Overview

This course is designed for experienced teaching assistants in philosophy at USC. It is intended that this course will be taken in one's fourth year (or later) in the program, and after the student has already completed the first part of this teaching seminar in their second year.

The previous course, Phil 593, focused on familiarizing students with their roles as instructors, and troubleshooting and optimizing their experiences as TAs. This course will focus on how you can approach developing and teaching your own courses, as well as focusing on how you can prepare for the teaching job market (we will spend a significant portion of our time collaboratively preparing and reviewing teaching application materials).

Our learning objectives: by the end of the semester, (1) students will be able to construct a syllabus using backwards course design, starting with learning objectives and generating aligned assignments and plans for grading rubrics, (2) students will be able to identify pedagogical values and evidenced-based strategies for promoting those values, (3) students will be able to compose teaching and diversity statements that draw on their own experiences in implementing evidence-based pedagogy in the classroom, and (4) students will be able to produce constructive feedback on teaching samples and materials of their own and of others.

For the fall of 2021, this course will take place online. The first five meetings will be held on consecutive weeks, so the vast majority of the course will have taken place by late September. The final meetings will take place later in the term, on weeks we choose in late October or early November.

Assignments

Assignment Timing Information:

All assignments will be due at least 24 hours before we meet. (In some cases, they may be due earlier, and that will be specified in the assignment description.) This is so that I (and your classmates!) will have time to read your contributions before we meet.

Schedule

SYLLABUS

Available Here

Week 1 - Course Design

What To Expect

How do courses at various levels differ? What special challenges arise with different learning objectives? How can you make a course creative, memorable, and something that connects with real lives? We will discuss choice-points in course design, approaches to course-design, and features of syllabi you've found that you think are notable. We'll also chat about your own initial ideas for a course you'd like to design for the syllabus-drafting portion of this seminar.

Watch This

Paul Blaschko produced the video below for the Philosophy as a Way of Life Instructor Network. (Optional additional resources: If you'd like, you can join the Facebook group for this community here. When answering questions to join, say 'yes' when asked if USC is part of the PWOL network. You can also find the youtube channel for this group here.)

The resources mentioned: the empathy map template (by Kim Barker), and the empathy map method guide. Feel free to fill out an empathy map of your own if (and only if!) you want to, and if you do, let us know how it went when we meet!

Read This

Bloom's Taxonomy (from USC's Center for Excellence in Teaching), just as a helpful reference.

Do This

Find a syllabus or two that you think have some exceptional features, and upload them to the non-public dropbox folder for this course (to the "Syllabus Examples" subfolder). Be ready to talk in class about the nifty features of the syllabus (or syllabi) in class. (Aim for syllabi that are exceptional with respect to course design or framing, rather than with respect to the particular readings and lecture topics they include.)

Read the Teaching Prep Assignment and the Diversity Prep Assignment. Complete the step of making lists of teaching and diversity-related values; add them to the document here. Come to class ready to share them. (Note that one way to approach this is to look for evidence-based good practices, and to see which desirable things they promote. You're welcome to do this, though that'll involve finding resources on the evidence-based practices earlier than you might otherwise. Note also that you're welcome to change which values you want to use for this project at any time.)

Week 2 - Aligned Assignments and Grading

What To Expect

This week we're interested in how to align assignments with course goals, a wide variety of kinds of assignments you might construct, and what sorts of things you should communicate in your assignment description for graded assignments. In class we will spend roughly half of our meeting discussing assignments you have prepared. We will be especially interested in how we can make assignments (even assessments such as tests) educational rather than just evaluative, and we will be interested in how we can make assignments memorable and related to students' lives outside of the classroom.

We will spend roughly the second half of class on grading rubrics. In the teaching seminar in your 2nd year, you had practice using a grading rubric that was provided to you. This year, you will be making your own grading rubrics (or at least, your own grading criteria), exchanging them, and working to improve them. We will discuss some grading choice-points you've noticed, and will look at challenges in constructing grading rubrics.

