interest, discipline, and class format, among others. However, the example we provide above illustrates the basic recommendation for anticipating flexibility at the level of your teaching methods: return to your learning outcomes in order to land on a solution that works for you and your students.

To learn more about the creative ways that Barnard faculty have redesigned their courses and teaching methods under drastically changed circumstances, read the Materiality, Embodiment, and Pedagogy Online series that was conceived, written, and designed by Joscelyn Jurich (with assistance from Hana Rivers and Annabelle Tseng).

There are many ways of structuring your syllabus, but in general it should include the following information in an order and presentation that makes the most sense for your class and pedagogical philosophy. The list below is drawn from the Committee on Instruction, which you can access by logging into the Barnard portal, hovering over the “Faculty and Departments” dropdown menu, selecting “Teaching and Advising,” and selecting “Procedures for Teaching a Course.”

• Instructor and course information, including office hours, contact information, and class meeting times.
• Course description.
• Student learning outcomes: student-centered, measurable expectations of specific skills, knowledge, or attitudes of students who successfully complete the course.
• Assignments and expectations, including guidelines for papers, reports, and other assignments, including the degree to which collaboration is allowed; due dates (consult the Academic Calendar for College- and University-wide deadlines); attendance policy (see “Faculty Guide to Attendance Expectations”); and expectations for participation.
• Evaluation: specify the criteria/items that will comprise the grading scale. If participation comprises more than 15% of the final grade, the syllabus must describe what constitutes good participation.
• Required texts, including reading lengths in page numbers or ranges.
• Course outline: an outline of topics to be covered, required readings, and associated dates.
• Statements regarding any other classroom policies such as limitations on use of laptops and other electronic devices in class (such limits are at the discretion of the Instructor except when devices are required by a student with a disability).

Barnard requires every instructor to include the following statements on their syllabus:

• The Barnard Honor Code
• Wellness Statement
• Center for Accessibility Resources & Disability Services (CARDS)
• Affordable Access to Course Texts and Materials 
• Attendance (details at the instructor’s discretion) 

You are free to copy-paste each of these statements (except for the attendance policy, which is set by individual instructors) directly into your syllabus (accessible here and in the “Procedures for Teaching a Course” page referred to above after logging into the portal).

As long as the core information about these statements and resources is included, you are also welcome to create your own versions of these statements, especially if doing so will help you articulate something unique and relevant about your pedagogical philosophy or the content of your class. 

It is also highly recommended that you develop a statement on the use of artificial intelligence tools (such as ChatGPT, Anthropic, Gemini, Dall-E, and others). The College has tended to defer to instructors on whether and how students can use AI in their courses, on the grounds that this decision is covered by faculty members’ academic freedom. If you do not already have such a statement, the CEP has developed a resource to aid you in thinking through what yours might say (including examples).

Barnard College’s Procedures for Proposing or Changing a Course (requires log-in)

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (Harvard University): Designing Your Course

Harrington, Christine and Melissa Thomas, Designing a Motivational Syllabus: Creating a Learning Path for Student Engagement (2018).

Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning (Yale University): Writing Learning Goals, Objectives, and Outcomes