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Beginning to Teach Inclusively
How do I encourage students to bring diverse perspectives to the subject matter I teach? How can I promote inclusive behavior of students working in groups? These were just a few questions posed by approximately 45 doctoral students and postdocs at the “Cultivating an Inclusive Classroom” workshop I ran last year with Dr. Sheila Contreras. To begin answering them, Inside Teaching posts over the next few weeks will address different areas for you to focus on toward a more inclusive classroom. In today’s post, I’ll discuss where to begin: making your curriculum design choices more inclusive.
What Do I Mean By “Inclusive”?
Before I start discussing how your content and curriculum design choices can be more inclusive, let’s start with a working definition for an inclusive classroom. According to the Association of American Colleges & Universities, inclusive classrooms are learning spaces where “active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity” occurs “in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication, and empathetic understanding of the complex individuals interact within systems and institutions.” 
 
So, as an instructor concerned about inclusive teaching, I encourage you do consider how your course content and assignments both represent a diverse (for example, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, nationality, epistemological perspectives) set of scholarly voices and how you can hold yourself – and your students—to more inclusive standards of behavior and discourse in the classroom.
Inclusive Classrooms Require Intentional Thought and Not “Extra Work”
Graduate students and other beginning instructors are often overwhelmed by the volume of things they need to learn about teaching in a college classroom or lab. Creating an inclusive environment in your classroom does not require “extra work” – what it requires is “intentional thought” in how you plan and implement your classes. This involves a deliberate awareness of the decisions you’re making and the impact they have on how you represent your discipline and the multiple voices connected to it. I’d argue that this level of intentionality is a key hallmark of curriculum design across disciplines. To help with this intentionality toward more inclusive classrooms, I provide the following four tips below.
Four Tips Toward Inclusive Curriculum Design
(1) Select the work of scholars from different cultural or paradigmatic backgrounds
Make sure you are presenting a variety of voices and perspectives across the course readings, videos and material you select.  Additionally important is presenting a full spectrum of disciplinary paradigms in the field so that students have a full picture of disciplinary conversation(s).
(2) Acknowledge the limitations of course material with regards to demographic representation
Frame what you are providing and point out the potential limitations of your materials. This can help students see how and why you have made the decisions you did. This can also help students to get a better window into your teaching decisions and engage alongside you critically.
(3) Pay attention to WHO and HOW you represent in your presentation slides, case studies, videos, and guest panels
As with our tips above, it’s important that the slides, case studies, and videos you use reflect multiple voices and backgrounds. Additionally, it’s important to pay attention to how various individuals and groups are portrayed in these materials. In their portrayals, are you sending the messages you want sent to a diverse group of students?
(4) Maximize the inclusion of all student voices in instructional activities
Make sure you provide multiple opportunities and safe spaces in your classroom for all student voices. Not all students will immediately respond to one way of engaging in the classroom, so make sure your approaches vary and respond to what you have come to know about the different students in class. We will share more specific tips about instructional activities in later posts.
 
Additional Resources
The goal of the Inclusive Teaching Workshop, in addition to soliciting student questions, was to present a Framework for Inclusive Teaching, modified from resources from both a resource from the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at University of Michigan and a paper produced by the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard.
 
We’d like to know: What have you done to make your course content and curriculum more inclusive? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below or with us on social media using the hashtag “#iteachmsu.”
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): McDaniels, M. Cultivating Inclusive Classrooms: Inclusive Curriculum Design. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

Four years ago, I was teaching Wireless Communication to senior year electronics engineering majors in India. I chose to teach this course because of my personal interest in digital and wireless communication. But even more than that, it is a topic that requires a deep understanding of probability–which I believe is a critical concept for everyone to learn. However, when a student asked me, “Why are we studying probability in wireless communication?,” I was surprised that I could not provide a satisfying answer.
 
