The Basics of TILTing

Where Does TILT Work?

The TILT (Transparency in Teaching and Learning) Higher Ed project started as an assignment design framework - a way of encouraging faculty to make clear the "hidden rules" for doing successful college work. In the years after the initial research (see the next section for more information), TILT has been applied to many more academic contexts than classroom assignments. Faculty have seen the need for transparent syllabi, transparent office hours policies, and transparent course-sequence handouts.

It's not only the classroom where higher ed professionals apply transparency principles. Staff have seen the need for more transparent student communications, documents, and processes. Departments have seen the need for transparent meeting agendas and internal processes. Colleges have seen the need for transparent job descriptions and community communications. Put simply, TILT is good practice for us all. 

Transparency is a philosophy, a way of communicating with others in our complex higher education system. 

While many of the examples and supporting information that follows focuses on TILTed assignments, please know that transparency has many applications. We are just starting to see the many additional applications available, and I hope to gather more and more examples to share.

These three TILT principles - purpose, task, and criteria for success - apply to any context. You can explain the purpose of a department meeting, the process that you are going to use to accomplish the task, and what a successful meeting will accomplish or produce. The same goes for a financial aid application for students: you can inform people why they should to apply, the process of completing the application, and what a complete application looks like. The details will vary context by context, but the basic three principles are the same. 

TILTed Classroom Assignments

Here is the nutshell version of transparent assignment design: if you tell students not just WHAT they are supposed to do in an assignment, but also WHY they are doing it and HOW they know if they are doing it well, they perform better.  It's that simple. 

The basics of making assignments more transparent are adding information about these three major areas.

1. Purpose: explain to students the skills and knowledge that they are supposed to gain or practice through completing the assignment. The best assignments align with overall course outcomes, so this is a great place to check that your classwork is in alignment with your course. You also might remind students that skills and knowledge gained in assignment completion might be useful beyond the classroom - in other classes, in the field, in their professional lives after college. 

2. Task: Define what the student should do or perform. This is likely the area that most faculty do an already great job of providing for students. 

3. Criteria for Success: Define the characteristics of a successful finished product. For some assignments, this might take the form of examples, or better yet, annotated exampled discussing strengths, encouraging students to go beyond simply copying structures. Other assignments might lend themselves better to rubrics, or checklists of grading criteria with explanations of your expectations. 

Providing greater transparency around assignments does involve work up front - revising assignments, adding material, developing rubrics, etc. - but faculty who do so report a significant payoff - better assignments that are easier to grade. And, if the payoff includes more students feeling like they belong in college and know how to start their work, it is worth the effort. 

For a great overview, see the Transparent Assignment Template Download Transparent Assignment Template and watch TILT Project lead researcher MaryAnn Winkelmas give a summary of the TILT research project and its impacts.