Getting Students to Engage with the Syllabus

The start of the semester is an exciting time on campus. Students are returning to friends they haven’t seen all summer, leaving the house and regaining some autonomy, and coming to class with a renewed motivation and enthusiasm. If you really want to squash that enthusiasm for learning quickly, one of the best ways to do so is by starting off with “Syllabus Day”: that first day of class each semester when many teachers distribute and read through key points of the syllabus. In the blog post “The Absolute Worst Way to Start the Semester,” Kevin Gannon explains the dangers of this approach and provides some useful suggestions for how to set a better tone in the first class. A couple approaches he suggests are collaboratively setting classroom expectations (involving students in that process also helps to generate buy-in!) or asking the students to engage with some of the types of activities you’ll be asking them to do later in the semester.

“But, Steven, the syllabus is important!” you might say, entirely correctly. The syllabus is more than just a schedule and list of due dates and point values of assignments (in fact, if you’re using it well, Canvas will manage this part automatically for you!). Along with sharing University and College policies, the syllabus is your first opportunity to express expectations for classroom behavior and set the tone of your learning atmosphere. With that in mind, here are just a few strategies you may want to try to get your students to read your syllabus, without ruining the momentum on your first day in the classroom.

• Syllabus Quiz — Within your Course Orientation module in Canvas you can create a quiz and ask students questions about critical components of the syllabus. This gets them engaged with that information without spending one minute of class time discussing it. It also has the added benefit of getting students into Canvas quizzes right away, which will make them more comfortable with the quizzing environment when higher-stakes tests come along.
• Affirmation of Comprehension — If you don’t want to present an entire quiz over the syllabus, you may consider creating a single-question survey to put in the course orientation module that just asks student to affirm that they have read the syllabus. This can act as a firm reminder that reading the syllabus is an expectation at the start of the course; creating a survey in Canvas is fairly simpleand true/false questions are incredibly easy to build.
• Module Requirement/Prerequisites — This is not so much a strategy by itself, but it can be used in conjunction with either of the first two strategies. Within modules in Canvas you have the ability to require the completion of certain items as well as to restrict access to later items. So, without even awarding any points you could require a syllabus quiz or survey in the first module and make completion of that requirement a prerequisite for accessing any of the information and materials in the later modules of the class.
• Easter Egg- If a syllabus quiz and/or locking down content feels too restrictive for your teaching philosophy but you’re still interested in learning about which students are reading your syllabus you might try this strategy. Somewhere within the text of your syllabus ask your students to send you an email with a unique phrase. This won’t drive people to read the syllabus, but it can help you be more aware of who is reading it. The Easter Egg also provides you an opportunity to show a bit of your personality, or perhaps learn a fun tidbit about some of your students.

If you’re trying to figure out how to approach your first day back in the classroom, here are some more thoughts from Faculty Focus.