In many courses, the days after the first exam can be stressful.
Some students might feel worried about the results, or even doubt their
abilities. So at the end of one challenging exam, a professor took a few
minutes of class time to reassure the students.
Her brief remarks led to the kind of email that every faculty
member should want to receive: “The speech you gave post-exam
was something I needed to hear. Thank you for reminding me that I belong here
and have the potential to succeed.” The student’s words tell
you a lot about the instructor’s teaching style.
Besides teaching content and skills in your discipline, your
role is to help students learn. And not just some students. The changing
demographics of higher education mean that undergraduates come to you with a
wide variety of experiences, cultures, abilities, skills, and personalities.
You have an opportunity to take that mix and produce a diverse set of thinkers
and problem-solvers.
Teaching inclusively means embracing student diversity in
all forms — race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socioeconomic background,
ideology, even personality traits like introversion — as an asset. It means
designing and teaching courses in ways that foster talent in all students, but
especially those who come from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher
education.
Traditional teaching methods do not serve all students
well. This guide is for any faculty member who believes, as we do, that
education can be an equalizer. We share tips here that any instructor can use
to minimize inequities and help more students succeed. We’re not suggesting a
complete redesign of your courses, but more of an overlay to your current
teaching practices.
Common Questions
If you’re still
skeptical at this point, you’re not alone. Here are some quick answers to
typical questions we hear about inclusive teaching.
I don’t teach about diversity. What does diversity have to do with my
course, and why should I care?
Some instructors make
the mistake of equating inclusive teaching with introducing current events or
“diversity issues” into, say, a math course. Of course you should offer diverse
content, texts, guest speakers, and so on, where they’re relevant, and there’s
been plenty of talk about that in academe. But when we talk about teaching
inclusively, we choose to focus on the teaching methods that apply to all
courses.
Are the tools of inclusive teaching just hand-holding? Shouldn’t
students be expected to learn on their own?
Instead of
hand-holding, we prefer the word “structure.” Without structure in any
situation, you leave it up to chance whether your goals are accomplished. For
example, say you threw a party to bring together your single friends. They are
far more likely to meet a variety of people if you plan icebreakers and
activities (high structure) than if you simply provide space and time for the
event (low structure). The same is true of learning: More structure means more
students will engage and learn from you and their peers.
I understand these methods help certain students. But don’t they harm
the ones who don’t need this kind of assistance?
Coming back to our
party analogy, the extroverted party lover is going to mingle and meet people
in either a low- or high-structure event. But the introverts who aren’t
comfortable with random mingling won’t. Helping those who need the structure
doesn’t harm those who don’t.
My course has a lot of content I need to get through. Can I really
adapt these teaching methods to my discipline?
You’re not alone in
believing that your course is unique in having too much content to make any
changes. We’re not advocating a total redesign — just that you consider making
some tweaks that can be the difference between retaining a more diverse
population of students in your discipline, and not.
Key Principles of
Inclusive Teaching
We’ll get to the specific strategies
shortly, but first the theory. All three principles convey the same message:
You, as the instructor, have the control to create experiences that level the
playing field in your classroom.
Principle No. 1: Inclusive teaching
is a mind-set.
For every teaching decision you
make, ask yourself, “Who is being left out as a result of this approach?”
Consider: When you lecture, students vary in their ability to stay focused,
pull out key ideas, and organize the information. Is it “hand-holding” to
provide a skeletal outline of your lecture in advance? Critics might think so.
But the result is that all students leave class with a set of minimal notes, a
clearer idea of the main points, and an expert’s example of how ideas fit and
flow together. And in the process, your students now have a good structure for
how to take notes.
Principle No. 2: The more structure,
the better for all students.
It’s worth repeating: More structure
works for most undergraduates, without harming those who don’t need it.
Students come to your classroom today with different cultural backgrounds,
personalities, learning differences, and confidence levels. Their very
diversity may seem overwhelming at times, but you can reach more of them by
sharpening the structure of your syllabus, assignments, tests, and pedagogy.
Principle No. 3: Too little
structure leaves too many students behind.
Some of the most traditional and
common teaching methods — lecturing, cold-calling — aren’t very inclusive, at
least as they are commonly done. Certain faculty members even take pride in
using the classroom to cull the “weak” students from the “strong.”
When we run faculty wokshops on inclusive teaching, we advise participants
to envision the types of students who get left behind by low-structure teaching
methods. To illustrate that here, let’s think about two hypothetical
students:
- Vanessa is a gifted student in a class with a Socratic
approach — a low-structure method of class participation. But she’s
uncomfortable raising her hand or blurting out answers the way other
students do. The result: Her discomfort might be distracting her from
learning, and her ideas are not part of the conversation, so others aren’t
learning from her. Vanessa would benefit from varied opportunities for
participation.
