Many doctoral psychology graduates go on to teach in higher education, yet doctoral training in psychology content rarely includes explicit, systematic preparation in teaching itself. PSY8358 addresses that gap directly, grounding college-level teaching practice in the learning sciences rather than relying on imitation of how students themselves were once taught.
Backward design for course planning
Starting from desired outcomes, not content coverage
- Identifying desired results first: PSY8358 covers Wiggins and McTighe's backward design model, which begins course planning by specifying the enduring understandings and measurable learning outcomes students should achieve, before any content or activities are selected
- Determining acceptable evidence: The second stage identifies how student achievement of those outcomes will actually be assessed — designing assessments before designing instructional activities, ensuring assessment validly measures the originally specified outcomes
- Planning learning experiences and instruction: Only in the final stage are specific content, activities, and instructional methods selected — chosen because they support the previously specified outcomes and assessments, not the reverse
Active learning and student engagement
The course examines the substantial empirical literature, including Freeman et al.'s influential 2014 meta-analysis across STEM disciplines, demonstrating that active learning approaches (which require students to engage directly with course material through structured activities, problem-solving, and peer interaction during class time) produce measurably better learning outcomes and lower failure rates compared to traditional, exclusively lecture-based instruction. PSY8358 covers specific active learning strategies adaptable to the psychology classroom, including think-pair-share, case-based and problem-based learning, in-class polling and retrieval practice, and structured peer instruction.
Bloom's taxonomy and learning objectives
PSY8358 grounds learning objective design in Bloom's taxonomy (and its widely used 2001 revision by Anderson and Krathwohl), which organizes cognitive learning objectives along a hierarchy from remembering and understanding through applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The course examines how this taxonomy guides both the selection of appropriately leveled course objectives (avoiding a course that claims to develop "critical thinking" while its actual assessments only measure factual recall) and the alignment of assessment methods to the cognitive level an objective actually targets.
Inclusive teaching practices
The course addresses inclusive and equity-minded teaching practices for the diverse college classroom, including transparent assignment design (making the purpose, task, and success criteria of assignments explicit rather than assumed), universal design for learning principles (building flexibility into how content is presented, how students engage, and how they demonstrate learning from the outset, rather than retrofitting individual accommodations), and awareness of how implicit bias and stereotype threat can affect student performance and belonging, particularly for students from groups historically underrepresented in a given discipline.
PSY8358 assignments include backward-design course plans, active learning activity designs, and inclusive syllabus projects
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Backward-design course plans, active learning activity designs, inclusive syllabus projects, Bloom's taxonomy objective papers.
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Frequently asked questions
PSY8358 treats this sequencing question as one of the most practically important lessons of the entire course, because it directly addresses a common and largely invisible planning error that even experienced instructors make, and because reversing the order has concrete, measurable consequences for how well a course actually achieves its stated goals. The traditional, intuitive approach to course planning that many new instructors default to — often because it mirrors how they remember being taught, or simply because content feels like the natural starting point — begins by deciding what content to cover (often organized around a textbook's chapter sequence), then designs lectures or activities to deliver that content, and only at the end designs an assessment, usually constructed to test whatever content happened to get covered in class. Wiggins and McTighe's backward design model identifies a specific structural problem with this sequence: because the assessment is designed last, almost as an afterthought, it tends to simply sample whatever content was presented, rather than being deliberately constructed to measure whether students achieved the deeper, more meaningful understanding the course was actually supposed to develop. This produces what backward design proponents call "two sins" of design — the twin failure modes of "activity-focused" teaching (engaging activities that may not build toward any clearly specified, meaningful learning outcome) and pure "content coverage" (lecturing through material to ensure it is technically covered, with no real attention to whether students achieve any lasting, transferable understanding of it) — a course can exhibit either or both, while still appearing, on the surface, to be a perfectly normal, functioning course. Backward design's reordering — first specifying the genuine, enduring understanding and the measurable outcomes students should be able to demonstrate, second designing the specific assessment evidence that would actually demonstrate that understanding (not simply factual recall, if the goal is a higher-order skill like analysis or evaluation per Bloom's taxonomy), and only third selecting the instructional content and activities that will actually prepare students to succeed on that previously designed assessment — forces a kind of internal coherence onto the whole course that the traditional content-first sequence does not reliably produce. The very practical payoff PSY8358 emphasizes is alignment: when assessment is designed deliberately around the originally specified outcomes, and instruction is then designed deliberately to prepare students for that specific assessment, students experience a course where what is taught, what is practiced, and what is tested are all pointing in the same direction — rather than a course where, for example, class activities target one level of cognitive skill (say, application or analysis) while the final exam, designed almost as an afterthought, ends up testing a different and lower-order skill (mere recall), leaving students confused about what mattered, and leaving the instructor with assessment results that don't actually reflect whether the course's real, intended goals were achieved.