Inclusive teaching strategies

Here are the twelve most commonly implemented inclusive teaching strategies in our department (all are reported being used by at least 2/3 of faculty; the top five by more than 80% of faculty):

• Assignments were well specified and announced to the students at least two weeks before their due date.

• Class materials (e.g., readings, study guides, extra resources) were organized on Canvas (or wherever students accessed course materials) such that students could quickly find relevant materials.

• I gave students a rationale for the learning activities, assessments, and grading policies; That rationale focused on student learning.

• I shared personal stories that related to the content I was covering in class

• I included a diversity/inclusion statement in the syllabus that explicitly expects respect and empathy for every student

• I gave frequent assignments/homework (e.g., less than 2 weeks apart)

• I included focal topics of relevance to marginalized communities (e.g., phenomena that occur within specific communities by language, religion, gender, sexual identity, ...)

• I provided opportunities to discuss why the material is interesting/relevant from a student perspective several times in the term

• I required a paper or project that involved some degree of student choice in the topic or design

• I personally reached out to one or more students who were struggling in one of my classes

• I used multiple assessment strategies over the course of the semester, (i.e. didn't assign only multiple choice exams or only papers)

• I had a small group discussion, problem solving activity, or demonstration with discussion in most class periods

Why this is important: Students are less likely to consider careers in psychology if they do not see role models in presentations of psychology research. Further, the work from researchers in these groups has historically been systematically hidden, and we need to address that harm by rightfully acknowledging their research contributions.

Strategies for finding such research:

1. The “BIPOC-authored Psychology Papers” google spreadsheet (developed by Dr. Erica Wojcik) is a good resource for instructors of undergraduate/graduate-level psychology courses to help diversify their syllabi

2. When you are learning about new research findings (i.e. at conferences or skimming journals’ tables of contents), make note of work that might be relevant to your class and is by BIPOC scholars.

3. Ask colleagues who teach similar courses

Strategies for including such research:

1. Try to work on one topic within a series of lectures; aim for iterative edits over semesters.

Why this is important: Some students are now very interested in / have concerns about this topic, and they may think you are complicit if you do not address it. For other students it is still very important: the historical pattern will tend to repeat if there is not broad understanding of that history.

Strategies for finding content about the history of marginalization:

1. The Nature article “Science must overcome its racist legacy” (linked here)

2. The classic book by Robert Guthrie “Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology”

3. Resources suggested by colleagues who teach related courses.

Strategies for including this history in your course:

1. Discuss it in the context of materials (a study, a video, a method/paradigm) in which the problem is especially salient.

2. Make a connection in a section where you typically address individual differences

Why this is important: Examples don't help students understand content if they don't understand the reference. Using only examples from the dominant culture is a strong signal to students from other cultures that they do not belong in your class.

How to find current examples/content that are likely to be a problem for some of your students:

1. You or a TA can look out for overly stereotyped images (e.g., dress vs. pants icon when describing gender), clips, examples. Be careful of images and stories that present groups in stereotyped/deficit ways.

2. Ask students on very short end-of-class or end-of-section (paper or online) survey about examples they found confusing.

How to find better examples:

1. Stimuli used in studies conducted in other contries or non-dominant contexts by researchers from those countries / contexts

2. Ask students to give an example from their context/culture of a discussed phenomenon in a survey or assessment

Why this is important: Students who don't think psychology research is particuarly relevant to them because of the non-inclusive nature of existing content may find these topics especially inspiring and a way into building overall interest in psychology research.

How to find topics:

1. The “BIPOC-authored Psychology Papers” google spreadsheet (developed by Dr. Erica Wojcik) contains a number of such topics

2. Ask about class content on a mid or end of semester survey: suggestions for topics/readings to drop and new topics to add.

Why this is important: Typical courses have a lot going on across the semester, and students find easy access to content especially helpful when they are reviewing past content (for an exam or project), when they missed all or part of a class (for illness, other obligations).

How to do this:

1. Considering including a full organized list (by activity or by week) of course content (lecture topics/recording, assignments, exams) in the canvas home page for the course.

2. Regularly update the top of the canvas home page for the course to focus student attention on current/upcoming content

3. Consider making a separate Canvas page for major assignments/projects/exams that includes links to various documents/resources you are providing for that assignment/project/exam.

