Pathway 1 Conclusion

Creating an inclusive classroom happens each day of your course, starting before the students ever step into the room. Each day, the words you speak, the behaviors you model, and the ways you encourage interaction between students work together to foster an atmosphere of belonging. In this pathway, we learned a number of concrete moves you can take to help students feel welcome and supported in your classroom. These include:

  • Using a pre-course survey to get to know students’ backgrounds, experiences, and interests
  • Using inclusive language and examples throughout your course
  • Thanking students publicly for their contributions to the classroom
  • Building a brave space by establishing norms that encourage students to grapple with hard questions
  • Modeling inclusive behaviors you’d like to see from your students
  • Highlighting students’ skills and strengths specifically and publicly
  • Leveraging small groups to help students learn from the diversity in the classroom
  • Utilizing consistent student team to create safe spaces for taking risks

These moves work together to create inclusive, welcoming, and affirming classrooms, demonstrated by research to benefit student learning and achievement. Below you can find links to this research, along with some final resources to help you implement these moves into your classroom. 

We hope you’ll take some time to peruse the research and resources to help you decide which moves you want to use and how to adapt them for your own classroom context. And when you’re ready, our next pathway will help you take a look at the ways you can disrupt traditional hierarchies that can interfere with equitable and inclusive teaching. 

 

Related Resources

 

The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at Michigan has created an overview of inclusive teaching with links to many other resources.

This inclusive pedagogy toolkit from Georgetown University helps instructors think through the ways that five interconnected aspects of teaching and learning work together to create inclusive classrooms.

This book chapter highlights how instructors can use Universal Design for Learning alongside inclusive pedagogy to foster a sense of belonging in all students.

The Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia has compiled tips to help instructors “establish and support a class climate that fosters belonging for all students.”

“Leveraging Norms for Challenging Conversations” articulates a variety of ways in which instructors can collaborate with students to set norms and productively respond to norms violations.

Protocols can be an effective tool for promoting equitable small group discussions, and this tip sheet from the Teaching and Learning Lab at HGSE compiles useful protocols grouped by purpose. 

For instructors teaching all or part of their course online, Stanford has 10 Strategies for Creating Inclusive and Equitable Online Learning Environments. 

The VIBE Framework for equitable decision making, featured by Faculty Focus, provides key questions to ask before making decisions at the individual, group, and institutional levels.  

This resource from HGSE on Creating Classroom Communities of Care from the Harvard Graduate School of Education highlights a variety of pedagogical moves that HGSE instructors use in their classrooms to create a caring community. 

 

Relevant Research

Ambrose et al. (2010) argue that instructors can create inclusive classrooms by attending more closely to students’ social and emotional development and by intentionally including traditionally marginalized perspectives.

Students benefit from the care their instructors show them. When instructors build rapport with students, they see increased student “engagement,” “enjoyment,” and “learning” (Meyers, 2009).

The IDEA Center (2003) conducted a literature review that established a link between teacher-student rapport and student achievement. The paper also highlighted specific practices that help instructors build relationships with their students.

Giving students ground rules that frame the classroom as a “brave space” helped Arao and Clemens prepare postsecondary students, staff, and faculty to engage in challenging conversations in authentic and meaningful ways (2013).

A short intervention in which African-American students affirmed their personal adequacy reduced the racial achievement gap by 40% for those students in two randomized field experiments (Cohen et al., 2006).

“Process” praise that highlights students’ specific work habits can help them develop an incremental theory of intelligence, which helps them build resilience and counters stereotype threat (Yeager & Dweck, 2012).

A broad research study at 23 institutions found that collaborative learning resulted in increased student learning and greater openness to diversity (Cabrera et al., 2002).

Remaining Pathways

Back to Step 7