Putting the horse back in front of the cart: using visions and decisions about high-quality learning experiences to drive course design.

Envision the following two scenarios about two instructors faced with the task of teaching a course in the life sciences. The first scenario goes something like this: Chris has been a college professor for 4 years, and for three of them, has taught an 80-student section of a middletier course in cell and molecular biology, a course required of all biology majors. Another section of the course has been taught for the past 12 years by a more senior colleague. When Chris first started teaching, he and his colleague sat down together and decided on a common list of content topics that they would cover and chose the same textbook. They agreed that they would work independently on the teaching strategies they would use for each topic. Chris planned to use some approaches he observed while serving as a teaching assistant at his doctoral institution. Now, 3 years into the course, despite good student ratings of his teaching efforts, Chris is somewhat dissatisfied with what he has accomplished. He thinks his attempts to make the subject matter relevant by bringing “hot topics” from the biomedical research–relevant news into his lectures have been only mildly successful at stimulating student interest. In addition, students seem to do poorly on exam questions in which he asks them to connect these topics from current research findings to the material they read in the textbook and that is covered in lectures. The undergraduate interns working in his research lab seem to be far more engaged in learning about cell biology, and he wonders if there isn’t some way to capture this interest for the general population of students in his class. But redesigning the course will be time-consuming and may run into resistance from his senior colleague. Pat has been teaching for 6 years at a large research university—she was hired to coordinate the introductory biology laboratory experience and to teach one of the largeenrollment sections of this two-semester course. Pat is one of six instructors who teach the multisection course each semester. The instructors meet regularly, and once a year they have a retreat at which they discuss the course; the instructors routinely agree that it is in the best interests of the students for them to use the same textbook in all sections of the course and to cover the same scope of topics in the same sequence. Pat feels that this has led her to compromise on the teaching strategies she would like to use in her section but feels that her role as primary decision-maker for the lab curriculum has helped to allay her concerns. The design of all of the labs includes opportunities for students to depart from “cookbook” approaches—once they have learned a basic procedure and run a prescribed experiment, students spend the rest of the lab period and sometimes the next lab designing and running an experiment to test their “next questions. ” However, she’s begun to hear more and more frequently from the other course instructors that no matter what they seem to do, the students tell them on course evaluations that they don’t feel that their learning experiences in the lab connect well, if at all, to those in the lecture. Unfortunately, Pat has to admit that her students have expressed the same concerns. Each of these scenarios describes a conscientious instructor who is operating in a situational context that drives the most common approach to course design. This most common approach basically entails the creation of a list of topics and then the development of a set of lectures to cover the progression of ideas falling under the scope of those topics. The topics are commonly chosen to reflect the material presented in a textbook, to prepare students for following courses, or to reflect time-honored traditions—or the interests of the instructor—and are limited simply by the number of such topics that will fit in the allotted meeting time for the course. The sequencing of the chosen topics likewise typically mirrors that of the textbook chapters. The goal of having students “understand the material” is the tacit assumption underlying this approach (Fink, 2003). In addition, Pat and Chris appear to have incorporated learning goals DOI: 10.1187/cbe.07–03–0017 Address correspondence to: Deborah Allen (deallen@udel.edu). CBE—Life Sciences Education Vol. 6, 85–89, Summer 2007