4. Put deadlines on Canvas pages, not inside linked documents, so that it is easier for you to update dates in future offerings of the course

Why this is inclusive: Some students have a very complex schedule (a high courseload, one or more jobs, a sport or club, family obligations) and their success depends upon being able to plan when to complete major assignments or study for exams.

Why this is inclusive: Some students find it very challenging to participate immediately (e.g., by quickly raising a hand or submitting a comment in the chat) or speak publically (e.g., by asking or answering a question in class, even a small class) because of knowledge of English, phobias, stereotype threat, or overall prior knowledge of psychology. Short-term and chronic illness can also prevent some students from attending a substantial number of lectures.

How to do this:

1. For in-class participation, consider having students discuss in small groups before asking questions / offering answers to the whole class, giving points to the group, not just the speaker.

2. In addition to in-class participation points, consider having a Canvas discussion page, with weekly or specific-topic discussion prompts.

Why this is inclusive: Students vary in their skills within specific formats (writing skills; multiple choice decoding skills; test anxiety). Using only one testing format means the scores are heavily biased by the format skills rather than entirely assessing understanding and skills related to psychology-specific content.

How to do this:

1. Consider adding lower-stakes assessments of a different type (explain your reasoning questions; mini-projects; group-assignments); see research-based strategies page for details on how to implement particular strategies

2. Consider including assessments based upon in-class or online participation. see research-based strategies page for details on how to implement particular strategies

Why this is inclusive: Creating opportunities for students to work together in small groups provides students chances to form networks of support and learning relationships, which is more challenging for historically marginalized students. Cultivating good communication and teamwork skills benefit all students in their coursework and beyond. Group work has also been shown to increase knowledge acquisition, retention, and problem solving more than independent learning alone.

How to do it:

• Think about how to structure groups to advance teaching and learning goals. Consider group sizes, whether groups should remain consistent throughout the semester or change, whether members should be selected intentionally, randomly, or by forming their own groups. Determine whether group work will be evaluated formally or not.

• Design group activities so that students can get to know group members. Give groups a time frame, clear instructions, and expected outcomes. It may be helpful to assign or ask students to volunteer for specific roles within the group (e.g. leader, recorder).

• For long-term group work, tell students how to mitigate group conflict. For example, you might ask students to create a contract that describes group members' roles, responsibilities, and accountability measures. You could also instruct students to reach out to you.

• If group work is evaluated, determine and communicate whether you plan to assess students individually, as a group, or both.

Supporting research:

Hodges, L.C. (2018). Contemporary issues in group learning in undergraduate science classrooms: A perspective from student engagement. CBE - Life Sciences Education, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-11-0239

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Smith, K. A. (2014). Cooperative learning: Improving university instruction by basing practice on validated theory. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 85-118. ERIC Number: EJ1041374

Why this is important: Learning experiences that relate to students’ lives, cultures, and interests or to real-world events and contexts can help students see the value of what they are learning and forge neural connections that foster the activation of long-term memory. Connecting new material to what students already know and what matters to them is a valuable method for helping them process and absorb that material.

How to do it:

• Gauge what your students care about, and what they already know about your subject, through a pre-course survey administered via Qualtrics. Include questions that ask students about their learning or career goals for a particular course or subject. What do they want to learn and why?

• Take the time to get to know your students on a more informal basis, through casual conversations before or after class or through low-stakes writing assignments that invite students to discuss their goals, interests, and cultural backgrounds. Knit what you learn into assignments, activities, and lectures.

• Carefully establish, through lectures, discussion, or other content, how new material connects to your discipline or profession. Link theory to practice by explicitly answering the old question, “When am I actually going to use this?”

• Self-disclose, within reason, to develop more personal connections with students by addressing the question of why content matters to you.

Supporting research:

Belet, M. (2017). The importance of relevance to student lives: The impact of content and media in Introduction to Sociology. Teaching Sociology 46(3), 208-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055X17730113.

Kember, D., Ho, A., and Hong, C. (2008). The importance of establishing relevance in motivating student learning. Active Learning in Higher Education 9(3), 249-63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787408095849.

Why this is inclusive: It gives students the agency to pursue the topics that are most interesting and relevant to them.