- Michael is an engaged student who is comfortable in
class and in discussions, but he’s feeling like a fraud because he
received a failing grade on his first paper. Up to this point, he was able
to do well by memorizing a lot of content. Now he’s in a required course
for his major that involves more analytical writing and expects him to
apply concepts. It’s a low-structure class in which his entire grade will
be based on how he performs on two papers and one exam. Michael would
benefit from more practice — that is, more low-stakes writing assignments
and quizzes, and more-frequent feedback. The discipline might miss out on
an engaged student because he may feel that he needs to change
majors.
Both cases show how a lack of
structure can inhibit student learning and development. Conveniently for our
purposes here, Vanessa and Michael also illustrate the two main areas in which
you can be more inclusive in your teaching — via classroom interactions and
course design.
Ways to Interact
Inclusively With Students
Here are some tips
that work for us. We teach small-sized courses as well as large ones filled
with hundreds of students seated before us in neat little rows. So don’t even
try pulling out excuses like “My
course is too large to do any of this” or “My classroom space is not ideal for these
techniques.” We hear you, but we’ve seen these strategies pay off
in all types of courses and classrooms.
Get comfortable with
periods of silence in your classroom.
Think-pair-share is
a gateway
technique to active
learning. It’s the versatile little
black dress of inclusive teaching. Yet we often shudder when we see it in
practice, as faculty members tend to skip right over the thinking part.
There it is,
prominently in the name of the technique: think-pair-share. The thinking time is crucial for students to
form and own their individual thoughts before pairing off and sharing.
Otherwise, you risk seeing some students monopolize the discussion and others,
like Vanessa, overwhelmed and left behind. That could cause quiet students to
prematurely accept other people’s ideas before considering their own, and lead
those dominating the discussion to think their contributions are more valuable.
As the instructor, you know that good ideas can come from any student.
Some instructors rush
the “thinking” part of this exercise because they get nervous about too much
extended silence. Even five seconds of silence in a classroom can feel like an
eternity.
We urge you to get
comfortable with the silence so that all students have the time they need to
think. Tell the class, “I’ll give
you two minutes to think or write silently, and then I’ll prompt you to pair up
with your classmates.” Be prepared to repeat that every time you
use this technique. If you know that you feel discomfort with silence (most of
us do!), you may want to use a timer to regulate it.
Add structure to small-group
discussions.
A classwide discussion has its benefits, but not all students have the desire,
confidence, or chance to participate. Small groups give students a low-pressure
way to vet their ideas with peers.
Yet this technique is
not as inclusive as it could be, if you leave it to chance that the teams will
function well (low structure). Here are some ways to add structure to
small-group discussion:
- Assign and rotate roles. Students who are at ease in
class discussion, like Michael, have a tendency to take over. By assigning
and rotating roles (reporter, skeptic, facilitator), you increase the
structure and level the playing field a bit.
- Take time to teach students how to participate in small
groups. Be explicit about some of the “rules,” such as exchanging names
before they get started and putting away their cellphones or laptops.
- Provide clear instructions on a screen or worksheet.
We’ve observed many faculty members give a single oral prompt, but that
leaves behind students who have hearing loss, who have learning
differences, or who simply need to be reminded about the task at hand.
Principle No. 2 about structure applies here, too: Some people need visual
cues, but offering them certainly won’t harm the other students.
Allow anonymous participation.
Not all participation
and engagement in your course needs to be spoken. Students who are introverts,
who feel that they don’t belong in a college classroom, or who hold a minority
opinion on some issue may need to engage with the class in other modes besides
public speaking. For example, some students with conservative viewpoints may be
reluctant to participate in a class discussion if they perceive that nearly
everyone else has a liberal viewpoint.
Here are two ways to
use unspoken, anonymous participation in class:
- A low-tech approach: Offer a prompt and ask students to
write an anonymous response on a notecard. Ask them to swap cards, and
then swap again. Start a class discussion with a few students reading
aloud the card in front of them.
- A high-tech solution: Choose a classroom-response
system (clickers, web-based polling) or a discussion board in which
students are anonymous to one another but not to you as the
instructor.
Note that both
approaches would help Vanessa (our hypothetical student who is reluctant to
participate in class), as well as a student with unpopular political views. We
recognize that speaking up may be a skill you are trying to cultivate, and
these techniques provide a way to build trust and help students gain
confidence. Perhaps you are starting to see how the same strategy in an
inclusive-teaching toolkit can work to reach a diverse mix of students.
Counteract
self-perceptions that stunt student learning.
Two such
self-perceptions that we frequently encounter are a fixed mind-set (versus growth
mind-set) and impostor
syndrome.
