June 13, 2024
Tomer Perry
How should we use lesson plans at Minerva? Starting from some reflections on how we use them today, I offer some thoughts about directions for the future. In particular, I propose moving towards more flexible and diverse lesson plans, though not less robust. Therefore, faculty teaching a lesson for the first time or teaching a topic outside of their expertise would have a fairly detailed lesson plan to follow but veteran faculty who are experienced and confident in their ability to teach a particular topic would have the opportunity to draw on a wider array of activities/content in running their class.
Following a structured lesson plan is a feature that makes Minerva unique compared to other academic institutions. It provides consistency to the learning experience across sections and years. This uniqueness plays an important role in Minerva’s pedagogy and should not be discarded lightly; it is part of the commitment to a scaffolded curriculum. Hence, while in other universities students taking the same degree may end up with little content overlap (e.g., they may be required to take a course called 'Introduction to Political Science,' but the contents of that course may vary dramatically from year to year or from professor to professor, such that two syllabi of the same course number have virtually no overlap).
Furthermore, teaching in a team, using the same content and lesson plans makes teaching interdisciplinary courses (which all the cornerstones at least are) a more realistic prospect. Ona personal note, I found that teaching in a team using a lesson plan that I didn’t write has made me a better teacher. Teaching from lesson plans in the past six years, I taught many readings that I would not have picked myself, but have come to appreciate how useful they are. Teaching in a team led me to realize that it’s not always best to pick the article or book that I consider ‘best on the topic,’ most interesting, innovative, or brilliant. Teaching my own courses, I crafted them to reflect not just my learning outcomes but also my personal philosophical/academic tastes: I would assign pieces that I enjoy discussing, find thought-provoking, had a lot to say about etc.
These are good instincts to have as a teacher — discussing a piece you’re genuinely excited about would make it easier to convey to the students the extent to which the topic is exciting and important — but they miss the point that what I enjoy discussing or thinking I about is not necessarily what most students would find thought provoking. The team teaching exercise has forced me to take a step back from my own personal interests and consider more broadly what makes for a better discussion with people who don’t have my professional background or personal tastes. This is not the only benefit of team teaching, there are many more that I cannot list here. Two important aspects that are relevant for the discussion below is that teaching in a team from a shared lesson plans helps faculty new to the course to catch up on the material and run a successful class with less stress, and facilitates teaching outside one’s area of expertise, enabling broader interdisciplinarity.
The consistency of learning experience at Minerva, based on detailed lesson plans, comes with some costs. One such cost is the lesson plans, when unrevised, can become ‘stale‘, which is to say they get less effective with the passing time due to the distance between when they were created and when they are used. This could be because these older lesson plans use examples or cases that are not as familiar anymore or do not resonate in the same way given changing circumstances (e.g. during the pandemic many examples which included public gatherings seemed odd, and after the pandemic the specific pandemic era examples resonated less well). Alternatively, it could just be that older lesson plans were made when the prevailing ideas at Minerva about best practices for LP design were different than they are (e.g. lesson plans that make a lot of emphasis on engagement prompt, focus on procedural instructions such as how to conduct a relay while providing little substantive guidance). A prominent example for such potential staleness is the first class of CX in the fall semester - to start strong, the first class of the year is built around discussing a real life contemporary example of an emergent property in social systems. When I joined the teaching team in 2018, the example in the LP was that of the Arab Spring. Though it was a really fantastic example, it was becoming clear that it doesn’t make as strong an impression on our students anymore as many of our first year students in 2019 and 2020 have not heard much about it (many were very young when it happened). We replaced the example with the Korean pop band BTS that was, and still is, remarkably popular. However, the pandemic years presented a lot of examples that were more alive in students’ minds given their relevance to everyday life and by 2023 it seems that though BTS is still globally popular, it is not always well known to all our students which undermines the impact of this example. At some level, the staleness of LP is not really a problem - every course that is taught repeatedly, whether at Minerva or somewhere else, requires regular revision to stay fresh. At Minerva, we have had been revising courses somewhat regularly with different degrees of intensity. In the cornerstones, leads lightly revise lesson plan regularly before and after weekly team meeting on the basis of past feedback and experience, which adds up for a continuous revision with a light touch. In addition, most summers, a (relatively) small budget was dedicated to cornerstone revisions which leads and their teams prioritized, mostly revising specific lesson plans, writing specific Minerva guides or making some otherwise focused and localized revision to a particular piece of a course. Finally, on a few rare occasion a course was completely revised and restructured, with lots of new lesson plans created and/or materials swapped out.