How to do it:

• Determine whether to give students choices of topic, choices of artifacts to create, or both. Also consider how flexible to be about student choice. For example, you could give students a list of topics to choose from or you could allow them to propose their own topics. Offering more student choice gives students the ability to determine how to express their learning, but they may also need more explanation of the assignment and support choosing a topic.

• When introducing assignments and activities that students will have a choice, be explicit in the purpose of the assignment.

• Since students may have not had opportunities to develop their scholarly perspectives, it is important to provide boundaries and/or examples around possible topics to empower students to choose appropriately and successfully. Consider offering to meet with students about their topics or assignment choices or creating a low stakes assignment so that they can propose and receive feedback on topics.

• Consider modeling or facilitating activities around how to brainstorm and narrow down topics, tasks that students often struggle with.

Supporting research:

Hanewicz, C., Platt, A., & Arendt, A. (2017). Creating a learner-centered teaching environment using student choice in assignments. Distance Education, 38(3), 273-287. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2017.1369349

Killpack, T. L., & Melón, L. C. (2016). Toward inclusive STEM classrooms: what personal role do faculty play?. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(3), es3. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-01-0020

Why this is inclusive: Teams bring a variety of strengths to a task, giving students resources to overcome challenges they would trouble addressing on their own, whether from gaps in knowledge/skills or worries. Collaborative learning also has social and academic benefits and can foster a sense of responsibility for learning.

How to do it:

• Offer different collaborative experiences to students early on in the semester before they work on a longer-term assignment.

• Select collaborative learning tasks that are challenging and relevant to the course goals.

• Model varied modes of leadership and encourage students to find modes collaboration that work best for their groups. Communicate that modes of collaboration should be consistent with the goals of the learning task, meaning that if students splitting up tasks and tackling them individually, for instance, undermines teaching and learning goals, instruct students to work together and provide a rationale.

• Encourage students to create ground rules for collaboration.

• Consider plotting out the stages of the project in advance to help guide the group and providing flexibility in how students connect with each other (virtually or face-to-face)

• Connect with the group at multiple points during long-term collaborative projects and offer students self-reflective prompts to encourage them to reflect on their own emerging collaborative skills.

Supporting research:

Laal, M., & Ghodsi, S. M. (2012). Benefits of collaborative learning. Procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 31, 486-490. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091

Scager, K., Boonstra, J., Peeters, T., Vulperhorst, J., & Wiegant, F. (2016). Collaborative learning in higher education: Evoking positive interdependence. CBE Life Sciences Education, 15(4), ar69. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-07-0219

Why this is inclusive: Equity of outcomes involves providing students the opportunities to learn about and devote additional effort to meet the high expectations you have of them. It also can reduce students’ anxiety about completing assessments.

How to do it:

• Determine when it would be beneficial and feasible to ask students to submit drafts or provide opportunities for redos. Asking for a draft of a long-term or particularly challenging assignment can help prevent procrastination and plagiarism, in addition to providing students with feedback to improve their work. When considering feasibility, think about class size, whether drafts/redos should be required or optional, the nature and length of assignments, and the course schedule.

• If you decide to assign drafts or accept redos, determine the parameters and criteria for this work. When should students submit it? What should they submit? How will you evaluate a draft or redo versus a final draft or original submission? The workload and timeline needs to be reasonable for you and your students.

• Offer substantial, timely feedback that includes specific suggestions for improvement.

• Incentivize applying feedback. For example, you can allocate class time for students to strategize or work on revisions or include improvement as an evaluation criterion for the final grade.

Supporting research:

Stellmack, M.A., Sandidge, R. R., Sippl, A. L., & Miller, D. J. (2015). Incentivizing multiple revisions improves student writing without increasing instructor workload. Teaching of Psychology, 42(4), 293–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628315603060

Wisniewski, B., Zierer, K., & Hattie, J. (2020). The power of feedback revisited: A meta-analysis of educational feedback research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03087

Why this is inclusive: Using more lower-stakes assessments can reduce student stereotype threat and anxiety. Many students have sufficiently high exam anxiety that their performance on very high stakes exams does not match their understanding of the course content.

How to do it:

• Review your course objectives and exams. Identify the concepts and skills that students need to practice to be successful on summative assessments. Think about course sequencing, class size, and delivery to determine where and how you might integrate lower-stakes assessments to allow students to practice applying their knowledge and skills.