A fixed mind-set
reveals itself in comments like “I’m not a math person” (uttered more than a
few times in the history of higher education). To counter it, one of the
simplest things you can do is talk about a growth mind-set in class. Your goal:
Help students to see that intelligence is not a fixed, predetermined quality
but something that can be developed via learning. Students may be particularly
receptive after a challenging assignment or a midterm exam. Share in class a
task that you found difficult — maybe learning how to speak a foreign language
or play the guitar. Convey that learning is hard yet not impossible. One of our
favorite words to use on this front is “yet,” as in: “I haven’t learned how to do X well yet, but
I’ll get there!”
The “impostor
syndrome” — the feeling that you don’t belong on a college campus and might be
found out as a fraud despite your accomplishments. How reassuring it was to
find out that the feeling was common, and
even had a name. You don’t have to experience it to sympathize with it. You
don’t even need to understand it. You simply need to remind students: “You
belong here.” If it feels comfortable
to do so, share a time when you felt like a fraud.
It might help students like Michael who are struggling with the rigors of
college, and it won’t hurt those who aren’t. If you’re uneasy discussing your
personal experiences in class, consider other ways to communicate that message,
such as through your syllabus, emails, or study guides. The key is to be
explicit about it.
Connect with students
personally.
This is a skill you
may need to practice. Even if making personal connections with students comes
naturally to you, it can be tricky to find the time, identify the appropriate
words, and establish boundaries. But it’s worth the risk. Here are some things
that work for us:
Use their names. It’s
an easy yet powerful way to connect. A few years ago, when we led a campus
discussion on how to create an inclusive learning environment, we were struck
by the simplicity of the requests from students. Many described how meaningful
it was when an instructor made eye contact or called them by name. You can try
simple hacks like having students use name tents or hang folders over desks
with their names in large print. Don’t assume that, just because you won’t
learn the names of all of
them, you don’t need to learn any of
them. Having trouble pronouncing some names? Ask for a phonetic spelling or a
recording — a request that is deeply appreciated by those of us with difficult
names to pronounce.
Model sharing pronouns. On the first day of class and on your syllabus, share your
pronouns and invite students to share theirs with you and with peers if they
feel comfortable doing so. Students who identify as LGBTQIA will appreciate this welcoming gesture, and all
students will see you modeling inclusive methods to avoid assumptions about
students’ gender identities.
Fire off
a quick note. We use this technique early
and often throughout the semester. Send a note congratulating students who were
successful on an early exam or paper or who substantially improved. Reach out
to those who didn’t do so well and express your willingness to help them. Check
in with students who have missed a class or two. Whether through a mass email
(now’s a great time to learn how to do a mail merge incorporating a preferred
name from your pre-course survey) or individual notes, reach out. The same
principle behind learning their names applies here: Just because your notes
won’t reach every student doesn’t mean you should abandon sending any.
Ideas for Inclusive
Course Design
Unfortunately, taking
steps to interact with students more inclusively in your classroom might not be
enough to reach students like Michael who are at risk because of the way a
course is organized — too much emphasis on lecture, too few assignments, too
much of the grade based on a single paper, midterm, or final exam. So the
second major question to ask yourself is: Who is being left behind by my course design?
Here are some ideas to
bring more structure to your course design, and we hope, more success to all
students, including Michael.
Design courses in
which you speak less.
A mistake that many
rookie instructors make (and plenty of experienced ones, too) is to talk
through an entire class meeting. As a result, whenever they pose a question to
students, it seems like an afterthought rather than something intentionally
baked into the course design. But you may object, “How will they understand if I don’t explain it to them?” Our
response: “How will you know they
understand if all they’ve done is listen?”
Give lots of low-stakes quizzes and
assessments.
Your goal here is to
evaluate the learning of every student in every class — preferably multiple
times. Students like Michael might not realize that they are struggling to
retain the material until they fail the first exam. With multiple assessments
in class, students practice asking themselves metacognitive questions such as,
“How do I know I understand something?” As the instructor, you also benefit by
learning immediately how many students are having trouble with a particular
concept or skill. For example, how will you change your approach if you learn
that only 60 percent understand a concept? By speaking less and asking more
of all students, you
avoid allowing your impression of the course’s progress to be set by a few
students who appear to understand the material. Rather, you are obtaining
evidence about the learning of all students, equally. If you teach a class with
a large enrollment, don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea of multiple assessments.
Many technologies can assist you with grading, and you very likely can find
help from your institution’s teaching-and-learning center.
Incorporate TTQs —
typical test questions.
TTQs help students
identify the caliber of questions they are likely to encounter in a forthcoming
assessment, and give you an opportunity to assess the learning of every
student. When a student like Michael has difficulty with the course TTQs, he
has evidence that he doesn’t yet understand the material and needs extra
support. You can identify the Michaels earlier in the semester, and reach out
to them before the first exam.
