Rules

In meeting the goals of the curriculum, there are a few rules we need to discuss. Whether you’re full-time faculty, guest faculty, a doctoral student, or a teaching assistant, there is one universal rule at our university:  academic freedom .

Academic freedom, in the context of teaching, is the idea that unless someone explicitly says otherwise, you are free to teach how you want to teach, what you want to teach. That doesn’t free you from consequences of bad choices (students might not like you, and if you’re not protected by tenure, you might not get hired again or have your contract renewed). Your reputation is obviously at stake. And there are some rules and expectations, which I discuss below. But otherwise, our norms are generally to grant the same intellectual freedom that tenured professors have to all of our teachers.

One of the most important expectations is that you  show up to class .  We understand that sometimes you can’t.  If you get sick, there are no substitutes. If you have travel, you may miss some teaching periods. When at all possible, you’re expected to find your own substitutes, find some way of attending class remotely, or assigning student work to make up for the missed teaching period. We keep this expectation partly because students are often paying hard won money to learn, and because we want students to learn.

Another expectation is that you  teach to the learning objectives  of the course. More often than not, these are not written down, or if they are, they are out of date or implicitly specified by a recent syllabus. We try to work hard to keep our documentation up to date, but opinions about what to teach evolve and the world evolves. We expect you to be resourceful, reaching out to our experts for guidance. The best way to make sure you’re achieving this is to share your syllabus, in advance of the course, with all of the recent teachers of the course. If you’re teaching a class of your own design, then you don’t have to coordinate or get approval from anyone (but you still might want feedback, as I discuss in the  course design  chapter).

A third expectation is that you  submit grades for all students on time  at the end of the quarter. We do offer  a standard grading scale  for converting percents to grade points, but there are no enforced rules about how you compute them, but we do expect grades to reflect, to the extent possible, the degree to which students met the learning objectives in the course. (This is often quite difficult to achieve, as I discuss in the  grading  chapter).

We also expect you to  follow regulatory requirements .  FERPA , for example, protects students’ privacy by requiring their permission to disclose “student records.” That means you can’t share grades or other evidence of learning that might be considered as a student record, including things like student work, grades of that work, or official communications about their work. This has implications on, for example, which learning technologies you use: you must either use FERPA-compliant software. If you choose not to, you’re responsible for ensuring that nothing that could be construed as a “student record” makes it to the cloud storage of a non-FERPA compliant provider. All that said, you can get a student’s permission and can prove you have it, if you want to share, for example, student work from a previous course offering.

Of course, this scarcity of rules and expectations, while quite freeing, also comes with great costs. It means that there’s huge variation in teaching approaches on campus, which can lead to innovation, but also great inconsistencies in student experience. And it puts a great burden on instructors to decide, fully, how they want to teach. The result is that most instructors just do what other people are doing (e.g., lecture), since that’s the path of least resistance. This harms meaningful innovation in teaching.