Creating the Assignment — Outcomes and Deliverables
Creating a set of assignment outcomes that work in tandem with specific deliverables will keep learning as the central focus for your project—both for your students and for yourself.
Assignment outcomes can be “mapped” to more general course outcomes. They may include a specialized set of outcomes that support a larger learning goal for the course, for instance, or they may include specialized outcomes that take on several overall course outcomes.
Deliverables can be a mix of individual and group projects, one large sequenced project, a portfolio, or whatever makes the most sense for your learners.
An Example
In a political science course, through consensus decision-making, students choose to focus their research problem on the following question:
What was the long-range historical impact to the LGBTQ Movement of the demonstrations that occurred after the sentencing of Dan White for the murder of Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978?
Students must then proceed to approach their project from assignment outcomes that were developed prior to the selection of that research problem (outcomes that they took into account during topic determination):
Upon successful completion of this project, students should be able to:
- Explain the historical context, historical patterning, key events, major actors, and historical significance of a single major episode in a selected American social movement.
- Identify, comprehend and apply basic concepts of social movement theory to the selected episode.
- Critically discuss strengths and weaknesses of the dominant social theory or theories at play in the selected episode.
- Rigorously apply concepts to develop in-depth understandings of the long-term historical impact of the episode, both for the movement itself and for subsequent events within that social movement and other American social movements.
- Gain an understanding and appreciation of how “theory” develops over time.
- Advance their ability to identify the relevance of “theory” to current social movements.
Given these outcomes and their particular research question, students can then begin to determine how they will form a resource bank, work toward commonplaces and shared definitions, identify important claims and counterclaims, etc. to prepare for collaborative deliberation.
