Outcomes Frustration

I've taught 3 Quality Matters workshops in the last two days and am in the second week of moderating a two week Applying the Quality Matters Rubric class online.  So, I am feeling all QM all the time at the moment.  One key aspect of Quality Matters is Alignment - essentially seeking to have everything in the class lead students to meet the course outcomes.

I'm working on making sure my American Government module level objectives are aligned with my course level objectives. I'm going to be honest with you - these course level objectives are horrible. They are not measurable and they omit about half of the important things one should be able to do at the end of an American Government class, including being a good citizen or a thinking member of our country (which to me is the key reason for students to take this class). I was talking with my dean about this and he observed that these objectives were written ages ago and need to be completely rethought.

So, I am struggling, as I imagine many of you do, to make the class that needs to be taught align with the objectives that I have. I am getting around it by thinking broadly about the language of the objectives. For example, one outcome is to "Explain the changing nature of government" and under that, I am including many of the media pieces of the class, where students examine media depictions of the government and explore how that matches with what they know to be true.

The other option, which I am also likely to take as I pull things together in these last days, is to have some portions of the class that do not align with the outcomes that are there.  For this class, meeting the existing outcomes seems like only about 2/3 of the class. The other 1/3 really focuses on using the understanding of American Government to become a good citizen. So this class as it stands would not live through a Quality Matters review, as I confess that I likely will have some module level objectives that don't align with course level objectives.

Are any of you struggling with alignment? Trying to make the course you think should be taught align with the ancient objectives of a course that used to be taught?

Reference:
American Government Alignment Outline - in Workflowy
Quality Matters website