The Free Syllabus System: A New Course Paradigm for Theory-Based Philosophy Classes

Since the dawn of time undergraduates have used “fluff” to addend their work in the classroom. Students bemoan the busy work that comes with weekly posts to a discussion board. They sacrifice balance in sleep and good physical/emotional health to meet paper deadlines, to satisfy attendance requirements, and to cram as much “creativity” and accurate recollection as they can muster into anxiety-inducing hour-long exam periods. All the while, TA’s and teachers are left to sift through the mess, to turn the rough into diamonds, and to ultimately punish students who do not stand up to muster with poor and missing grades. Moreover, poor and missing grades come at an unredeemable cost to students; when a student doesn’t perform, the ceiling for the highest grade is lowered.

In a traditional grading schema, the points available to a student are zero-sum. There are only a few opportunities via limited assignments to earn the points that they need to get an A, and to fail an assignment or otherwise to do poorly is to miss out on crucial chances at success. Students are left calculating which might go something like this: “Because I got an 88% on my midterm, the highest grade I can get in the class is a… 93%, which means I need to earn a… 91% on my final exam to get an A-.” In the traditional zero-sum system, there are few chances besides a rare extra credit assignment for redemption. Once points have been lost, the best one can do is damage control. Is this the right sort of incentivization to produce quality educational moments? I do not believe so.

The traditional schema for grading places an undue burden on students to do well the first time—or else. All the while, looming deadlines and required work demand of students that they conform themselves to the structure of their coursework (often many classes all at once in multiple subjects). It’s no surprise that student mental health is such a concern. Nor should it come as a surprise that under the pressure, students turn in less-than-ideal work—essays beginning with “since the dawn of time.” Students are working under a system that pressures them to perform well on demand rather than offering them an invitation to perform when their creative inspiration strikes. There is a better way.

The ideal educational environment is not one induced through stress and negative reinforcement. Rather, the ideal educational environment is one that directly correlates learning experiences with both positive incentivization and accessible free choice for the sake of the student. It is an environment that puts the student in the driver’s seat of their own education. With a firm grip on the wheel, the student need not fear the whiplash of calculative thinking in zero-sum grading systems, of school-life balance in a pandemic-fueled world, of busy work against the lack of substantial inspiration, etc. Instead, when students are put in the driver’s seat, they may go whenever there’s gas in the engine. They may turn left, or veer right as the inspiration strikes. When students are empowered with freedom in their education, they not only learn as works best for them (some engines like diesel, some like unleaded), but they are also given the opportunity to learn how to learn. After all, freedom is a powerful tool, and knowing how to wield it is a skill worth honing.

The syllabus system that I have developed addresses these concerns from the perspective of the student with a sensitivity towards the needs of an educator to meet educational goals in the classroom. I call it the “Free Syllabus System,” and have found incredible results with my students. I no longer grade busy work; I no longer rue the long hours I spend grading. The work I evaluate is more often than not a joy to read, and even when it’s misguided, the work remains genuinely intentioned. Moreover, since I’ve implemented the Free Syllabus System into my classroom, all of my students pass the class—and I don’t make it easy for them. They pass the class not because it’s easy, but because they are excited to stand up to the challenges they are inspired to meet. I consider it a failing of my own if a student does not pass—after all, aren’t I, as their teacher, the ferryman leading students across the tremorous river of philosophy? Would it not be my own failing to find my vessel missing a passenger on the other side?

So how does it work?

There are no required assignments on my syllabus. Every form of engagement in the class is optional and every option may earn points. Why? Philosophy is practiced in many ways. Today’s youth argumentatively communicate with one another through Facebook and Twitter threads. If this is a student’s preferred way of philosophically engaging, then they may chat with one another on the CANVAS discussion boards. Philosophy is done in private through reading, contemplation, and reflection. Should this be a student’s desired path to learning, they may write critical and analytic essays. Philosophy is also deeply interpersonal. When we share space with one another (with philosophical intentions), we facilitate the discourse of ideas through embodied communication. Some students thrive through the shared interlocution of attended lectures. In sum, any means to engaging philosophically is also a means to educational success, and I leave all such means open to my students. But no two students are the same—each has a life full of priorities, needs, desires, and best practices. Every student is “non-traditional.” By completely opening the grading floor to a set of opportunities to earn points, each opportunity entirely optional, students are invited to choose their own adventure.

Brass tax: every point is worth 1% of the grade and every optional assignment (usually) has enough points available to allow a student to pass (depending on the course content and the level of the students, I shift around point values to encourage different forms of work). Assignments that may be chosen to earn points include discussion posts and replies, short essays, long essays, tests, or attendance. Some students rely on attendance, others on tests, and some on essays or discussion posts; the vast majority of students earn their grade through a mixture of assignment types as the inspiration strikes them.