• Consider redistributing exam questions across multiple, lower-stakes exams. You can also scale back high-stakes exams and add formative assessments like in-class audience response questions, scaffolded learning tasks, homework, or short writing assignments.

• Decide how to evaluate any new formative assessments and revise assessment weighting.

Supporting research:

Kenney, K.L. & Bailey, H. (2021). Low-stakes quizzes improve learning and reduce overconfidence in college students. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 21(2), 79-92. https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v21i2.28650

Why this is inclusive: Students have reported that sharing personal stories increases their engagement and the perceived approachability of and rapport with the instructor, as well as helping students develop positive relationships with other students. Offering a personal story related to a course concept can help students better contextualize a topic or envision practical ways in which that concept is actualized in the world. It can also increase students' interest in a topic.

How to do it:

• Plan in advance. Think about your boundaries to determine when it will be appropriate and relevant to share a story and which details to share. Ask yourself how the story would enhance student understanding or engagement. Consider your positionality and how that affects the story, your telling of it, and students' potential understandings and reactions.

• Consider using a personal story to model approaches or behaviors to students. For example, you could talk about mistakes that you made as a student in the discipline and how you learned from them to model productive failure.

• Invite students to share their personal stories when it is relevant and feasible to do so. If you ask students to share stories, offer a specific prompt and communicate that sharing is voluntary. Connect the storytelling to course content.

Supporting research:

Brakke, K., & Houska, J. A. (Eds.). (2015). Telling stories: The art and science of storytelling as an instructional strategy. Society for the Teaching of Psychology. https://teachpsych.org/ebooks/tellingstories.html

Why this is inclusive: Students perceive faculty who collect their feedback during the term as more caring. Feedback is important to learn about the unique concerns of the students in your course, given ever-changing populations enrolled with different prior experiences and current experiences with local and world events.

How to do it:

• Consider what feedback would be most beneficial to you and your students. Determine when, how often, and how to collect student feedback. For example, if you want to know what students think of a new assignment you have planned, you can ask for their comments before or after they complete it, whereas if you want data on their overall course experience, you may prefer to use a midterm survey.

• Plan what questions you intend to ask. Questions may vary in specificity depending upon the type of feedback you hope to collect. Use broad, open-ended questions to solicit qualitative feedback on overall experiences. Use more targeted questions to pinpoint students' perceptions of or responses to specific course materials or tools, teaching techniques, class activities, or assignments.

• Talk to your students about the use and purpose of collecting feedback beforehand. Express that you value their feedback.

• Interpret feedback by searching for trends in results. Look for trends that you can use to make changes that are potentially beneficial and feasible for you and your students.

• After you have collected feedback, share overall results or trends (without including identifying information) and discuss which trends you intend to act on vs. not act on, why, and how. If your students have make suggestions that you do not plan to implement, you should still address this feedback and explain your rationale.

• Make changes based on your student feedback. You may want to use end-of-term OMETs to assess the success of these changes.

Supporting research:

Harris, G. L. & Stevens, D. D. (2013). The value of midterm student feedback in cross-disciplinary graduate programs. Journal of Public Administration Education, 19(3) 537-558. https://doi.org/10.1080/15236803.2013.12001750

Payette, P.R. & Brown, M.K. (2018). Gathering mid-semester feedback: Three variations to improve instruction. IDEA Paper #67. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED588349.pdf

Why this is inclusive: Minoritized students regularly experience opportunity and equity gaps throughout their educations, so providing proactive support can be an especially impactful inclusive teaching practice.

How to do it:

• Start by listing support resources on your syllabus and in your Canvas course shell. You can copy/paste from the Teaching Center’s syllabus checklist, which is updated annually to include contact information for student support units. Call students’ attention to these resources on the first day of class when you review your syllabus.

• Normalize struggle and be approachable. Let your students know that it is normal to experience challenges or to find college difficult, but that they can talk to you if they need help.

• Although it is not always possible to identify students who are struggling early in the term, plan to check-in with those who appear to be having difficulty after the first major assessment. Intervening earlier allows students to make changes or seek support while there is still time to improve their grade in the course.

• Throughout the term, pay attention to student performance and behavior over time, especially sudden changes. If students stop attending class, submitting work, or the quality of their work drops, reach out. For large or online classes, you can use Canvas’ grade center and reports to track changes in academic performance or other analytics like the last time the student logged into a course shell.

