Adventures in Teaching: Visual Syllabus
Today is my first day teaching. Ever. I am nervous and excited and I figured the best way to mark the occasion would be to start a mini blog series on my adventures in teaching for the first time.
When I was hired as a part-time faculty a month ago, I had zero idea how much actual work was involved with teaching and preparing a class. I have spent so much time in the past month preparing my syllabus, getting Moodle set-up, and learning the ins-and-outs of the department I will be working in. I have a small advantage in that I graduated from this school about five years ago! But I never took a single course in this department, and the school has changed so much in the past five years, that I still have much to learn.
I am teaching a course on professional communication. If you know me at least a little bit, you'll know I am super into this topic! I think it's critical we know how to communicate with others and I have been working hard at improving my reporting and presenting skills to do this better every day.
One of the important components of effective communication is visually presenting information in a way that pulls the reader in. Syllabi don't normally do this, but I felt it was important to highlight this element that plays such an important role in my report writing.
My visual syllabus is shown below. Thanks to inspiration from Ann Emery and others, I created it all in PowerPoint. What an amazing tool for report writing! So easy to move pages, rearrange text, etc.! Comment below with your thoughts on the visual syllabus.
Update (12/13/19)
I now have a little more experience teaching under my belt. I am now an assistant professor of psychology in evaluation at University of Wisconsin-Stout. I taught two classes at CSU Fullerton and this semester I'm teaching 4 sections of 3 courses at UW-Stout!
I moved away from doing syllabi in PowerPoint. It's nice for a one-off document, but I found it annoying over time. Now all my syllabi are in Word and in greyscale for mass printing (and saving money).
If you are interested in using either of these visual syllabi, they are both available to download. Have fun with them! No need to attribute back to me at all.