Spring Cleaning

This morning I awoke to the welcome sounds of birds.  They’ve returned to the neighborhood, adding to the mix of voices that accompany my morning coffee and email routine. I have zero vocabulary for identifying birds (I call my friend Felicia when I really want to know), but what I can say is that I recognize the repeat visitors and the warm weather their return signals.

Waking to those voices always brings a sense of relaxation and joy.  We’re in the final weeks of our spring semester, the celebratory rituals have begun, and even though I don’t have summers off, the relaxed rhythms of the warmer months beckon. We’ve almost made it through another year.

Then it happens…. Ahhhh,  there’s so much left to do!  There are plans in progress that are yet to be finished.  My goals for the year are only half-way done.  My hopes for completion seem foolish at best.  And that’s just me.  My faculty and students are having the same moment multiplied by 1000s.  How do we get it all done?

Well, we can’t.  So let’s just accept that. But there is value in this moment of panic.  It provides an opportunity to evaluate the goals we set and consider adjustments for the future.  Were all of those goals worth it?  Do they get at the heart of what we wanted to do?  Are there too many? Too few?  It is time for a little spring cleaning.

As I adjust my list to something more reasonable and perhaps attainable, I am thinking about curriculum design. At universities, much of the curriculum is considered without reference to the whole.  Although departments work together to develop shared goals in the form of course descriptions, outlines, and learning outcomes, the courses themselves are mostly developed in isolation.  Faculty bring their talents to a topic, interpreting it through their particular lenses, with little thought to what else a student might be learning.  And, although the overall path through a degree is strictly defined in some majors (usually in STEM disciplines), in most cases the path is only encoded as far as course levels and a few pre-requisites, with the rest being experienced as a series of topics to be pursued and then, well, mostly forgotten.

This reality leads me to think about our students lives.  Project due dates are looming, with a generally pile up of research and exams and presentations for the end of the month of April.  How will they get it all done? How will they fully benefit from the creativity and insights of the faculty if we are piling on with no concern for that end of semester reality?

Here’s a thought.  Let’s do a little less.

We can start by looking at our syllabi and asking the question, what did I truly want to accomplish in this course?  All indicators suggest that the details of our courses fade as students leave for their next semester’s work, so what should they take with them?  Looking at what you planned, right at this moment when the fast slide to the finish line begins, what might you omit next time?  What is not essential to the things you’d like your students to carry forward? When you find it, write it down for next year.

Then let’s do a little reorganizing.

Remind yourself that a) your students are in three to four other classes, all with readings, assignments, and exams weighted toward the end of the semester and b) feedback is a really good thing for learning.  How might you reorganize the material that is essential, so that less of the big stuff is saved for the last weeks of the semester?  How might you make time for feedback and revision? Write it down for next year.

These are small steps, to be sure, but if we start to ask these questions regularly, we might be able to de-clutter our lists, creating just a little more room for honest engagement with ideas.  Let’s not equate academic rigor with a quantity of readings or assignments.  This just leads to skimming and superficial encounters with important concepts and texts.  Let’s not think that the most important measure of learning is a single large assignment, but build in the shorter building blocks that give room for improvement. Let’s not think of our courses in isolation, but consider the totality of a student’s schedule and find ways to weave that into our planning.

You see the world is full of information and we are all adept at touching the surface of ideas.  But to get to the small moments that can build real understanding, we need more time. Universities need to create that time in our schedules and our curriculum as a counter-balance to the abundance of information and experiences at the touch of our fingertips. We need to make room for thinking.  So in the spirit of spring cleaning, let’s sweep away the excess and do a little less.

We might even find it brings us joy.