Assess them before and
after class, not just during.
The assessments should
be low-stakes, yet required. For example, a vocabulary quiz before class will
acquaint students with terminology, while a short essay after class might emphasize
deeper work with a concept. Pre- and post-class assessments distribute learning
over time and help all students build study habits that avoid cramming. The
most important aspect here is that the work is not optional. Why? Simply put: How often do you do optional work
in your job? When assignments are optional, compliance will vary and you risk
exacerbating differences in study skills, background knowledge, and the like.
For example, if Michael has a false sense of confidence about his understanding
or is not managing his time well, he may decide not to participate in an
optional study guide. Some students have been trained to seize every attempt to
practice, while others haven’t — and that, in turn, can contribute to
achievement gaps.
Reduce the stakes of
major papers and tests.
When a single exam or
a paper carries a lot of weight, you risk letting that one experience or day
wreak havoc on a student’s grade. You can downplay high-stakes work by: (1)
allowing students to drop one or two of their worst scores on exams,
assignments, or quizzes; (2) letting students replace an earlier score with a
cumulative final grade; and (3) replacing some of the weight of high-stakes
work with smaller, more frequent assessments. Unfortunately, who experience an
early setback in a pivotal course and feel their only option is to drop the
class and change majors. Ask yourself: Is my grading scheme allowing students to grow?
By relying less on
lectures and more on activities that you can assess, you increase the validity
of your grading while helping students cultivate a sense of hope in the face of
a single setback. It’s important that, in course design, we practice what we
preach.
Set clear expectations.
Imagine you were asked
to be part of a grant-writing team in which you had only a vague idea about how
much time it would take and what a successful proposal would look like. Fitting
that task into your already busy life would stress you out, right?
Similarly, a lack of
clear expectations in course design can induce stress among your students. They
need dependable structure around due dates. They need to know what success
looks like in your class. If those things are lacking, that will be a source of
anxiety and tension for some students (for example, those who work, are
parents, or have learning differences) more than others. You as the instructor
can remedy their stress, while at the same time getting kudos for being
“organized” from the students who need less structure.
Here’s a checklist of
ways to set clear expectations — and avoid unnecessary stress and
miscommunication — around what it takes to be successful in your course:
- Write a syllabus that sets both semester goals and
provide daily objectives. Those daily objectives become a study guide for
your students.
- Set deadlines for major assignments and exams at the
beginning of the semester and try to stick to them.
- Provide clear instructions for each assignment. Be
transparent about how students will be graded (i.e., use a rubric) and
what mastery looks like.
- Write exam questions that align with your daily
objectives. If you come up with a good question that doesn’t match one of
your stated objectives, you have misalignment. Skip that question this
semester and use it next semester, after you have revised your objectives.
- Follow those “rules” and you might have students
actually thank you.
Connect with students
through course content.
Of course, not all
students will have an immediate passion for your discipline, and you will have
trouble attracting and/or retaining some groups of students more than others. One
way is to focus on content. For example, many women has an interest in biology,
so the computer-science department added a section of its introductory course
related entirely to applications in biology.
As you introduce
content in your course, constantly ask yourself: “Why should a student care
about this?” Consider your own material and the diversity of students in the
class. Choose a few students and come up with links to content, readings, and
skills that might be compelling to them. For example, in a biology course, a
student from a farming town might be interested in how research in the
discipline transformed pest control in crops. In a statistics course, a
military veteran might be interested in how data can be analyzed to compare
civilian and military life. Putting yourself in students’ shoes and asking,
“Why should I care?” can lead to deeper learning in your course and your
discipline.
How Will You Know
If Your Efforts Are Working?
Just as you assess
students on their learning, you should assess your teaching practices and
course design for inclusiveness. How?
Survey your
students.
This one is the
easiest. And we always learn something when we survey our own students. At the
beginning of the semester, ask students what makes them feel included in a course.
Check in again to find out what they think could be improved, so
that you can make a few meaningful changes for the second half of the course.
Ask a peer to observe
your class.
Because there is only
so much a peer can focus on in a single class session, ask your colleague to
comment specifically on whether you offer students a diversity of ways to
participate, and whether your “instructor talk” is as inclusive as it could be.
Collect data.
Given that one of us
is a statistician, we hope you aren’t surprised by the suggestion that you
collect and analyze some data. Talk with folks in your campus
teaching-and-learning center about data you might want to track and how to
analyze it. Start small by seeking to answer a particular question you care
about.
The Universal
Benefits of Inclusive Teaching
Inclusive-teaching methods won’t
harm students who don’t need the additional structure, but will help level the
playing field for those who do.
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