Hillcock Response

I'd like to address some of the issues that Garth and Brittany brought up in their posts with some examples that I've experienced both as a student and an instructor.

In my teaching experience I have almost always relied on reflective practice. The particular circumstances under which I was teaching more or less demanded it (my class consisted of four international students who had almost no language skills and two of them came to the class a full month after it began). I agree with Garth that to treat the syllabus as God would be very detrimental, and in this case it was impossible. I started out with a syllabus, but made sure to put a clause in it that explained that it was subject to some change. I stuck to the basic structure of my syllabus in terms of how much time passed between each section that I taught, but I used student input to determine some of the materials I taught. For example, they felt that one of the books I was using was not giving them practical information, so I switched to my own worksheets and even structured them around things going on in their lives (i.e. I did a vocabulary exercise on driving a week before they all took a trip to Florida). Obviously, change and adjustment was easy in this situation because of the small number of students I had. It was incredibly easy for me to discuss their needs with them and adjust them accordingly (without losing full control of the class or straying too far from the syllabus). In my opinion, too much variability in a syllabus occurs when you've strayed so far from the objective that both the teacher and the students lose sight of what they are working towards.

I can think of one class I had as an undergrad in which there was too much variability and another where the syllabus was not flexible enough. A few years ago I took a course that was supposed to teach us lesson planning abilities. The professor was not clear about deadlines and allowed us to do our assignments out of order. This resulted in the majority of us not turning in our lesson plans until two weeks before finals and as a result getting little to no feedback on our lesson plans. This was particularly disastrous as the lesson plans we developed in this class were to be put to use in our teaching practicums. Suffice it to say most of us fell on our faces during our first lesson.

The class that was too rigid involved a reading list full of out of print items. One of the out of print books was to be read by the second or third week of class. The professor expected us to use her one copy of the book to make xerox copies of over 200 pages of reading. Instead of pushing the book to the end of the semester and allowing us more time to track down more copies or kill some trees, she stuck to the syllabus and as a result most of us didn't do the reading and there was almost no discussion in class that week. By the time the next out of print book came up there was a near mutiny and she dropped it all together.

I think both of these cases would not have been so disastrous if there had been more dialogue between the teachers and students. As long as the teacher can maintain control, I don't think there is any harm in switching up the syllabus a bit.