Blog - Classroom Management - 9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves - high school syllabus
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9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves

Full confession: Steph loves a good syllabus. A nice thick packet full of clear expectations, detailed descriptions of each lesson, and an entire semester’s worth of due dates? Bring it on. Her color-coded planner is ready and waiting. But that joy Steph feels? It’s not something everyone (or even most people) experiences.

For too many years, we followed the traditional conventions of the high school syllabus, providing students and families/guardians with an overview of everything our class covered as well as our classroom rules and expectations.

The thing is? Most didn’t really care. And it made for a boring and overwhelming first day of school as a small mountain of papers accumulated on each student’s desk.

Blog - Classroom Management - 9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves - high school syllabus

Do I even need a high school syllabus?

You’ll probably need to create a traditional high school syllabus the first time you teach a class. This can be completed more than a few ways (some of which require significantly less work on your part than others):

  • Your site uses a department-issued syllabus created by committee (or your department chair) which is submitted to and approved by your principal. 
  • You are responsible for creating your own syllabus which you submit to your principal for approval prior to sharing it with students and families/guardians.
  • You teach an AP course, which requires you to create and submit your syllabus to your administrator who approves it and then submits it to the College Board to get official approval for your course. 
  • You teach an AP course that already has an approved syllabus, which your administrator wants you to use. The administrator submits the existing syllabus under your name for College Board approval.

The traditional syllabus will likely include an overview of the content you’ll cover, the order in which you’ll cover it, and possibly both a timeline and the texts you plan to make use of throughout the year. This syllabus varies in level of detail depending on who’s asking for it. While your administrator and the College Board may want, and possibly benefit from, such detail, this is far more information than your students and families/guardians need or want.

Students and families/guardians don’t need to know everything, but they do want to get a feel for your expectations and what your class will be like. The traditional syllabus is basically theoretical and philosophical. Students and families/guardians want practical. (Unless the family member/guardian is also a teacher of the same subject, in which case they may want that traditional syllabus information, but that’s a very small number of people).

Using your high school syllabus to clearly explain your expectations and policies from the very first day makes it easier on everyone. Before any school has been missed, before any assignments are turned in late, before any plagiarism takes place, before anyone is stressed, frustrated, or feeling emotionally charged, all the information students and families/guardians need to really understand is ready and available. This is also helpful if, and when, behavior issues arise—it’s a lot harder for students and families/guardians to challenge you when you follow a consistent policy that you made readily available to them.

What should I include in my high school syllabus?

Whether you’re looking to revamp your lengthy syllabus or you’re creating a high school syllabus for the first time, there are a few essentials you’ll definitely want to include:

Remember, your syllabus is not the only one students will receive the first week of school. Make it easy for them to quickly identify which one is yours.

What students and families/guardians most want to know is how to reach you. So make it easy to find your name, email address, and course website. You can share your phone extension or code for communication apps like Remind if you don’t mind being contacted that way, but if you choose this approach, know that you’re opening yourself up to interruptions during class.

The more we make use of digital resources, the more we need to remind students where and how to access those resources. Providing all the URLs in one place makes it easy for students to access resources quickly and independently. Even if you use an LMS and have links directly to websites from there, the list gives families/guardians an overview of the places you frequent in class.

Students always want to know how they’re going to be graded. Identify grading categories and their weight, and include information for families/guardians on where and how often to check grades: 

Example

Progress can be checked via Aeries. Checking grades is your responsibility. Please do so regularly. Families/guardians are encouraged to use the Aeries Parent Portal on a weekly basis to view current grades and attendance for EVERY class.

Pro Tip: Don’t include any kind of timeline for how often you plan to update grades. Your end-of-semester, exhausted self will thank you when you haven’t promised a three-day turnaround on every assignment.

Tell your students exactly what you expect to see from them and exactly what behaviors you won’t tolerate. Do your best to limit this to a manageable number of behaviors you care most about. There’s no need to include behaviors everyone else includes if they don’t bother you. For example, Steph doesn’t care too much about students eating in class as long as they clean up after themselves, but Kate hates it. Focus on the rules you care about and plan to enforce, and let the rest go. It’ll be easier on everyone.

What’s the difference between rules and expectations? you might be wondering. We tend to think of rules as things that have clearly defined consequences like, “Raise your hand before speaking” or “No electronic devices without teacher permission.” Expectations, on the other hand, are things that we would like students to do and that will make them more successful. These are things we address if they become a persistent problem, not things we address on a one-time basis, like “Be mindful of classmates’ personal space” or “Maintain a clean and orderly workspace.”

When you’re writing your rules and expectations, do your best to keep them short, specific, and positive. A long list of “don’ts” and “no’s” doesn’t create a particularly welcoming environment!

Once you’ve made your rules and expectations clear, you want students and families/guardians to know what to expect when those rules are broken. Most schools rely on progressive discipline, where a first violation results in a warning, and future violations result in family/guardian contacts, detentions, and eventually referrals to the office. 

You may, however, want to avoid explicit timelines and consequences. Students and situations are different, counselors and administrators don’t always handle referrals the way you would like them to, and you’ll give yourself more flexibility to work with your individual students and the parameters of your school if you haven’t been too specific.

Ah, late work. Perhaps one of the most contentious topics teachers, administrators, counselors, students, and families/guardians must navigate throughout the year. Each teacher’s policy is different (we favored a 10% deduction, preferring to motivate students to do the work eventually; we had colleagues who favored a 50% deduction, preferring to deter late submissions), and the closer it gets to the end of the semester, the more late work students want to turn in.

It’s helpful to have a policy for single assignments and for entire grading periods.

