Respect and honesty grow in spaces of psychological safety. Use the examples in this section to build community and create safe learning environments that value diverse perspectives.
Discuss with students what taking responsibility for learning means in a Higher Education context and clarify faculty expectations. Identify where student expectations may differ from faculty expectations and discuss how to bridge this gap with students.
Co-create a social contract with students that outlines communication expectations that focus on respect, openness, and inclusion, and maintain these throughout the course. Educators can facilitate this in the first class to help students connect and share their perspectives. All students are invited to share their expectations, and the contract should uphold a comfortable and safe learning environment.
Students do not always know how to respectfully discuss multiple perspectives. Explicitly teach and offer guidelines for interpersonal skills before engaging students in discussions, eliciting their own diverse perspectives.
Create program learning outcomes that emphasise interpersonal skills like collaboration, communication, and respect. This fosters a culture where students develop the ability to work together in a safe, inclusive, and supportive environment, cultivating mutual respect and honesty that are essential for their academic and professional growth.
Seek inspiration for learning outcomes related to inclusion through the institutional graduate outcomes and student charter.
During discussions and problem-solving activities, model respectful communication and showcase your skills in valuing the diversity of perspectives and experiences.
Consider providing recordings of collaborative conversations between stakeholders in a project that demonstrate accessible, safe and respectful collaboration, which students can learn from.
Acquaint students with co-created group contracts for group-based projects that establish ways of working to improve communication and accountability.
Students come with a diversity of interests, strengths, and limitations. Allow students multiple ways of engaging with the learning, multiple ways to express themselves, and multiple easy ways to be engaged and motivated.
Culturally unsafe topics, such as whistleblowing, can be perceived differently by students with different cultural backgrounds. Create an anonymous space within the digital environment where honest opinions can be voiced without fear of reprisal. Most online tools may be anonymous to other students, but educators can access identities in case of any breaches in student conduct.
Online whiteboards for classroom discussions.
Physical whiteboard or post-it notes for in-person learning.
Interactive and anonymous tools, such as in-class polling.
Chat functions for online learning.
When offering printed resources in active learning experiences, give access to a digital version so that students can fully engage with that resource using whatever technology they need to support them.
Video demonstrations.
Written instructions.
Interactive 3D models.
Moving beyond a one-size-fits-all model and adopting flexible and differentiated teaching approaches allows educators to recognise and respond to the diverse strengths, backgrounds, and learning needs of all students, including those from marginalised communities.
Allow students to work through activities at their own pace, providing feedback through self-assessment, peer-assessment, and educator-assessment.
Offer students a choice in learning experiences to increase motivation, engagement, and agency. While students do benefit from this autonomy, the learning should be guided by choices available to them in industry, as informed by internal and external stakeholders.
Offer students a choice of topics for the assessment task and allow them to select their own groups.
Offer flexible assessment options, such as a core concept/task and a flexible format submission that accommodates different learning abilities. Students may choose an oral presentation to showcase their communicative skills, or a written report to demonstrate argumentation and paragraph flow.
Rotate roles within the team project or activity (manager, facilitator, creator, analyst, reviewer) to ensure all students experience different aspects of the project, fostering equity in skill development.
If an assessment task requires students to address an industry standard issue, allow students to select the most relevant standard for their future careers (e.g., state, national, or home country standards).
Co-create with students three activities aligned with the same learning outcome that use different skills, for example, one that focuses on written research, one on discussion and one on visual conceptualisation. Allow students to choose their preferred activity and discuss their experiences as a class.
Ensuring the spaces students learn within are accessible is essential to ensure that students can get sufficient practice, scaffolding and support to complete their assessment and learning tasks successfully. Without access to these, students will underperform in ways that mirror existing societal barriers, stigma, and bias, and thus, assessments will become less meaningful evaluations of what students can genuinely achieve. Addressing cohort-specific challenges helps level the playing field and mitigate potential disadvantages.
Choose physical or virtual learning environments that are neutral and unfamiliar to all disciplines involved, helping to eliminate unconscious biases and encourage collaboration.
When introducing a new workspace, artefact, or teaching modality, invite students to share any challenges or barriers they or their peers may face.
Assessment must reflect actual student ability, so students should be able to safely share any barriers they face to avoid being disadvantaged compared to their peers.
At the start of the teaching period, invite students to anonymously share their needs and barriers around assessment. With the release of each assessment and later individual results, invite students to share how those barriers relate to the tasks and how any mitigation approaches are helping.
Implement additional communication scaffolding and visual aids, and reduce the grammatical complexity of the written information while maintaining disciplinary terminology.
Design active learning in consideration of socially anxious and/or introverted students. Active learning is not about constantly speaking but about continually applying.
Create a think-pair-share activity that prioritises the ‘think’ aspect, encouraging students to openly reflect on their own critical biases in forming their opinion before launching into the ‘share’ stage. This gives students critical time.
Create clear, short, grammatically simple learning outcomes that reflect real-world diversity and include only what is directly and explicitly assessed.
A student with depression may find it considerably harder to join physical classes and may not be comfortable being seen during a depressive episode, but may still be able to participate in online classes. Provide multiple modalities for participating; where this is not possible, clarify why the selected mode is essential to the skills and knowledge involved.
An ADHDer/student with ADHD may find the physical presence of peers around them essential to keep them engaged in the practice, especially for parts that are less aligned to their personal motivations.
For introductory subjects, more scaffolding and guidance will be required in how to communicate and collaborate across diverse cohorts, and students will have less developed self-management skills (especially emotional regulation), which will need extra support.
Integrate critical reflection practices, personal goal setting, effective teamwork and communication into the learning outcomes.
Identify overused assessment types and skill sets used in the curriculum (such as written assessment forms) and create a varied assessment regime that leverages a diverse range of skill sets (visual and oral communication). This allows students to showcase their strengths and encourages broader participation. Use a colour-coded spreadsheet to map out different assessment styles and skill sets.