Planning introductory college courses: Content, context and form

Course planning is an important faculty role requiring expertise and effective decision-making. Despite the centrality of planning activities in the teaching-learning process, relatively little research has explored the process by which instructors in higher education plan their classes. Thus, the author and colleagues pursued a three-year series of studies of college instructors in the US who were teaching introductory classes. The study explored faculty members' underlying assumptions about planning and their decision-making processes. This chapter summarizes these empirical studies that inform us about the general and discipline-specific purposes faculty express for their classes, the contextual influences that modify their intentions, and the way they arrange discipline content for teaching. A key finding was that differences in course planning reflect varied assumptions about students and about their discipline that faculty in different fields bring to the planning process and which strongly influence them.