I have noticed the following three benefits of my approach:

1. When students choose for themselves what assignments to complete, they perform them better. For example, I no longer grade essays full of empty filler phrases, or contrived discussion posts. Discussion board threads go back and forth 10-15 replies long; often between as many as 5 students—and are a joy to evaluate. Additionally, the quality of engagement during lectures is heightened. When students choose how to learn, they invest in their choice, and that investment is reflected in the quality of their work.
2. The burden of grading is less, allowing me to recover that time to develop better lecture content. For instance, in a class of 75 students, a third of them might choose to take a midterm exam. A different third may choose to take the final exam. Moreover, the grading that I do is enjoyable because the quality is markedly improved over traditionally required work.
3. A majority of students earn more than 100% by the end of the semester, and fewer students, on average, receive failing grades. My students succeed and excel.

Why you should incorporate the Free Syllabus System into your classroom:

The focus of my philosophical research is on expertise, skill. I want to know what’s going on in the heads of experts when they perform at their very best, what environmental conditions are most conducive to eliciting skillful performance, and how we can make the forms of skillful action accessible to everyone. What I have learned is that people tend to perform the best that they are able in what are called “flow states,” a term coined by the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The conditions of flow typically involve deep engagement with activity, the loss of sense of self or ego, a dilation of time, and above all—optimal performance. We do better when we do so in the flow, and we feel better about what we do when we are in the flow. Thus, the purpose of the Free Syllabus System is to invite students to learn in a flow-like way.

Flow, and skillful action more generally, is driven by motivation. It is commonly argued that in order to count as an expert, one must have spent at least ten years practicing within a domain with a continuous desire to improve. Now, we shouldn’t expect undergraduates to be experts of their own education—especially considering many of them are in their first years of embarking on their own independent ventures to sate curiosity and set the foundations of a future career. What we should take note of in the foregoing definition is the emphasis on motivation—experts need to desire to continually improve or else they become stuck at the level of hobbyist, or give up entirely.

The same is true of flow states—to “get in the zone” you have to be motivated to do well, to want to perform, to be inspired to be challenged. After all, doing the best that you can at anything is a taxing affair. It’s a hard thing to push yourself to the limit of your abilities. Whether you are an expert or a novice, doing as well as you can takes energy and focused attention, all of which comes at a cost. To continue to push yourself to your limit requires something more: that the activity you are performing, though challenging and taxing, is intrinsically rewarding. That is, the activity should feed back energy and the power to be motivated into the person performing.

This is what is so remarkable about flow—whether experienced by a novice or an expert, the challenge of doing as well as one is able remains proportionally taxing. However, for the performer caught up in the flow, the action feels as if it were effortless. Despite the continued challenge of doing something that is hard, and despite the cost in attention and executive resources for doing so, finding the motivation to go on is effortless. Csikszentmihalyi calls those sorts of people who seek out challenging activities for the sake of flow, intrinsic reward and motivation autotelic personalities. He argues that the more one engages in flow-like activity, the more likely they will be to seek out further challenges for their own sake and for the sake of doing well.

It is the goal of Montessori schools to inspire in their students the development of an autotelic personality just as it is the goal of the Free Syllabus System. For a Montessori school, the challenges presented to students come in the form of creativity-based work and blending students of many ages and educational skills together in a single classroom. The creative work is made to invite students to express themselves as they are most able to, and the blended classrooms curate an environment in which the ideal expression of each student is shared by each other in the classroom.

A university Introduction to Philosophy course (or, really, any theory-based course) is much like a Montessori setup in this way. There are seniors who are taking their final humanities credit to graduate sitting next to starry-eyed freshmen in their first ever college class. There are engineers, artists, mathematicians, anthropologists, and future philosophers all held together in a shared classroom experience. The way that each student will uniquely approach the course’s content is an opportunity and a window through which all the rest of their classmates might gain new perspective on life, philosophy, and their own unique educational paths.

The purpose of the Free Syllabus System as a grading paradigm and paradigm for sharing course content highlights the overlap of the Montessori and University advantages. It is a system designed to inspire creative self-development and, ultimately, the conditions under which flow is most likely to occur. Students find their greatest and healthiest motivation through creative inspiration rather than fear of failure—accenting this is easy: let the student choose when and how to succeed. When students are empowered to choose for themselves how to succeed, and given the freedom to experiment without fear of failure, they push themselves creatively when they are inspired. And when they challenge themselves to be creative, and let their inspiration guide them, they find flow. In educational flow, students learn more and they do so effortlessly. As a consequence, the educational environment that a classroom within the Free Syllabus System takes on is one in which not only philosophy is taught, but also living well. When we invite students to flourish, they will; and hopefully, along the way, they may also learn to be a little more autotelic and creative in the endeavors through which they will enrich their futures.

Spencer Ivy

Spencer Ivy is a Doctoral Candidate of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His interests focus primarily on the Philosophy of Action and Cognitive Science. Spencer’s research includes both philosophical and empirical work on automaticity, expertise, and the aesthetics of technology.