It is therefore pertinent to consider the process of revision and its regularity in discussing the issue of potential ‘staleness’ of LPs, but in general it is fair to conclude that the more specific and detailed a lesson plan is, the more it risks become stale at some point or another, and the more frequently it would require revision. That is not a reason to avoid specific examples because rich and detailed case studies offer a unique pedagogical value; it is just an observation regarding the implications of using those sorts of pedagogical tools. Given the focus on active-learning and flipped classroom, many of the lesson plans at Minerva focus on engaging specific cases and examples and so there is a fair number of LPs that could probably benefit from relatively regular revision. Nonetheless, different courses and different LPs require different frequencies of revision (and there is not a lot of value of making broad generalization without examining the data).
The other, and arguably more significant, potential cost of relying on structured lesson plan is that it may constrain the ability of faculty member to rely on their expertise and unique teaching styles to lead their classes in a way that reflects their skills. This is a sensitive and controversial topic, and I do not mean to suggest that using lesson plans is itself a problem or that there can be no creativity, expertise, and pedagogical freedom while teaching from a lesson plan. As I noted above, I have found teaching from lesson plans written by others to be a tremendously helpful experience of growth as a teacher, and an important piece of team teaching. It is therefore not a question of whether we should use lesson plans in this regard but a question of how specific and detailed they should be, and how strict our expectations should be regarding the extent to which faculty follow, and more poignantly diverge from, lesson plans.
In the past year, specifically in the cornerstones, there has been a push towards ensuring more consistency in the learning experience provided to students. In part, this push followed concerns raised by students (and faculty) regarding the impact of changing our grading system for cornerstones, specifically noting the discrepancy between grading practices of different faculty members. Nonetheless, concerns about consistency were not limited to grading and were also raised regarding the extent to which cornerstone classes are taught differently by different faculty members. In discussions among faculty regarding our shared norms and expectations around lesson plans, questions were raised about the acceptable extent of divergence from lesson plans, specifically about the implications of skipping prep or reflection polls, skipping a pre-planned activity (or skipping an activity that makes use of pre-class work), improvising activities etc.
These are important questions that the academic team at Minerva should discuss and while there’s room for disagreements on these points, there is certainly a need for clarity regarding the academic policy of our institution and the expectations our academic leadership has from faculty when they approach teaching a class and relying on an existing lesson plan. Like the previous point regarding the regularity of revisions, discussing what could or should be such a policy would take us far afield from the question of lesson plans and so for the rest of this discussion I present some proposals regarding lesson plans which take into account the general concern that strict adherence to lesson plans, if it is too strict (and what amounts to that remains to be decided elsewhere), can lower the quality of learning by constraining faculty’s ability to employ their knowledge and expertise in the most effective way.
Building on the benefits of Minerva’s current LP structure, I make suggestions that maintain their current strength while avoiding the potential pitfalls and create opportunities for innovation and growth in the use of LPs at Minerva.
First, we should keep the current format and structure of LP available and maintained. In revising courses and classes, we should keep a ‘standard’ version of each LP that we are confident and proud of, meant for faculty new to the course or content, and remain the ‘default’ LP for purposes of team coordination. The ‘standard’ LP remains the shared basis for discussion about the content and course (e.g. when there are questions about the meaning of learning outcomes we often go review the way they are first introduced as a way to get clues about the central ideas of a particular learning outcome). In considering deviations and experimentations, faculty should keep the ‘standard’ LP in mind as the basis from which to evaluate departures.
