The Empty Syllabus: When Everyone Gets an A+
By: Designing With Radical Agency
Tags: Teaching And Learning

Written by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Maureen Carroll, and Frederik G. Pferdt

Micki arrived on Zoom at 8:30 am and was ready to jump into her first virtual class, Designing with Radical Agency at Stanford’s d.school. She was excited to hear from the professors and learn what the course expectations were. The first step was getting her hands on the ten-week course syllabus. This is what she received.

The multiple empty cells took Micki by surprise, and heightened a sense of uncertainty about what lay ahead in the journey she had signed up for. Traditional schooling has conditioned students like Micki to expect clearly defined goals and predetermined activities, set in a syllabus. In the real world, however, ambiguity abounds. As educators, our goal in this class was to help our students build the agency to develop their own goals and determine how to best accomplish them.

In our first session, we shared a metaphor to explain the mystery of the empty syllabus. We told the class that in most courses the instructor selects a vessel, whether it is a sailboat, a ferry, or a cruise ship, and the itinerary and final destination are set from the start. In this course, they would choose their own vessels, build and possibly rebuild them, chart their own course as they set out to sea, and decide on their destinations. We shared the expectation that they would be navigating ambiguity in a myriad of ways as they embarked on their agency journeys and that we would be their support and allies.

In our planning meetings we had decided that we would be responsive to our students’ needs and that we would not know what these needs were and how they might evolve until we met with them each week. With this in mind, we asked ourselves, “How could we create a syllabus?” and realized we could not. The empty syllabus served as a reminder that the agency journey belonged not to us, but to them. In this article we highlight three insights from our ten-week classroom experiment about the nature of agency and how to best support students in their personal growth journeys.

Insights

It’s difficult to shed the roles we inhabit as teachers and students. By challenging the expectations that these roles created, ownership of learning shifted to the students.

In the first weeks of the course it became evident that getting our class to unlearn the behaviors that defined them as students was going to take some persistence. Even when we led with the message that we were “putting them in the driver’s seat,” we had the sense that, deep down, they really didn’t believe it, and expected us to play our assigned role as teachers and tell them what to do. Perhaps we should not have been surprised by this. After all, they have been playing the student role since they entered the education system. Essentially, the question was: Who did they think they were doing their classwork for? From their student role perspective, they submit assignments for the teacher, and oftentimes those assignments make no sense to them. We wanted them to step out of the student role, and do the work that made sense for themselves. But we, too, had been playing our teacher roles for a long time, and it was easy to inadvertently fall back into more traditional teacher behaviors that could undermine that shift in authority and ownership. Clearly, telling them they were in control was not enough to change their mindset and behaviors. So we decided to try something different. Our experiment was to disappear. Literally.

At the beginning of one class we sent students to breakout rooms for a check-in in pairs. When we brought them back to the main room we led them to believe that the three of us were having connection issues. In reality, we were there, behind a fake virtual background with our microphones disconnected. After the first awkward moments, they came up with different hypotheses as to our disappearance. They figured out our absence was probably intentional (what are the odds of the three teachers, each in a different city, having connection issues at the same time, but not the students?) When a few minutes passed without any sounds from us, different behaviors emerged. Some had clearly moved on to doing something else on their computer, but didn’t leave the call, planning to re-engage when (or if) we showed up again. Someone prompted a discussion about what they should do and a few proposed activities. Fifteen long minutes later, we reappeared, and we had a rich debrief on how their actions — in this experiment and in real life — connect with their evolving understanding of the nature of agency.

An experiment: reconnecting

2. Agency requires courage and vulnerability. Using rituals created a culture of belonging where these mindsets emerged.

We knew how to create a classroom culture when we were actually in the same room as our students, but virtually, we weren’t quite sure. We wanted our students to be comfortable sharing who they were and knew that we had to be willing to do the same. One of the things we did to build a class culture where courage and vulnerability could emerge was to use rituals. During the two-hour time period where we met as a whole class we began and ended each class with a “ritual in” and a “ritual out”. The rituals included meditation, drawing, open-ended personal connections, and improv games. By taking this time we wanted to show our students that building connections truly mattered to us.

We had three goals: we wanted everyone to have a strong sense of belonging; we wanted the students to know that we cared about them; and we wanted our students to build bonds with each other. Rituals provided a way to meet these goals. We saw the bonds among us strengthen as we forged deeper connections each time we met. We believe that rituals are a way to build connections and community and that they are an essential part of creating a meaningful learning environment. They build trust and they allow us to get to know each other as human beings. In our classroom, rituals opened a space where courage and vulnerability flourished.

3. A polished project outcome is an artificial finish line that sends the wrong message to students. Reflecting on their learning journeys and setting their own assessment criteria shifted the focus to personal growth.

Most project-based courses end in some sort of final presentation. We realized that this was not going to work in our class. While presentations can often be a useful forcing function that accelerates students’ work, it can also send a message to the students that what one produces is what matters. And in this case, we felt that message would undermine the goal we aspired to. We wanted the end goal to be the students’ growth, not an artificial finish line. As a result, none of our students ended the course with a completed project. This course was about student transformation and the growth the students showed as they defined the role that agency played in their projects, and more importantly, in their lives. None of this growth was about rushing towards a finish line with respect to their projects. Instead, deep and meaningful insights about themselves emerged. There was a lifting of pressure that allowed the students time to explore, meander and linger in ambiguous spaces. We wanted them to realize that it was about owning one’s agency.

Example of a map, showing a student’s learning journey

When it came time to grade the course we asked our students to craft their own assessment rubric. We wanted them to take ownership of their learning, and this activity pushed them to reflect on what dimensions of growth were important to them. This was not an exercise for us to figure out how to give grades. Instead it was a way, once again, to redesign the relationship between a teacher and a student. After seeing these rubrics, and throughout the course as we watched the students’ growth, it became clear to us that it would feel inauthentic to put a grade on our students’ personal journeys.

Moving Forward

Our hope is that educators can reimagine their classrooms to put students’ growth at the center of the learning experience. To do so requires a willingness to be vulnerable, to take risks, and to linger in ambiguity. We tried several new ideas as we crafted this class experience. We invite you to experiment with what makes sense in your context, and offer the provocations below as a way to start a dialogue around how we might reimagine the possibilities of what education could achieve.

Provocation 1: How might you create a classroom where your students take ownership of their learning?

Provocation 2: How might you use rituals to build community and a sense of belonging?

Provocation 3: How might you go beyond grades and find ways to capture growth and make it visible for the students?

The “empty syllabus” represented a different approach to learning. And on the last day of class, Micki and her peers received their grades. They all got an A+. What if we created an education system where every student and every teacher got a grade of A+ based on their agency as learners?

Designing with Radical Agency is the Fall 2020 version of the Design Thinking Studio course, offered by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka d.school) at Stanford University. The teaching team is composed of Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Maureen Carroll, and Frederik G. Pferdt.