Good luck, Andrew! (Warning: unsolicited anecdotal advice follows.) I remember my own job-search-dream-course syllabi with some embarrassment. It seemed so important to get exactly the right list of the perfect books – lots of them, so everyone could see I knew my stuff and was serious about passing it along. My experience since is that the critical thinking mission is in tension with the content transmission mission – we can challenge their cognition or we can challenge their data uptake, but trying to do both at once usually overloads their systems and produces high quantities of prof-lounge howlers.

Awareness of this trade-off is one of the things savvy reviewers look for in sample syllabi, and you will be evaluated on whether you are a teacher (thinking focus) or a schooler (content focus). Either may be what’s wanted, and a balance can be an impressive tour de force, but realism is important in any case.

I’m at a smaller regional teaching university and I’ve run a couple of searches. The dream content syllabus wouldn’t help you much here; it screams ‘learning curve’ and there are plenty of good candidates out there with actual functional syllabi informed by actual teaching experience. You can simulate that, but to do it you’ll need to regroup around the fact that what looks like thin publication by scholarly standards is glut by ordinary undergrad standards. Three books for a semester is a lot here, four starts to push credulity, and if you’re going to do primary sources don’t try to do much else because teaching them to read them and then write about them coherently will take up most of your class time. (By the way, I’m one of the ‘high expectations’ hardasses around here. That’s why I actually teach them to read rather than fantasizing that someday I’ll get students who already know how to do it: so I can hold them meaningfully accountable for college-level learning.) I guess I’m just saying that you may want to have different sample syllabi for my kind of school and R1s.

Blahblah, sorry for the old guy babble. Again, good luck!

I’m student-teaching high school biology these days, and I recently got some big kudos from my mentor for “actively helping my students develop metacognitive skills” (that is, I try to teach them and get them to think about: how to study for a test, how to do homework in a way that helps you learn, how to complete an assignment in a way your teacher will like, how to look stuff up, etc.)

Now I remember how much your class made me aware that this stuff is all an art than CAN be taught ON PURPOSE. Thanks!