Read This

Handout - Constructing Assignments

Assignment Ideas beyond think-and-write and beyond discuss-and-write - Brainstorming from fall 2020

USC's Center for Excellence in Teaching's Assignment Description Template

Optional but encouraged: look at one another's assignments (in our course's non-public folder), which will be submitted 24 hours before we meet.

Optional: USC's Center for Excellence in Teaching's Tips for Designing Grading Rubrics

Optional: Examples of Grading Rubrics

Do This

Draft your own assignment. Use the assignment template above if you'd like. (Or don't: plenty of assignment descriptions don't follow the template. Like the one you're currently reading!) But in any case, include as much information as you would really include when giving the assignment to students (perhaps with the exception of examples, if you would provide those when actually giving the assignment.) Upload it to our course's non-public folder at least 24 hours before we meet, so we all have a chance to see everyone's assignments in preparation for our meeting.

Draft an accompanying grading rubric, or at least some guide to how you'll be grading your assignment. Upload it to the course's non-public folder by the time we meet. (There are several examples of rubrics above, and also an example of a guide of my own that I've given to students but which is not yet a grading rubric.) Make an effort with these, but don't worry if they're incomplete or if they're sketches. Think about what you're struggling with (or any interesting choice-points) and come to class with one or two targeted questions for when we workshop them.

Week 3 - Syllabus Design

What To Expect

By now, we have had several meetings focusing on the production of things that will be reflected in your syllabi: in the pedagogy seminar in your 2nd year, you had meetings on policy writing and on activity design, and in the current seminar we have met about general course design and about assignment design. Now, we'll focus on the rest: choice of course materials, workload, design of a course calendar, and of course, how to best communicate through syllabi. Before we meet you will have submitted your own syllabi and had a chance to look through the syllabi of your classmates. We'll spend the majority of our meeting workshopping these syllabi. We'll also discuss any questions or comments you have (about your own or others' syllabi, or about syllabus construction in general). If we have time, we'll do a flash-brainstorming session on innovative communication strategies for syllabi.

Read This

A Syllabus Template from USC's Curriculum Office. (No need to use this, I'm including it for reference.)

An example of a Syllabus Assignment.

Diversifying Syllabi: browse through this list of readings you may find useful, from the graduate students at Georgetown University. (Note: they also have links to other helpful resources for diversifying syllabi, such as the Diversity Reading List created by Simon Fokt, and APA resources on diversifying syllabi.)

Optional: you can find some sample syllabi (to supplement the ones we looked at during our Course Design week) here, at TeachPhilosophy101. You can find several syllabi by profs at USC by going to the USC schedule of classes and clicking on the course titles (often syllabi aren't uploaded, but several are -- select different semesters for more variety), and of course there are always profs' websites. And you can find an amazing online syllabus here, for Meghan Sullivan's God and the Good Life course.

Optional: USC's Center for Excellence in Teaching's Syllabus Review Checklist. There are a lot of things you can reasonably disagree with here (and, in fact, a lot that I disagree with), but at the very least it's helpful for reminding us of options and choice-points.

Do This

Produce a draft of a complete syllabus. Be sure to include everything that you would include on a real syllabus that you're giving to students. Upload these to the non-public folder at least 24 hours before we meet. Feel free to also include an additional, final page tacked on to the syllabus noting any challenges or choice-points you faced and would like feedback on. Special optional challenge for your syllabus construction: include some kind of graphic (picture, diagram, infographic, etc.) in your syllabus, or some other innovative way to improve on communication in these documents.

Optional but encouraged: glance at one another's syllabi before we meet, and prepare some comments that you can share with your classmates during our meeting.

Week 4 - Teaching Samples and Supplemental Materials

What To Expect

This week will be focused on teaching sample videos and supplemental materials. In advance of today's class you should produce a teaching sample, and make it as polished as possible. (Note that teaching sample videos needn't be class-length.) We will also look at supplemental materials you've created, whether it's asynchronous material (such as as videos, interactive online essays, podcasts, or infographics), or something you've produced to supplement synchronous education (such as interactive handouts or interactive online presentations that you work through with the students).