Second, as we revise lesson plans, create new activities, experiment in class or brainstorm ideas in team meetings we should collect a secondary ‘activity bank’ for lesson plans with optional activities, alternative scenarios, useful examples (including some that were provided by students in past years), tangent discussions that may clarify confusions some students, and additional optional content to cover in class. Though coursebuilder isn’t designed to accommodate this kind of content, we often include optional activities, alternative methods for debriefing, common confusions and other flexible structures within the formally fixed structure of LPs in coursebuilder. The proposal is to expand and systematize these practices, allowing for a more organized collection of alternatives and past activities by lesson plan. Ideally, this would be integrated into Coursebuilder and Forum such that when you use an alternative activity it ‘slips’ into the timeline in the right place (so that Forum would not be marking you as ‘behind’ your timeline because you’re pursuing a different progression, even if you’re just flipping the order of activities) but we can implement this approach even with the current technical limitation of CB and Forum and without additional product support on that front.
Third, we can build flexibility into LP design by creating activities that are less focused on content that is curated or generated by the LP designer ahead of time (e.g. case studies or scenarios) and draw more on students’ input and experiences. For example, instead of creating a series of pre-written negotiation scenarios that students would tackle in breakouts we can assign a pre-class work that requires students to come up with their own examples and then run a relay discussion in class where several such scenarios are chosen and are then assigned to different breakout groups. Running these activities requires more knowledge of the class materials (because such knowledge is required to curate the most useful examples) as well as a degree of comfort with a less predictable discussion in class. Therefore, these activities could sometimes be relegated to the ‘alternative’ activity bank alongside the ‘standard’ LP as discusses above.
However, I believe there is good reason to include these kinds of activities more frequently across the curriculum (especially in the cornerstones) because their benefit is not just that they render our LPs more flexible but also that they lean towards active-learning by requiring student engagement in generating cases (therefore also doing extra work of the ‘thinking it through’ principle from the science of learning) as well as facilitate student engagement by picking topics that resonate with students, avoiding ‘stale’ and out of touch examples produced by professors in bygone years.
A related idea, located somewhere between LP design and team teaching practices, is to leave some examples or cases as ‘placeholders’ to be discussed and chosen anew by the teaching team each year. For example, the abovementioned example of emergent properties in CX’s first lesson of the year can be left as ‘empty’ (with a placeholder) in the LP and be chosen every year by that year’s teaching team in the first team meeting of the year right before classes start. This kind of practice can keep lesson plans fresh, make each year’s content different and fresh but consistent across section, and facilitate teamwork and camaraderie among teaching teams.
Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, we can foster a culture of flexibility and experimentation, encouraging faculty to personalize lesson plans while teaching them, trying out different variants of the activities or different modes for teaching the content. This kind of experimentation should of course be constrained in some way and there is room, as noted above, for Minerva’s academic leadership to provide greater clarity regarding their expectations in this regard. At the same time, deviations from lesson plans - so long as they are done thoughtfully and intentionally - should be seen as opportunities to study and evaluate the effectiveness of our current structures, techniques and assumptions. Faculty should be invited to use those experiences as ways to develop additional alternatives to the extended content ‘bank’ of our lesson plans or test out new approaches to teaching and learning.
In the same vein, we should be clear in communicating to students that even though they are all taking the same course with the same general content, each faculty member will teach that content somewhat differently, relying on their own expertise, expanding and emphasizing different points in the materials, and presenting different perspectives or directions for further learning. That is a feature, as I see it, not a bug: it is why we ensure students do not stay with the same faculty instructor for both the fall and spring even if though many of them would prefer that, and even though there would be a great benefit to developing such a personal connection between students and faculty, not to mention ensuring greater continuity between two parts of a cornerstone course.