Personally, wrapping my head around the concepts of probability took me several years. As a result, it has had a serious effect on my understanding of the world in general, including my position on some crucial political, medical, and spiritual issues. When my student asked me for why it was relevant, I tried to explain why I cared about it and how it connected to wireless communication. I could tell that he did not care about either of my reasons. This bothered me for weeks, perhaps, months. Well, it still kind of does. But, it led me to wonder what could I have done differently? Last year, now working as a researcher in literacies at MSU, I found my answer.
 
For the past three years, I have been doing my research in the realm of literacies. Research in literacies (plural) is contemporary to literacy (singular), and is more inclusive of different social and cultural activities and practices in which the learners engage these days. A literacies lens takes into account the role of more than one ways of making, representing, and communicating meaning in digital and non-digital spaces. It values the literacies of students and deems them important and relevant, too. Snapchatting your trip to the local science museum is an example of a type of literacy; rather, a combination of several literacies. As a result of this experience, I know now that, in my wireless communication class, I needed to make probability relevant to my student; not simply share why it was relevant to me. Sharing my personal liking did not connect with him because our experiences with probability had been quite different. I need to situate my teaching in my student experiences. The question is: how?
 
Through my research and teaching at MSU, I have learned 5 pedagogical moves that are important to make learning relevant to students: knowing student experiences, explicit instruction, situated and transformative practices, critical framing, and aesthetic framing(Cope & Kalantzis, 2015; Girod, Rau, & Schepige, 2003). Think of a topic from your own teaching that you wish your students cared more about. It could be social justice, evolution, literature, or anything that you really care about but some students do not. Now, how can you use these 5 pedagogical moves to make your topic relevant for students? To help you think through, I have 5 tips and questions–based in literacies research–that you can ask yourself to keep your teaching relevant to your students.
Knowing Student Experiences
Ask yourself: Do I know my students’ experiences that bring them to this class?
 
Knowing your students and their experiences is a continual process that cannot be achieved in a single post-class survey. It takes place in bursts of examples that slip out of several in-class discussions and through your regular awareness that provide you a window into their out-of-class experiences. As a teacher, you need to be aware of these examples that get you closer to understanding what your students find relevant.
 
Tip: You can, of course, set up surveys to get a glimpse of student experiences. Another way to tap into topics that students find relevant is by scaffolding discussions where students are given opportunities to provide examples situated in their experiences, choosing their styles of expression and communication.
Explicit Instruction
Ask yourself: Is it obvious to my students why this topic is important to study?
 
If you think it is not obvious to your students why they study a certain topic, make it explicit. As teachers, the link between significance, necessity, and implications of a topic are more clear in our heads than often in our teaching. As students just getting to know a topic, these links may not be obvious to them. And, it is possible that they are trying to make their own links to justify it, which may lead to further alternative conceptions.
 
Tip: Include a quick list of significance and implications in your syllabus. This does not have to be a comprehensive list, but something to hook your students. If you wish to have some fun with, make it a catchy Buzzfeed-like clickbait sentence. However, make sure that you do not frame your clickbaits in a way that take the substance out of the topics, or essentialize students. Here are a few examples that do and do not work.
Situated and Transformative Practice
Ask yourself: Will students be able to go outside and use what they have learned in their real world?
 
Often, we forget to make connections with students’ out-of-class experiences. Why should students care about chemical reactions, when their biggest challenge is clean drinking water? The connection between chemistry and real life may be more clear to you than it is to your students. When topics are shared with real-life implications and examples that are connected with students’ personal experiences, they become more relevant to them.
 
Tip: Create projects or assignments that involve solving a real problem in students’ communities. These could be papers, a survey of their community, or actual working projects. There is always room for improvisation.
Critical framing
Ask yourself: Are my students critical of the information they engage with, or do they agree without further questioning?
 
Critical framing sounds like a very scientific approach, but it is equally valued in literacies. Being critical to information is as important a skill for a literature major as it is for a scientist. But being critical is not limited to questioning information for evidence. It also means being socially and culturally critical. Are your students aware of racial, gender, and other biases in their learning environment and profession? Do they question practices that are taken for granted but could be marginalizing to others? Framing your own teaching in critical ways advocates a critical lens on the world. As teachers, we are among the best role models for our students on how to be socially and culturally conscious, scientifically skeptical, and adept at navigating media and information.
 
