Faculty Institute on Teaching
Content Sequencing As Storytelling
| Title | Description | |
| “The Historical Account” | Organized chronologically, progressing from past to present. | |
| “The Cornucopia” | Topic by topic: there are no set relationships amongst the topics, so the ordering is not critical. | |
| “The Model” | Content is sequenced to model steps in a relevant process (e.g., law-making, scientific method, publication process).
Can be very useful with semester-long projects or simulations. |
|
| “The Lego Tower” | Causal: each concept or unit builds on the one that precedes it. | |
| “The Snowball” | Cumulative: the course gradually pulls together a number of events or issues that culminate in some final effect or (re)solution. | |
| “The Dialogue” | The course introduces a series of differing perspectives / methods (“What is justice? Rawls might say… Shklar might say…”) | |
| “Wicked Problems” | Problems, questions, or cases serve as the principal organizing principle of the course. (“Each of 5 modules revolves around a different case study that highlights major tensions in the discipline…”) | |
| “The Loop de Loop” | Recursive: key topics or concepts are revisited throughout the course, with new information or insight developing each time. | |
| ??? | What would you add? | ??? |
Attributions
The “Syllabus Sequencing as Storytelling” section is a remix of the University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence’s “Course Content Selection and Organization” resource (shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license). This remix by Naomi Salmon and Laura Schmidli streamlines some of the original descriptions, adds titles and illustrations, and provides some additional examples.
