Inclusive Teaching
- Explicitly calling attention to important points during a lecture can help cue students to take notes
- Don’t be afraid of silence during group discussion, as often quieter students are waiting for their chance to speak
- Developing a growth-mindset correlates with increases in GPA and success rates for disadvantaged students
- Cultural differences in student-faculty interaction is a challenge for students unfamiliar with the academic culture.
- Allow students to help constructing norms for a respectful and productive learning environment
- Asking students to write about themselves in the beginning of the semester can help you get to know them better
- Creating a safe and effective learning environment is crucial for supporting class discussions
- Cultural differences in the way healthcare works is a challenge for healthcare students unfamiliar with the culture
- Consider providing group discussion questions to students before the discussion to help guide their focus when reading the material
- Comparing what students do with what you were expected to do when you were in college is an unconscious dog whistle, or red flag, for enforcing habits of white languaging, and through it, white supremacy
- Building community within the classroom is essential to avoiding implicit bias and developing an asset-based mindset
- Avoid commenting on students’ discussion to allow them the space to express themselves
Inclusive Assessment
- Even negotiated grading contracts can easily be functionally unilateral
- Criticisms of community-based assessment include failing to equalize power dynamics, as well as gender and racial biases
- Criterion-reference assessments can easily become norm-referenced when the standard is not applied blindly
- Conventional assessment ecologies value habitus more than learning
- Contract grading puts emphasis on the processes that lead to learning and acquisition rather than the products
- Community-based assessments are centered on the racialized habitus of the community.
- Co-constructing the rubric with students helps them provide better feedback to their peers
- Classroom and homework activities can affect students’ self-perception and self-efficacy
- Assessment is political.
- Asao Inoue argued for community-based assessment; a system of grading that combines teacher and peer student evaluations using rubrics
- Anonymous grading reduces implicit bias when grading student work
- Anonymous grading cannot prevent reference to the norm within the class which may introduce a bias towards a white racial habitus
- All grading systems are political because of the inherent power dynamics
Teaching Design
- Enclosures are parts of the classroom ecology that categorize, sort, restrict, and define students
- Critical thinking and argumentative learning objectives are best assessed through peer-to-peer discussion
- An engagement trigger is something done in the beginning of a lecture that gets students thinking about and applying recently learned knowledge
- Coursework is less helpful than projects when writing a resume
- Active learning lessons can be designed with three steps.
- Discussion skills like articulating, defending, and providing evidence for an idea are what helps us learn