Tip: Show your own skepticism towards marginalizing and unscientific practices (e.g.: practices that are based in evidence, but still value other ways of knowing) in your discipline. Add a question at the end of each topic that makes connections to how it affects (or has affected) social and cultural issues.
Aesthetic framing
Ask yourself: Are my students genuinely curious about this topic? Do they think about this when they leave my class?
 
Aesthetic framing should be a requirement for all disciplines. Although it is inherent in disciplines like literature, music, and science, it is often lost in everyday teaching and learning. An aesthetic framing speaks of making connections to the content in a way that inspires emotional responses from  students. How you explain the inner-workings of a leaf can either bore students or inspire them with further curiosity to learn more. Our goal as teachers is to provide a disciplinary lens for  students on the world. Everywhere students go, they should be thinking about things from this disciplinary perspective; at least that should be a worthy goal for us all.
 
Tip: Pay close attention to your word choice when framing the language in your syllabus, and more importantly, during your instruction. Keep in mind that music, lighting, and other modalities can also have an effect on emotions. Feel free to experiment with the ambience of your classroom. For example, reading Edgar Allen Poe with dim lights and spooky music creates an eerie atmosphere often associated with Poe’s work and genre, thereby making it more engaging.
 
Overall, the purpose of these five questions and tips is to excite students about disciplinary content, inspire authentic discussions, and bolster relevant practices. Our goal is to have them on-board with the things that we have learned to value and care about, so they can be good, literate, and emotional citizens who value each other and the world they live in.
 
Related readings
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2015). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Learning by Design. Palgrave Macmillan.
 
Girod, M., Rau, C., & Schepige, A. (2003). Appreciating the beauty of science ideas: Teaching for aesthetic understanding. Science Education, 87(4), 574–587.
 
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Skogsberg, E. Five Ways to Make Learning Relevant inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

Picture a classroom full of voices, chairs facing not the front but one another, heads leaned close, and pens moving furiously. This image is very different from the traditional university classroom in which a gallery of students listen and watch as a professor recites information. However, an increasing amount of university instructors favor the former example for their classrooms (Smith et al. 2005). Why would undergraduate instructors turn away from tradition and toward this more cooperative learning environment?
 
Many studies have found there is a fundamental difference in the way students engage with material in cooperative classes. In my personal experience with cooperative learning, I have witnessed students constructing new knowledge based on previous experience, gaining a richer understanding of a concept by explaining it to a peer, and even voicing their insecurities with the material. In this post, I will discuss the benefits of cooperative learning and explore some cooperative learning approaches. I hope to persuade you that cooperative learning is an effective and feasible approach that can be incorporated into your classroom this semester and beyond.
Active Learning vs. Lecturing
Anecdotal evidence aside, the data speak for themselves. In a meta-analysis of over 200 studies, Freedman et al. (2014) found dramatic differences between lecture-based and active instructional strategies (including cooperative learning) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classrooms. Students in active learning classrooms are 1.5 times less likely to fail than students in lecture-based classrooms and outperform their counterparts on exams by an average of 6%. These results point to increased retention and higher GPAs of students within the discipline when active learning strategies are implemented.
 
