Designing Project Teams that Work

Teams are most productive and conducive to learning when students with complementary skills, knowledge, and dispositions work together. That said, students generally don’t enter classrooms already sorted in these diverse ways. Often they group together based on achievement and engagement or based on background characteristics. In this video, Eric Mazur and his teaching team explain how and why they intentionally design heterogeneous teams. By using pre-class surveys and student demographic data, they find ways to assign students to teams in ways that play to each member’s strengths and...

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Using Team Contracts and Peer Feedback to Foster Team Building

Many students balk at the idea of working in teams, particularly when they don’t know who the other students are. Students may be concerned others won’t pull their weight or that the output may not meet expectations. Given this, it is important for instructors to be intentional in fostering team-building experiences and peer-accountability processes. Doing so, instructors can ensure that teams get off on the right foot and persist productively throughout the class. In this video, Eric Mazur and his teaching team give examples of how they do this by discussing the use of reflection, team...

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Devaluing the Right Answer

Most instructors experience students asking them if they have the right answer or just asking for the right answer outright. However, as Eric Mazur and his teaching team in this video acknowledge, simply giving students the right answer can “sabotage” problem-based learning. This is because what matters in problem-based learning is not the answer so much as the process of arriving at an answer. Devaluing the right answer is one way for instructors to make this principle of teaching clear in their classrooms.

Using Peer Instruction to Improve Student Learning

Peer instruction discussions are an efficient and student-centered way to address common misconceptions about  course concepts. By getting students to individually answer class questions and then getting those with different answers to talk to one another, you can encourage students to assess each others’ ideas and move closer towards the correct answer. In this video, Eric Mazur describes how he leverages peer instruction using in-class polling technology. He notes how even after a short discussion amongst peers, students can go from around 50 percent ...

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Creating Assessments with Individual and Collaborative Components

We all know the image: Stressed, fearful students trickle into a silent exam hall, all tired from cramming from the night before. But as Eric Mazur notes, stress is not conducive to deep and meaningful learning. In fact, the stress of exam culture often means that students only study for tests and then forget what they learned soon after. To flip this script, Mazur and his teaching team have instituted two stage exams. In the first stage, students work individually; but in the second stage, they share answers with each other, discussing and debating until they find the right answer...

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Tracking the Learning Process Using Design Notebooks

Given the messiness of the design process, it’s important for students to be able to track their own learning while they engage in projects. In this video, Eric Mazur outlines how he uses design notebooks in his class in which students document all elements of their project- and team-building experience. Students submit design notebooks with their completed projects and are graded for their completeness and quality of reflections. These notebooks help reinforce the principles of iterative development that underpin project-based learning and further emphasize the importance of process....

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Presenting Projects Publicly as Summative Assessment

Creating opportunities for students to make their learning public can raise the stakes and broaden a course's horizons. In this video, one of Eric Mazur’s students and his teaching assistant introduce how they use a public project fair as the primary summative assessment in the class. At the fair, students demonstrate how their projects work to external judges and then answer questions about the design process and related class concepts. The result is an engaged public and motivated, proud students.

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Pathway 1: Establishing Inclusivity and Belonging

From their first minutes in a new classroom, students are discovering whether this new learning space is an inclusive one. The course materials, the learning activities, the interactions with other students and instructors—all work together to create classrooms where students can learn and grow. In this pathway, we’ll explore how you can create a welcoming and brave classroom for students starting on day one and continue promoting inclusion throughout the semester. You’ll learn techniques for getting to know your students, building a classroom community, highlighting...

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Step 1: Getting to Know Your Students

Students learn best when they have a good rapport with their instructors. Inclusive instructors build rapport with students by getting to know them: their backgrounds, their interests, their learning goals. For Dan Levy, this learning begins before students even enter the classroom with “Assignment 0,” a self-reflective survey students complete before the first class meeting; Levy reviews their responses before he meets them. “I think it's very hard to learn all that information [about students] quickly,” Levy admits. “But it gives me ways of connecting with...

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Pathway 2: Disrupting Traditional Classroom Hierarchies

Classrooms have traditionally been built on a number of hierarchies: Instructors hold more knowledge and power than students, the right answers count for more than the wrong ones,  and students with more experience in and knowledge of the subject are “smarter” than their peers with less experience and subject knowledge. In this module, we’ll learn how to challenge these traditional hierarchies to create classrooms that center students as knowledge holders and creators, turn the “wrong” answer into a learning opportunity, and highlight the knowledge and strengths that all students...