Read This

I recommend that, for making your teaching sample videos, you do not record your lecture yourself. Instead, you can ask IT to record it. A tip: sometimes they'll try to adjust the video to do close-ups of you or follow you around the room. It may work out better to just ask them to set things up so they can see you and the board, and have something static. Another suggestion: sometimes the audio on these doesn't work out terribly well, so for the purposes of preparing something to share with job application materials, you may want to have a couple different lectures recorded. You would then also have the option of sharing just portions of each of multiple samples. To set up lecture recording through IT, here are the steps to take:

• Go to mydornsife and login
• Under Dornsife Applications, click "My Event Request"
• Select "New Event Request" and then select "Video Recording" for the event type

Here's a short powerpoint about making infographics, made by the USC Dornsife Office of Communication. Near the end there's a helpful list of websites you can use to facilitate making them.

Browse This

Here is a google document with links to guides for making asynchronous resources. If you're aware of a guide for making some kind of synchronous or asynchronous supplemental material (recordings of spoken lecture, narrated Prezi or Powerpoint, Doodly, an interactive essay, infographics, an interactive tutorial using something like Adobe Captivate or Camtasia, etc), please feel encouraged to add it to the document.

Browse through the document here about supplemental material development. (E.g., my example is a step-by-step guide, but you can give guidance of another form if you'd like.) Feel free to add to the document any tips or ideas you have about any kind of supplemental materials.

Do This

Create a teaching sample. It needn't be a full class-length sample. Link to it in this course's dropbox folder at least 48 hours before we meet. Choose a 3-5 minute portion of the video for us to watch, and indicate what that interval is.

Watch the 3-5 minute intervals of one another's teaching sample videos, and think of comments to share during class.

Make a supplemental resource for your students (or for pretend students in some future semester). Make an interactive handout, record a spoken lecture, make a narrated Prezi or PowerPoint, a Doodly, an interactive essay (using something like Adobe Spark, as I have done for this class), an interactive tutorial, etc. Add a link to the resource to the zoom links page. Important note: this assignment may take longer than you would expect, so consider starting on it early.

Submit your Teaching Prep Assignment, in the spreadsheet here.

Week 5 - Mentoring Grad Students

What to expect

Across this course and its predecessor, Phil 593, we've focused on teaching undergraduates. This week we'll shift our attention to approaches to teaching and mentoring graduate students. We'll talk about different approaches to graduate seminars, approaches to supporting independent work (such as on dissertations), and how to help graduate students through some of the typical challenges of graduate school. The material this week in no way assumes that you'll pursue mentoring graduate students in your future teaching; my hope is that it will be independently interesting and useful even if this kind of teaching isn't in your plans.

Though I'll present some ideas about resources for grad students, approaches to grad classes, and mentoring dissertating grad students, what we focus on during class will largely be determined by (and a lot of our discussion will be focused on) your contributions to the documents for this week's assignments.

Read This

A central pedagogical approach is to start by meeting students where they're at. And for that, it helps to know where students are at. But it's easy for faculty, even very junior faculty, to forget what being a grad student is like, which things grad students don't know, and which challenges they face. (It's often even the case that for some things, grad students themselves don't know that it would be helpful for them to know those things.) Further complicating the issue is that there's no single answer to "where grad students are at", even in fairly broad terms, for at least two reasons. One is that graduate school involves a bunch of very different phases. (Which it involves depends on the school, of course.) A second is that, as with undergraduates, graduate students differ from one another in significant ways, so the answer will vary across students.

Different Stages of Grad School

Below is a list of some of the phases that tend to be part of Ph.D. programs in the US, along with some of the questions that may arise for grad students in those phases. As you read it, I invite you to reflect on which other phases and milestones grad students encounter, what kinds of questions arise for those or for any I've listed, and also what kinds of challenges arise for grad students at those stages. The ultimate aim is that, in figuring out where grad students are and what they need help with, we can then brainstorm about how to go about meeting those needs.

