By James M. Lang

I spent the week before Thanksgiving playing catch-up on my paper-grading duties. I had been behind all semester, thanks to my 5-year-old son's appendix rupturing in mid-October, necessitating surgery and a weeklong stay in the hospital. Nothing puts your dedication to timely grading in perspective like watching your anesthetized child being wheeled through metal doors by a team of doctors and nurses, and wondering if you'll ever see him again.

So I lost a couple of weeks—the first one spent every day by my son's bedside in the hospital, watching cartoons with him and catnapping in an uncomfortable chair (I had the day shift; my wife had the overnight), and the second one fretting over his gingerly motions around the house as he slowly regained his mobility.

All the while, of course, my students were working away, reading their assignments and writing their papers. I managed to teach my courses during the second week, but that was all I could handle. The stack of papers to grade piled up.

In the week before Thanksgiving, as I worked my way through the final set of papers from my English composition course, I felt something sinking in me. While all of the students had improved their writing in at least a few ways since the beginning of the semester, some students were still making basic mistakes that we had reviewed multiple times in class, and that I had pointed out to them directly in my responses to their earlier papers.

One student's paper contained a half-dozen comma splices—the one grammatical error that I usually review extensively in class, and that we practice identifying and correcting. Another student seemed to have no idea how to incorporate a quotation into her writing—a skill that we spend an entire class period on, and about which I had given her further instructions on her last paper. Transition problems abounded, as well as lifeless introductions and conclusions.

The sinking feeling I had stemmed not from the fact that students were still making mistakes, or that they had not completely mastered the art of English composition. When that happens, I'll retire happy.

What disturbed me was the awareness that every student seemed to need something different at that moment. We were in the last weeks of the semester, and the students were working toward the final research paper. I usually leave some open, unplanned class meetings on the syllabus for that time of the year, to allow me to focus on any final problems I see in their writing. But instead of a few common problems, I saw a myriad of different ones, ranging from basic to advanced. How could I possibly be helpful to students in all of those areas in one class period?

So, to borrow a football phrase, I called an audible.

The next class session, I waited until the end of the period, and then stood at the front of the room holding the last stack of graded papers.

"Listen," I said. "Change of plans. You can forget about the readings on the syllabus for the next class. We're not meeting. I'm canceling that class. I think the only way I can move everyone forward at this point in the semester is by meeting with each of you individually. We're going to schedule 20-minute conferences instead of holding class together."

I expected smiles at the prospect of a canceled class, but a chill seemed to descend on the room instead. I hastened to explain that nobody was failing or in trouble, and then had them sign up for conferences before Thanksgiving to discuss their last paper and review the work they had done so far on their research papers.

The bargain worked out much in their favor, of course. They were trading a 75-minute class for a 20-minute conference, while I was trading 75 minutes for five hours of individual conferences. When that sank in, and when they walked out of their conferences with the benefit of individualized attention, I'm confident that most of them saw the value of the change.

I suspect their initial discomfort stemmed, in part, from fear that they had performed so poorly that they needed a dressing-down. But it may also have stemmed from the simple fact that I was changing what the syllabus had promised.

My syllabi usually offer detailed descriptions of each day of the semester, with all of the readings and topics for each day's class spelled out. I try to work all of those elements out in advance and stick to the schedule because I know that students are juggling multiple courses, and it helps them to plan out their work and study time. But because I plan out the entire semester, changing the itinerary or falling behind has the potential to throw off the rest of the course. So I rarely change, and I imagine the students come to count on that.

When I took over our college's Honors Program this year, one of my first duties was to meet with a conscientious student who was withdrawing from the program and wanted to outline what he saw as its deficiencies. One of his main complaints was that instructors in the program did not stick to the syllabi and made changes to their courses or their scheduled assignments midstream.

The conversation reminded me that our students do see the syllabus as a contract or a promise about our expectations for the semester and about their workload. (The better ones see it that way, anyway. I have had students whom I'm quite certain never even looked at the syllabus again after I reviewed it on the first day of the semester.)

So while it might make all the sense in the world, from our perspective, to make adjustments and respond to unexpected situations or unforeseen problems, such changes may appear to our students as arbitrary and capricious. All of which means that such adjustments should not be undertaken lightly.

I know some of my colleagues avoid the problem altogether by not providing detailed information on their syllabi. They may only break the course into broad units, and list a topic for each unit, with details to come as the semester progresses. Others chart a more middle ground and offer a topic or the readings to be covered each week.

Both by temperament and from pedagogical conviction, I favor a detailed level of planning. I also know that it saves me time, during the middle of the semester (when I need it most), to have already planned out the schedule of readings and course topics.

So I'm led back to a solution that I have written about here before, and which increasingly has come to seem to me like the most essential component of good teaching: transparency.

When changes need to be made to a course, they should be made with full disclosure: what has gone wrong in the original plan, why I think it went wrong, and what options I saw to rectify the situation. If course size allows it, it may even help to ask students to make suggestions on how to pull a splintering course back together.

The more open we are with students about the reasoning behind our course planning, the more we can invite them to become partners in their learning, and the less we will appear as autocrats who can require students to reshuffle their schedules and workload on a moment's whim.

During the crush of the semester, it can be difficult to live up to the ideal of openness. We have so much to take care of in our teaching, so much grading to do, so many other parts of academic life to manage. It took a health crisis to jolt me out of my routines this semester, and make me reflect on what I was doing in the classroom and how I could do it more effectively.

But the jolt ultimately sent waves into my other course as well. A few weeks ago, spurred on by my reflections on this subject, I asked my honors students to work in groups and design a final assignment for their course. The exercise gave me a terrific opportunity to display some transparency, since I had to explain to them first what mastery of skills and content I expected in any final assignment. I was delighted by the creative projects they proposed, and I took pieces from several of their final proposals to create the assignment I ultimately gave them. I hope and expect that their commitment to that assignment—even though it deviated from what I had initially described on the syllabus—will be stronger, since they understood the purpose and had a hand in its creation.

I know that my commitment will be stronger to it as well, knowing that it came about not from mindlessly following the plans I laid out back in August but from stepping back and taking a look around at what was happening in the course, talking to my students about it, and then calling an audible.

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of "On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching" (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes about teaching in higher education, and his Web site is http://www.jamesmlang.com. He welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.