Culture & Environment

3) Students co-construct, discuss, adopt, and regularly revisit community norms for constructive interactions discussions, classroom and lab routines, and group roles.

Students agree on the behaviors that support a collaborative classroom and lab or group learning environment. 

• Assign the NPR episode “Ruining it for the Rest of Us” from This American Life to provide a rationale for setting community norms.

• Build norms as a “living” or “shared” document to revise regularly throughout the course, especially when norms are being ignored.

• Ten simple rules for building an antiracist lab Article about the importance of intentionally implementing equitable and inclusive policies to increase diversity in STEM labs. 

Students discuss specific norms before collectively committing to the norms. 

• Team policies agreement guide from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Educational Innovation’s page on Team Projects has ideas for teams to develop their policies and practices.

• Guidelines for Classroom Interactions Ideas and strategies for creating classroom norms from University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.

• Share videos/ posts of former students sharing experiences with the course.

• The Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool: A First Step in Doing Social Justice Pedagogy Appendix A: Reflection questions to help analyze syllabi.

• Active learning strategies and resources from BETTER in STEM website.

• Inclusive Teaching Strategies, Hogan & Sathy (2022) Teaching in Higher Ed August 2022 interview with Hogan & Sathy re: inclusive teaching.

• Require brief one-on-one meetings to connect and reinforce expectations, follow up with students who need reminders.

• Maintain a clear and consistent structure for how resources, assignments, and expectations are shared.

• Elicit student feedback on pacing and assignments.

• Backwards Design Understanding by Design, Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Overview of backwards design, stages in process, and lesson planning template.

• Student Voice in Higher Education April 2022 paper by K.E. Matthews and M. Dollinger distinguishing between student representation and student partnership.

Students revisit norms frequently to add, revise, or remove norms that are important to the classroom community.  

• Group Settings, Structures and Norms, CBE-Life Sciences Education Evidence-Based Teaching Guide for Group Work provides resources.

• Equity-Focused Teaching Strategies Reflection: Structured Interactions Specific instructional strategies for structuring constructive classroom and small group interactions from the University of Michigan, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. 

• Regularly administer anonymous and ungraded surveys about class climate and discuss your plans for addressing issues raised in surveys.