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Pathway 3: Including More Student Voices in the Conversation

Equitable classrooms include a variety of viewpoints and voices in class conversations. Encouraging students from all backgrounds to contribute to the classroom discourse takes a little extra work but brings innumerable rewards. In this pathway, we’ll look at ways to get more students actively engaged during class, whether the setting is the smallest seminar or the largest lecture.

Pathway 4: Crafting Inclusive Activities and Resources

In inclusive classrooms, instructors take the time to plan activities and create resources that will help all students learn. Students come to the classroom with a wide range of experiences, backgrounds, knowledge, and skills, all of which influence how they interact with the course material and each other. With this diversity in mind, inclusive instructors devise a variety of activities so that there are inviting and meaningful learning opportunities for everyone. Then, within each activity, instructors can create scaffolds that help all students accomplish...

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Step 2: Using the Physical Space to Disrupt Hierarchies

The physical setup of the classroom can signal that everyone in the room is both a teacher and a learner. Standing at the front of the room literally and figuratively places the teacher above the students, which is why Christina Villarreal (known to her students as “V”) makes a point to sit in the circle during class discussions. Arranging her classroom this way helps “agentize” her students and empower them to lead discussion. As she explains, “Central to my philosophy as an educator is meeting students where they are. There are physical cues that can...

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Step 3: Intervening Selectively to Enhance Equity and Understanding

Instructors can easily take up too much space in the classroom as highly-educated experts. This dominance can be particularly pronounced if they also hold a lot of privileged identities. Timothy Patrick McCarthy knows that he is a big presence in the classroom and, for this reason, intentionally steps back during discussions to make room for student voice. When he does step in, he highlights the knowledge that students create as a group: “There are times where three or four or five students will say something, and there's something happening in those responses...

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Step 4: Centering Students as Discussion Leaders

To disrupt traditional hierarchies, instructors can step out of the way and allow students to take center stage. But positioning students as holders and creators of knowledge can be challenging. Not all students will be comfortable stepping into these roles immediately. Instructors may therefore also proactively introduce classroom routines and activities designed to help students see themselves as knowledge creators. In his course, Timothy Patrick McCarthy uses student provocation, an activity in which a pair of students leads a single class discussion mainly through...

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Step 5: Using Technology to Elevate Student Thinking

While Timothy Patrick McCarthy uses classroom discussion to position students as knowledge holders, Dan Levy uses technology. By giving his students an iPad to solve problems on the projection screen, he reduces barriers for students to share their thinking with the class. This technique also makes the classroom more inclusive for those who might be uncomfortable coming to the front of the room to use the board or document camera. As students write their own answers, they surface misconceptions that the instructor might not otherwise catch; these misconceptions...

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Step 6: Finding Value in Wrong Answers

In many classrooms, there’s a strict hierarchy for student responses: right answers are valuable while wrong answers are not. But mistakes are a critical part of learning, and even “wrong” answers can contain nuggets of brilliance. By treating “wrong” answers with the same respect and curiosity they give “right” answers, Paola Arlotta creates an inclusive environment where students feel comfortable trying out new ideas and students with less disciplinary experience can see that they bring value to the classroom conversation. Arlotta’s teaching assistant...

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Step 7: Nurturing Voices that Challenge the Dominant Narrative

In addition to the hierarchy that tends to discount the value in wrong answers, there’s often an epistemological hierarchy in disciplines, placing dominant narratives at the top and counternarratives at the bottom. Counternarratives center the experiences of historically targeted and marginalized groups, and while they have become more widely embraced in recent decades, they still are too often seen as sidebars to the dominant Eurocentric narrative. By working to lift up these counternarratives, instructors can create an inclusive and equitable environment where...

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Pathway 2 Conclusion

Postsecondary classrooms are often built on a number of traditional hierarchies, so ingrained in higher education that they may be difficult to notice at first. Change won’t happen overnight, but continually reflecting on the questions and issues raised in this pathway can help you create a more equitable classroom that centers learners, values all knowledge, and welcomes historically underrepresented voices. In this pathway, we learned a variety of instructional moves that help you challenge different hierarchies endemic to higher education classrooms. These...

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Step 1: Prioritizing Unheard Voices and Perspectives

Classes can easily fall into a routine where the same students talk again and again, leaving less space in the discussion for new voices and viewpoints. However, instructors striving to create inclusive classrooms intentionally find ways to bring these missing voices into the conversation. They don’t aim for equality of airtime but rather try to distribute airtime in ways that promote equity. Gretchen Brion-Meisels explains how she manages participation in her course: “If I think that there are voices that we haven't heard from or perspectives that we haven't heard from...

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