By Kevin Currie-Knight
I am currently in the throes of creating two undergraduate courses for next semester – one on school choice, and the other on the politics of American education. In so doing, I am coming up against the (probably) age-old challenge of course creation: finding an appropriate balance between breadth and depth of material. Do I cover many topics that I think students should know at the possible expense of going over fewer topic more deeply? Or do I stick with fewer topics in order to give room for us to really explore each one, but sacrifice a few subjects that I really think students would benefit from?
Like with most questions of course creation, there really are no great final answers here. Creating a course or syllabus is much more an art than a science. But finding the method that works best for you can benefit from some thinking about the pros and cons of each approach, and I’ve personally been doing a lot of that lately. So, let me subject you to my thoughts in the hope that they might be of benefit to others.
I think most teachers initial instinct (particularly when teaching any kind of “survey” courses) is to go with breadth over depth. In creating a course on the politics of American education, my instinct is to think of all the sub-topics that students might benefit from – special education law, the role of interest groups in education, the charter movement, etc, etc, – and create a course where students get a bit of all of them. Why? Because there are so many important things students interested in politics of American education need to know, and even the thought of excluding a few of them makes me feel like I am not preparing students.
And this can definitely be a good thing. After all, there are a lot of interesting and important things we need to teach students, and in some sense, it is our job as teachers to expose students to all the possible things about our subject that they will need to know. Another reason to prefer breadth over depth is that exposing students to a wide array of subtopics may improve our chances of covering that one or two that will really resonate with students. Let’s say that I am teaching Politics of American Education, and I decide that there is no time to discuss special education law, but that there are some students in my class who are potentially really interested in special education… but who are bored to tears at the talk of how special interest groups affect education policy. Those students will leave my class less interested than they otherwise would have been.
But we also risk giving up something important in including many sub-topics in our courses: the ability to really mull over and explore any particular sub-topic. Some of my friends teach philosophy, which I think provides a great analogy here. Let’s say you are teaching an intro philosophy course that includes a week or so each devoted to different great philosophers. The question: can you really do Nietzshe, Aristotle, or other great philosophers any real justice in one week? Might it actually be more rewarding to cut down on the number of philosophers covered so that you actually have time to devote two or three weeks to reading, appreciating the subtleties of, and criticizing each philosopher? Asked differently, is the goal to give students a broad survey of what philosophers have written, or allow them to experience what it is like to do philosophy? The former requires depth, but the latter requires breadth.
If the most obvious negative to a “depth” approach is sacrificing time for analysis and focus, the most obvious drawback to a “breadth” approach is probably that it requires leaving some potentially really important subjects out. Which one of these is the biggest negative probably depends on what you want students to get from your class. If the goal is to equip students with some knowledge about several different aspects of your subject, you might emphasize breadth over depth. But if the goal is to prepare students to really think deeply about your subject and sharpening their analytical skills, then you might think about sacrificing breadth for more depth, reducing the amount covered and increasing the focus with which each thing is covered.
Now, I will tip my own hand. Even though my general urge is to go with breadth (because there are just too many “must know” areas of education politics!), I usually end up sacrificing some of that breadth for depth, even though that means making really hard choices about which “must know” topics need to bite the dust. I generally justify this by thinking about the importance I place on students knowing how to really think about a particular subject, which takes time and focus on each subject. I also – and here I may be deluding myself – like to think that by focusing on fewer subjects and giving time for students to really take time to understand and think about each, I stand a better chance that students will actually connect with a particular topic (than if we covered each subject at a more cursory level owing to time constraints).
As I said, there really is no right answer here. In the end, we all need to go with what makes us most comfortable and constantly be willing to revise each semester’s syllabi depending on the how we think past semesters have gone. Yet, thinking about these issues consciously, and recognizing the pros and cons of each approach, can help us all create courses and syllabi that best meet the learning outcomes we have for our students.
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Kevin Currie-Knight is a Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois, Springfield (Liberal Studies Department). He is finishing up a dissertation on libertarian arguments on American education from the University of Delaware’s School of Education, and worked as a graduate assistant at UD’s Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning.