Scoping and cutting content
Two topics got added because the field moved and nothing ever came out
The syllabus is the one you inherited, plus two topics added because the field moved, minus nothing, because nothing was obviously wrong.
What it is
Sorting everything in the course into three layers and cutting from the outside in. The layers are worth being familiar with, important to know and do, and enduring understandings (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).
The workshop pairs this with a second idea, the expert blind spot. You no longer remember being a novice, so the items you find obvious are exactly the ones you file under worth being familiar with and then assume anyway.
Run it
- Sort every item in the course into the three layers.
- Cut from the outside in.
- For every item you did not put in the inner layer and still want to keep, write one sentence saying why. This is the step where things actually leave the syllabus.
- Rank what survives.
The inner layer is smaller than you want it to be. For a first-semester epidemiologic methods seminar, mine has five items, among them that confounding is a property of the causal structure rather than of a p-value, and that adjustment can create bias as easily as remove it. The Mantel-Haenszel derivation is worth being familiar with. It is not enduring, and it belongs in a reading rather than a session.
Say this
Scoping knowledge and skills, from the workshop
“Choose a learning goal. Highlight the most crucial knowledge and skills required. For the remaining items, consider a justification for including in your course. List them in order of priority.”
The expert blind spot, said out loud in week one
“I have been doing this long enough that I no longer reliably remember which parts were hard. When I skip a step because it seems obvious to me, that is my error and not yours. Tell me, in class or afterward, and I will go back over it.”
In my courses
EPI 601 runs thirteen content sessions across a fourteen-week semester, three hours each on Mondays, with Labor Day and fall break removing two. That is less room than the topic list assumes, which is what forces the triage.
Decide the compression weeks in advance. Something will run long, and if you have not chosen what gives, the thing that gives is whatever happens to be last.
Evidence
The three-layer triage comes from a curriculum-design book that reports no trials (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), written for K-12 and imported into higher education by analogy.
The one well-replicated result that bears on cutting is the expertise reversal effect: instructional support that helps novices degrades performance for learners who already have the relevant schemas (Kalyuga et al., 2003). That is a study of instructional support rather than of course-level scoping, so it is a reason to calibrate what you cut to who is in the room, not evidence for the triage itself.
The workshop used an inattentional-blindness demonstration to make the expert-blind-spot point. That demonstration is about selective attention and says nothing about instruction, so treat it as a mnemonic.