A class is a story: Fitting content to sessions

16 Jan 2020 Tags: Course design

Any given class is a story. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It arcs toward a conclusion. The story can be deliberate and designed or it can be inadvertent and confused. Ultimately, the story will be different for everyone in the room. The best that I can do as instructor is the best any performer can do: Create an environment in which the audience can participate, hoping that their outcomes approximate those I had in mind. But what do I do with a prior “story” when the class I designed for an hour and a half session last year is scheduled this year for a sesssion of one hour?

This happens fairly often. Although a fixed-credit class always has the same number of class hours per week, the layout of those hours into individual sessions can vary. For a professional graduate class at the university where I’m currently teaching, the week may be structured as one three-hour session, two sessions of one and a half hours, or two asymmetric sessions (two hours followed by one hour, or one followed by two). Each of these takes the melody of the semester and inserts rests at different points.

When I began teaching, I tended to think of a course as a long melody, from Week 1 to Week 14, the material building from basic concepts to final, integrative activities. I imagined that I could slice that melody wherever I needed, fitting it to any particular year’s class schedule. If I hadn’t done everything I wanted by the end of one class, I simply resumed the topic at the start of the next.

Limitations of the “long melody” notion

The limitation of my “long melody” notion is that I presumed that the material could be cut at any point with no loss of learning outcomes. But now that I’m thinking in terms of the arc of a class, I see that where I cut makes a big difference. For example, a class might begin with a question and end with an answer. A good question is easy to state, readily understood by students at this point in the course, and yield a memorable answer to wrap up the class with a sense of completion.

In this approach, when structuring the class the first time, I would design the question and class activities together. The question would shape the material, both topics and level of detail, while the need to stay true to the material would constrain the choice of question. If all goes well in the actual class, it would travel from a sense of curiousity to a feeling of satisfaction.

Now imagine that the next year, the class session was twice as long. I could just juxtapose two of the earlier classes. The resulting class wouldn’t be terrible but it would feel slightly off, particularly at the join, where there would be a natural end point but the class would in fact continue, introducing a new question. The sense of completion from answering the first question would be muted by immediately introducing a new curiousity. The two questions and their answers could become confused by the students.

On the other hand, if the new year required splitting a longer class into two sessions, the damage would be even worse. There might be no natural break at the halfway point of the original and at class’s end the question would only be incompletely answered.

How this affects course design

These effects are modest but real. I suspect they worsen as the original class structure is stronger. A mushy class structure will be less damaged than one with a clear arc. This has the paradoxical outcome of advantaging weak class designs—whatever their other limitations, they are the most resistant style to arbitrary changes in class length.

I do not have a solution to this. There is much more I could write about the underlying topics. This post is simply to clarify my thoughts about an issue that is much in my thoughts as I convert a course structured around equal-length classes to an asymmetric structure.