Single Assignment Example

If homework/classwork is not fully complete at the time the teacher requests the work be turned in, it is considered missing, and the student will not be eligible to earn full credit. Any work submitted past the deadline will receive an automatic 10% deduction (one letter grade). Homework/classwork that is incomplete, underdeveloped, or inaccurate will receive no/partial credit, even if it is submitted on time.

Grading Period Example

All late work must be completed by the end of the grading period during which it was due (i.e., Missing/Late work from the first grading period will not be accepted in the second or third grading periods).

Setting these policies at the beginning is helpful to you and your students. Not only do teachers’ policies vary widely, but if you don’t have a policy, you’re likely to find yourself wishing you had one when the semester ends and your students submit dozens of missing assignments the day before grades are due. And then you’re likely to change things up mid-year, creating confusion for your students (yep—definitely speaking from experience).

Plagiarism becomes a more nebulous term with every new advance in technology. We hate plagiarism, and probably spend more time rooting it out and defending against it than any other classroom management issue. After many disagreements with students, parents, counselors, and administrators about what does and does not constitute plagiarism, we started defining for everyone what we considered to be plagiarism and what the consequences would be for students who submit plagiarized work.

example

Plagiarism is the practice of using or copying someone else’s idea or work and pretending you thought of it or created it. In this class, plagiarism includes . . .

  • turning in another’s work as one’s own.
  • copying any part of another student’s work before class, during class, or while in another class.
  • copying an author’s exact words without quotation marks and/or citation and pretending they are one’s own. (Note: “author” includes all writers of content that can be found on the Internet.)

Students caught plagiarizing will be given a ZERO for the assignment and receive an administrative referral.

While this is important in any class, we find it to be especially helpful in our AP classes, where heavy workloads and the pressures of college applications often leads students to make poor decisions and then utterly panic when they get a zero on an important essay.

Over the years, we learned that students will drag out the make-up work process forever if you let them. We started specifying how many days students had to complete make-up work (or make-up tests) and emphasizing that it was students’ responsibility to ask the teacher for missing assignments.

You might want to be more generous in this policy than you’d like to be. If a student missed an entire day of school, they likely missed six(ish) classes. If every one of those six teachers says students have the same number of days a student was absent to make up work, you’ll end up with students with a tough choice to make. This doesn’t do anyone any good and, in our experience, English often loses out to math and science.

Something you may not think of but is important to clarify is what your policy is regarding missed “interim days.” In other words, if you assign something Monday that is due Friday and a student misses Tuesday, does the student get an extra day? 

An issue that arises as the year goes on (and sometimes becomes a big problem with spring semester seniors) is being absent the day something is due. Because we tend to provide students multiple days to complete assignments, we also make it clear that an absence on Wednesday does not excuse students from a due date given to them on Monday.

example

Unless previous arrangements have been made or the student has communicated with the teacher, all work that is to be electronically submitted must be turned in on time. (The only exception would be work assigned and completed in class on the day of absence.)

When we don’t set this expectation, we get too many students who are “sick” the day a project is due and chronically absent students fall even further behind.

While we like to be as explicit as possible regarding our absence/missed work policy, we also like to show grace. Usually the students who stress out the most about these policies are not the ones the policies are created for. A quick note indicating that students (as well as their families/guardians) are welcome to communicate with you about these deadlines if there are extenuating circumstances, and you’ll try to be accommodating, can go a long way toward creating a positive working relationship. Note: We find this to be less necessary with our late work policy because ours is quite generous, but it certainly merits a mention there as well.

If you work in a school where students are expected to provide their own school supplies, books, or devices, you’ll definitely want to list those items in your syllabus. Because the Williams Act in California means we can’t require students to purchase any materials, our list only includes materials the school provides for students (like agendas, textbooks, and Chromebooks). This is a great place, however, to remind students of the necessity to bring a charged Chromebook to school each day, especially as our classrooms move online.

Why You Should Consider Using a Syllabus Template

Sure, you could open up a Google Doc, type out your classroom expectations in the default size-11 Arial font, hit print, and call it a day. But we’re big fans of a visually appealing, infographic-style syllabus, and we think you should consider it for a few key reasons.

  • It makes your syllabus stand out from the big pile of similar papers your students will get the first week of school.
  • It gives students and families/guardians a sense of your personality. Choose fonts and graphics that reflect your personality or interests in some way.
  • It shows students and families/guardians you take pride in your work (and you will expect the same from them).
  • Technology is rewiring our brains, making us more likely to skim than read. Your students and families/guardians are more likely to read your syllabus if it’s formatted for skimmers than if it includes lengthy blocks of text.

Interested in trying out an infographic syllabus?

Check out these templates:

Blog - Classroom Management - 9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves - high school syllabus

Coffee-Themed Infographic Syllabus Template

Blog - Classroom Management - 9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves - high school syllabus

Book-Themed Infographic Syllabus Template

Blog - Classroom Management - 9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves - high school syllabus

Minimal Infographic Syllabus Template

While you have to set the expectations for your own classroom, you don’t have to spend hours creating a visually appealing template. Save yourself time by letting us handle the formatting: we’ve got fully editable infographic syllabus templates (minimalist, book-themed, and coffee-themed, so you can choose the one that best fits your personality). Even better? Each syllabus template includes a fill-in-the-blank scavenger hunt activity you can use on the first day of school to make reviewing this not-so-exciting document more engaging for students.

So, if you’re a veteran teacher, take that lengthy high school syllabus and give it a makeover. Condense it down to the basics for your students. And if you’re a new teacher, don’t make this task harder than it needs to be: keep it simple.