Diversity Among Graduate Students

Graduate students are a diverse group! They may differ from each other, and they often certainly differ from any particular person teaching or mentoring them. It's important for us to be aware of these differences.

One common (and often costly) approach to undergraduate teaching is to teach to the kind of students we ourselves were, even though most of our students don't match that. There is a similar, perhaps even more widespread approach to teaching and mentoring graduate students. Faculty may overestimate the degree to which their graduate students are as the faculty themselves were (or the fellow grad students the faculty member knew). Here are just some of the ways grad students may differ from faculty mentoring them: background (some grad students come directly from undergrad, some directly from MA programs, some not directly from either; some come from Philosophy programs, some not); some have academia as a goal, some don’t; some have gaps in what they’ve learned about or focused on; some have very broad interests, some have narrow interests; some have more formal background, some less; some are pursuing interdisciplinary work, some not; some are neurotypical, some not; some have full-immersion approaches to grad school, some not; some have caretaking roles, some not; some are comfortable writing and doing research, some can benefit from a more collaborative or guided approach to doing those things; etc. There are also differences in personality, working style, etc., that can mean what it looks like when a student is thriving (or not) can vary greatly.

In addition to differing from mentors, grad students differ from each other. This is sometimes in tension with (explicit or not) assumed norms and/or ideals that can be present in programs, communicating to some students that they don't belong. (This can contribute to imposter syndrome - the feeling that one somehow doesn't deserve or won't thrive in the role they have, or that they're a fraud. But I want us to think beyond imposter syndrome, as it's present in just some of the cases I'm interested in, and it is also a bit victim blame-y.) Sometimes, this involves protected categories, where there is inequity in treatment across races, gender identities, national origins, etc. And sometimes it doesn't primarily involve protected categories, but rather, is about things like personality traits, work habits, etc. Across the cases, it seems that there is something treated as a norm or ideal, and those falling outside that find fewer rewards and/or more challenges, and in general a structure not designed with them in mind. Sometimes grad students are made to feel as if their mere presence in a program is something they should be apologizing for (analogous to how Sonya Renee Taylor notes that we can make non "normal" or "ideal" bodies feel like their mere existence is something to apologize for); those who do fit the mold face pressures to continue to do so, and those who don't fit face pressure to change, to leave, or to do things to "make up for" the differences. Our pedagogy should involve an attempt to be aware of these norms and to stop promoting them.

In the assignments for this week, you'll reflect on where students are at and what challenges they face, and also how students may differ from you and from each other, and what norms we may implicitly be communicating to students and how to avoid that.

Browse This

In graduate student mentoring, it's important that you don't have to do everything alone! You can not only point graduate students to additional people who can help them (additional mentors, peers within the institution, philosophers outside of the institution, support networks, etc), you can also point them to written resources with advice that may be helpful. Below are some collections of advice for graduate students, that you may consider making available to your own grad students or that might influence your approach to grad student teaching and mentoring. No need to read these, just click on one or two that sound interesting and scan through them. (Note: I don't endorse everything in these, but rather, am sharing them in part because they can help us reflect on which kinds of topics we might mentor graduate students on.)

• From Dan Korman: Making the most of Philosophy Grad School, and Advice for the Job Market
• From Douglas Portmore: Getting the Most Out of Graduate School, and Writing and Research
• From Elise Woodard: Seeking and Responding to Feedback, Setting and Maintaining Boundaries, and more.
• From me: A Daily Writing Approach to Dissertating, and Giving a Talk in Philosophy, and Dealing With Climate Concerns
• Liz Jackson: Additional resources with advice.

Another central part of mentoring graduate students is supporting them in writing even when they are faced with challenges (life events, getting stuck on an objection, being stressed by the project, etc). I've collected just a couple of resources on this, I invite you to find and share more if you're inclined to!

[Writing-related resources will be added in the next day or so - sorry for the delay!]

