Daisy course insider New classes draw on teachers’ expertise, students’ interests

By Amitha Nair | Staff Writer

Filled with popular recurring classes and new additions along with brief descriptions of each class, the course catalog summarizes every class option students can take for either a semester or a full school year.

Throughout the school year, teachers come up with course ideas to potentially be added to the catalog, which comes out in April.

“Teachers propose new classes earlier in the school year, like December, based on their interests and what they think students might want to take,” said Katy Lake, Upper School Registrar.

By creating new courses and validating if older courses still serve the same purpose as they did when first implemented, teachers and department chairs are heavily involved in the process.

The English department follows a path called “Backward Curriculum Design,” where teachers take a step back and determine what skills to introduce to students and which they should master. They then choose texts to promote these skills and further understanding and skill building.

“Every faculty member in the English department is always brainstorming new courses,” department chair Melissa Allan said. “Teachers routinely suggest classes they would like to develop and teach. Then we try to gauge student interest and slide it into the curriculum and course catalog.”

This year, Allan decided to get junior students’ opinions for new senior seminars, rather than choosing them herself and deciding what future seniors would be interested in.

“I asked teachers interested in teaching a senior seminar to present their idea and to write a short description of the class,” Allan said. “Since we can’t teach an unlimited number of courses, I distributed all the class ideas to the junior classes during a form meeting and let them choose their top four choices. The results from the survey helped the department understand what classes to offer, introducing an additional element of student choice.”

Throughout the years, hundreds of courses have been added and removed based on student and teacher preference. Most underclassmen and Form III classes stick with the same curriculum for years, but senior seminars have a different set of rules.

“The long-standing policy in our department for senior seminar classes is we would offer them for three years,” Allan said. “This rotation allows us to integrate new ideas and new classes which keeps the curriculum fresh for students and faculty.”

Allan said this year the department realized some of the senior seminars had run more than three years.

“So that was something we needed to solve for and ask ourselves: are those classes offered for more than three years because students and teachers are still excited about them, or are they offered out of habit?”

Although the process of creating new courses is similar across departments, each department has a different set of rules based on the subject. The science department eliminates a course based on two variables: student interest and overlapping material. But this department is open to bringing back the course after a couple of years.

“We are teaching forensics this year, it is a semester course, and that is something that we taught several years ago and then the faculty member who was actually interested in the course left and the course fell out of the catalog for a while,” said Marshall Bartlett, science department chair. “Then we had a new hire, she was interested in teaching the course again, so we brought it back.”

With each new course, teachers and department chairs take into account the level of difficulty and what learning objectives the class meets. Coming up with a variation can take multiple years to get a sense of what students like and dislike about a course and additional opportunities within the course.

“What we found is that the single chemistry course we were teaching did not meet everyone’s interests,” Bartlett said. “It was baseline chemistry, a generic introduction to chemistry, but a lot of the students were interested in the application of chemistry, so we started looking for a bearing of this course that would be more targeted for the application of chemistry and the environment.”

Between all the departments and new classes, department chairs and teachers are constantly thinking of new ways to interest students.

“The department chairs are very thoughtful with what they have to offer and they care about what students want to take,” Lake said. “If not as many students are taking that class, then they will pull the class and come up with something that they think more students will take.”