• When you identify a student who is experiencing challenges, talk to them to determine the type of support that they need. If the student needs academic support, you can suggest supplementary resources, meet with them during office hours, or direct them to academic support services. For other issues, connect students to the relevant campus resources. For students experiencing distress or in need of immediate help, consult Pitt’s Faculty and Staff Guide for Helping Distressed Students.

Supporting research:

Guzzardo, M.T., Khosla, N., Adams, A.L., Bussman, J.D., Engelman, A., Ingraham, N., Gamba, R., Jones-Bey, A., Moore, M.D., Toosi, N.R., & Taylor, S. (2021). “The ones that care make all the difference”: Perspectives on student-faculty relationships. Innovative Higher Education, 46, 41–58. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-020-09522-w

Why this is inclusive: Learning students' names communicates that you value their presence in your course and contributes to an inclusive classroom climate.

How to do it:

• Introduce yourself at the beginning of class. This is also an opportunity to model sharing your pronouns, which can help make students who would like to share their pronouns more comfortable doing so. Note: Students should never be forced to share their pronouns.

• Ask students to introduce themselves at the beginning of class and be intentional in making sure you learn the correct pronunciation and maintain the correct pronunciation, including modeling an apology when mistakes are made.

• Consider having students create name tents in larger face-to-face classes. In Zoom sessions, you can also prompt students to adjust their username to the name they prefer to be called.

• Encourage students to share their names at the beginning of small group activities.

• Create opportunities to get to know students individually. This could include greeting or speaking with students as they enter or exit class, visiting small groups as they collaborate, or encouraging students to attend office hours.

Supporting research:

Cooper, K. M., Haney, B., Krieg, A., & Brownell, S. E. (2017). What’s in a name? The importance of students perceiving that an instructor knows their names in a high-enrollment biology classroom. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-08-0265

Marrun, N. A. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching across PK-20: Honoring the historical naming practices of students of color. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, 17(3), 4. https://doi.org/10.31390/taboo.17.3.04

Why this is inclusive: Students often doubt that novel teaching methods are going to be useful or fair, which can impede participation in the method and the larger class; historically marginalized students have good reasons to be more suspicious of the fairness and fit to them of various teaching methods.

How to do this:

1. Include the learning purpose of a task or assignment at the top of the assignment description.

2. In lecture, when introducing a task that will be the first time a novel approach is used in that class, share the rationale for the approach, with a focus on the learning benefits.

Why this is inclusive: One in five students have a disability, and visual disabilities are common. Lectures based upon psychology research often include a lot of visual content, and this content is regularly diffcult to see, especially from the back of rooms. Also note that accessibility is both a legal requirement and official Pitt policy.

How to do this:

• A full set of 'how-to' instructions in various formats here: link

Why this is inclusive: Language processing in everyone is significantly enhanced by multi-modal support. Most commonly, seeing a person's mouth helps with hearing. In lectures, many students are too far away to see your mouth, so they don't get that support. In recordings, your image might be too small or off to the side. Captions on the page are a big help. Non native English speakers or students with auditory processing disabilities are especially in need of additional supports in processing English.

How to do this:

• Zoom can now automatically create transcripts, showing them live during the lecture as well as in the zoom/panapto recording. link

• Other options: link

Kinds of situations that might arise and possible solutions:

1. My exam has complex content that requires students be able to ask me questions during the assessment (which DRS services cannot answer)

   • Allow students to complete the assessment during office hours

2. My assessment is based upon a presentation made by students in class

   • Have students submit a recorded presentation

3. Pop-quizzes require students be in-class

   • Have make-up quiz opportunities

How to do this:

1. Pitt resource for current requirement for syllabus statements, mentioning policies and procedures for violations

2. Supplement this by explicitly mentioning empathy and respect for others

Why this is inclusive: The most commonly mentioned instances of micro-aggressions involve student-on-student micro-aggressions. Discussion is critically important to learning, but micro-aggressions limit participation / value of participation for students who are most likely to be the victims of micro-aggressions.

How to do this:

1. Include a discussion activity early on in the course and involve students in the creation or modification of suggested discussion ground rules

2. Ask about the ways in which the discussion ground rules help build empathy and respect for every student