Do This

After reading the above, contribute to this document. Choose two phases or milestones of graduate school, either from the timeline above or something missing from the timeline above. For each, write a question a grad student might have at that time, and an associated stressor or challenge they might face. Then write an idea for how to communicate an answer to that question, or how to help the graduate student with the challenge. (Note: it's fine if the way of helping is to direct them to a different resource. You can't do everything!)

Think about how some graduate students may differ from you, how they differ from each other, or some "norms" or "ideals" that may be present in some departments. Then think about how reflection on these things may impact your pedagogical approach. Go to this document and list some of these features, then write a short paragraph about some way in which your pedagogy or mentoring approach may be responsive to this.

Optional: Find a resource that graduate students may find helpful. Share a link to that resource here.

Week 6 - Teaching Statements

What To Expect

In this class we'll talk about your Teaching Prep Assignments, your pedagogical values and the evidence-based strategies you tried out, and how that went. Then we'll spend the majority of our meeting workshopping your teaching statement drafts.

Read This

Browse through the collected teaching statement examples, available in the Teaching Application Materials subfolder of our course's non-public dropbox folder.

Here is a handout of teaching-related questions that you can write short answers to, to get you thinking about a range of things you might include in your teaching statement, and mostly just to help you get started writing if you're having a hard time with that. Answering the questions is optional, and you don't need to share your answers with me. This is just intended to be a resource for you, if you want it.

Do This

At least 48 hours before we meet, upload a full draft of a teaching statement (try to make it no longer than 2 pages single-spaced) to our class's non-public dropbox folder. Feel free to also include a following page in the same document, noting any difficulties or choice-points that you would like feedback on.

Before we meet, read each other's teaching statements. Prepare some comments that you can share with your classmates during our meeting. (Even better, but optional: also have some comments that you can send to your classmates after we meet.)

Submit your Diversity Prep Assignment, in the second part of the spreadsheet here.

Week 7 - Diversity Statements

What To Expect

In this class we'll talk about your Diversity Statement-Prep Assignments, your diversity-related values and the evidence-based ways you worked to promote them, and how things went. Then we'll spend the majority of the meeting workshopping your diversity statement drafts.

Read These (optional)

Browse through the collected diversity statement examples, available in the Teaching Application Materials subfolder of our course's non-public dropbox folder. (We don't yet have very many of these!)

Here's an IHE article with tips on diversity statements. I think the article is helpful, though I disagree with some of the points: (a) I think statement authors shouldn't feel pressure to talk about their own backgrounds, identities, and personal situations (though if you want to, feel welcome). (b) I think the author lists a narrower than ideal range of kinds of diversity that would be very fitting for discussion in diversity statements - for instance, issues related to mental health are left off. (c) While I agree with the spirit of it, the "go out and do something" phrasing may make people think the variety of ways to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion is narrower than it really is. For instance, the something you do may centrally involve researching and implementing DEI-promoting methods in your classroom, and that can be great. And (d): I'd add to this list of tips the note that promoting DEI can occur at many levels: in the classroom, in a department, in the profession, and in the broader community. Focus on whatever you'd like (or describe a little about a bunch of different things), but be sincere and draw from tangible things you've done or plan to do.

Here is a helpful resource that includes a listing of topics you might cover in your diversity statement, and a collection of writing prompts.

Here's a record of a social media exchange where I asked people for actual and ideal diversity-related interview questions, and they gave me examples as well as worries about asking about diversity in interviews, and worries about diversity statements.

Do This

At least 48 hours before we meet, upload a full draft of a diversity statement (try to make it no longer than 2 pages single-spaced) to our class's non-public dropbox folder. Feel free to also include a following page in the same document, noting any difficulties or choice-points that you would like feedback on.

Before we meet, read each other's teaching statements. Prepare some comments that you can share with your classmates during our meeting. (Even better, but optional: also have some comments that you can send to your classmates after we meet.)

I would love to hear about what worked for you in this class and what didn't. So, if you're willing, send me an email letting me know (i) which particular topics/meetings you found most useful, (ii) which meetings or assignments you found least useful, and (iii) any ideas you have about how the course can be more helpful for future students.