Teaching Preparedness Checklist

Teaching can be rewarding and challenging in a regular semester. Given all that's happened in the last two years, teaching now can be even more so. To support faculty in using their time wisely and targeting their efforts to enhance their classes, the CTLE has designed this checklist that faculty can use to review their course plans and decide where and how to focus their time and effort.

As you review each item, check to see if you have achieved each item. Where you aren’t sure, reach out to CTLE@syr.edu and ask for a course review.

• You've included a technology check section for your students in your Blackboard course.
• You've begun adding material to your Blackboard course.
• You have clearly stated objectives for your course (3-5).
• You can articulate the essential items and outcomes in your course.
• You’ve made plans to ensure that students achieve these essentials.
• You assess students regularly throughout the course—not once in middle and once at the end. 
• You plan to provide regular feedback to students individually about their progress to the course objectives.
• Your assessments clearly measure the degree to which students achieve the objectives for the course.
• Your assignments directly support students in practicing recalling knowledge or demonstrating skills called for by your course objectives.
• Your content clearly points students to the course objectives.

• You’ve planned deliberately to build community in class in adaptable ways.
• You plan to repeatedly engage in community-building activities across space and time.
• You’re revising your course to speak to equity, diversity, inclusion, and access concerns. Such activities might include adding scholarship from under-represented scholars; imagining how students with exceptionalities will participate in class sessions and what that means in your class; imagining how students with various challenges will engage with the instructor and content.
• You’ve re-thought your ground rules for your classes to facilitate function, and you've planned to have students help to create these guidelines.
• You’re re-imagining group work and projects to facilitate appropriate objective achievement with maximum adaptability.
• You’ve reviewed your content to consider how you can present it in inclusive ways.
• You’ve started identifying ways to break large pieces of content into small pieces.
• You’ve begun thinking about universal design for learning and incorporating those principles into your course.
• You’ve considered alternate ways for students to demonstrate their learning apart from tests and quizzes.