What are inclusive teaching practices?
Wednesday, July, 17th, 2019
The following suggestions offer ways to help you teach more inclusively.
Some Effective Inclusive Teaching Practices
- Model and develop the capacity for perspective taking.
- Pose questions that elicit diverse experiences and knowledge of students.
- Encourage divergent perspectives to be voiced.
- Make group work more inclusive
- When assigning group work, out students in groups rather than have them choose their own.
- Try to ensure diversity among groups, but try to avoid putting a single student of a marginalized identity in a group.
- “Scaffold” assignments by adding opportunities for students to learn how to effectively complete each of the parts of the assignment and then to integrate them.
- Ask for regular feedback from your students and then respond to .
- Encourage active learning strategies. Active learning consists of a variety of techniques in which students learn by doing things and thinking about what they are doing. Active learning practices have increased equity in teaching (Haake et al., 2011; Lorenzo, Crouch, & Mazur, 2006).
- Employ universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines. These help to maximize learning for all students based on the varied needs of students.
Resources
- An Approach for Teaching Diversity by Jim Winthrop offers twelve suggestions for enhancing students learning. (U. of Wisconsin, Whitewater)
- Inclusive Teaching Strategies: Reflecting on Your Practice is a checklist that helps you to reflect on your own teaching strategies. (U of Michigan (CRTL)
- To learn inclusion skills, make it personal, by David Asai, senior director for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, describes his work on inclusion in science labs.
- Classroom Assessment Techniques” are brief activities that provide faculty with feedback about their effectiveness as teachers, and give students a measure of their progress as learners. A formative rather than summative approach to assessment, these techniques aim to improve the quality of student learning, not to provide evidence for evaluating or grading students. The purpose of classroom assessment techniques is to provide faculty with information on what, how much, and how well students are learning. This document offers examples of some quick ways to take the pulse in your class.
- The critical incident questionnaire (C.I.Q.)is a single page form that is handed out to students once a week at the end of the last class you have with them that week. It lists five questions, each of which asks students to write down some details about events that happened in the class that week. Its purpose is not to ask students what they liked or didn’t like about the class. Instead it gets them to focus on specific, concrete happenings. It works very well in discussion based classes, and is a good way of taking the pulse of a class in terms of their experience.
Suggestions for Personal Reflection on Inclusive Teaching
- Read through the Inclusive Practices Chart. Included in the second column are some of the things that most of us do. As you read through, check off the ones you already do. In the fourth column are ideas for how you might enhance what you already do by using more inclusive, student-centered language, and some new ideas that you might like to try. As you read through this list, check off a few you might like to adopt or adapt.
- Reflective Exercise – Think about your discipline and your course. Every discipline’s style of teaching and learning is different based on the subject matter, content and level of the course. Draft a short handout or develop a portion of your syllabus to help students understand how to succeed in your course. Point out the best techniques to read, to study or identify what resources are available to help them know how to be successful in your course.
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