Practical aspects of teaching a graduate-level small-molecule chemical crystallography course

We present the practical curriculum of the graduate Chemical Crystallography course in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlining our favorite resources, texts, and software. The course relies on collaborative in-class student assignments that build up a knowledge base of fundamental crystallography and 37 hands-on structure solution and refinement exercises spanning structures of varying difficulty. Students begin solving and refining structures early in the course, following a 'do first, understand second' philosophy. The strong focus on data inter-pretation ensures that students gain the practical skills necessary for independent structural investigation and critical evaluation of the crystallographic literature.