What drives these increased learning gains? In the transition between lecturing and active learning, the instructor shifts the learning environment from being teacher-centered to student-centered. This shift in focus promotes greater accountability, ownership of ideas, a sense of belonging amongst students, and a more cooperative classroom.
The Cooperative Classroom
Cooperative learning is one active learning approach documented as effective in achieving student learning goals. With a cooperative learning approach, students work together in small groups to accomplish tasks that promote positive interdependence. In other words, learning activities are structured so that achievement is both beneficial to individual students and also to the group as a whole. These activities can last anywhere from five minutes to an entire semester. Successful cooperative learning strategies promote student engagement with the material, individual accountability, and teamwork-building skills. Cooperative learning also promotes regular, formative assessment of student learning, higher order thinking, and builds classroom community (see Smith et al. 2005),
Cooperative Learning in Action
The key to successfully implementing cooperative learning is aligning it with learning objectives. Cooperative learning activities aren’t extras, but essential steps toward optimal learning. Some topics could include concepts that will be emphasized on the exam, big ideas for the day, and items that are difficult  for students to master. The better integrated these activities are, the easier it will be to select approaches that meet your overall course objectives.
 
It may seem like an intimidating task to implement cooperative learning in a lecture-based course. Completely redesigning a course involves significant time and effort, and graduate student assistants often don’t have the freedom to dictate the classroom structure. The good news is that cooperative learning can be incorporated into courses in small, low-stakes ways. The following are three strategies that can be integrated into your curriculum next semester and accomplished within 5-15 minutes. I would suggest starting here:
Think-pair-share
Instructors pose a question or discussion topic (e.g., “Based on what you know about global wind and ocean currents, describe why the wave height in the Southern Ocean is an average of two meters higher than in the Equatorial Pacific”). Instructors then give students individual reflection time to process the question and to think about their answer. Following this silent period, students are then asked to pair up with another student to discuss their answer and to resolve any differences (if there is a correct answer to the question). The class can then come together as a large group once again, and the instructor can call on individual groups to share their discussions. This approach encourages students to explore and demonstrate their understanding of key concepts prior to a high-stakes exam in a way that is not possible in a lecture format.
 
Bonus: The pair step is a great opportunity for the instructor to walk throughout the room to monitor the discussion groups and connect with students on a more individual basis. The share step can be used to assess the distribution of ideas among students and identify sticky points that may require additional attention. This approach also allows students to speak up in class after vetting their thoughts with another student, which helps to decrease public speaking anxiety.
Minute Paper
Similarly to the think-pair-share activity, instructors pose a question or discussion topic. Instructors then provide time (typically under three minutes) for students to write down their ideas . This could be specified as anything from a “brain dump” (e.g., “Discuss the  factors that dictate the growth of algae in the Arctic Ocean”) to a more structured form (“e.g., How would you design an experiment to measure the effect of temperature and light on algal growth in the Arctic Ocean?”). Students can then team up into small groups to discuss their answers and come to a consensus or perspective on the major ideas from the question. Following small group time, a few groups can be asked to report out to the whole class about their discussion. The minute paper approach allows instructors and students to move beyond memorization and into higher order thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation.
 
Bonus: Positive interdependence can be achieved by assigning group members specific roles (e.g., recorder, checker, task manager, and spokesperson). These roles can be rotated each time the activity is used to allow students to practice each communication skill.
Jigsaw
This learning strategy works well for course concepts that can be split up into separate yet interconnected parts. Each part thus represents a piece of the puzzle, and the complete puzzle requires each individual piece to be complete. The jigsaw approach is split into two steps: the expert group meeting and the jigsaw group meeting. In the expert group meeting, instructors  split students into small groups that are each assigned one part of the relevant content. Expert groups are assigned to discuss their “puzzle piece” and to achieve a consensus or mastery of their component. Expert groups are then dissolved and new jigsaw groups are formed, made up of one person from each expert group. In the jigsaw group meeting, each “expert ambassador” has a chance to report to the group about his or her piece of the puzzle. Jigsaw groups are then assigned the task of connecting each component to form a complete picture of the concept. The jigsaw approach encourages students to take ownership of their component of the concept and improve their communication skills when meeting with the jigsaw group.
 
Bonus: Keep in mind that this method, while rich in discussion opportunities, requires the most logistical planning and organizational support of the three strategies outlined. For further reading, see https://www.jigsaw.org.
What are your favorite cooperative learning activities that you use in your own classroom? Do you have a successful strategy to encourage students to embrace cooperative learning? Please share your thoughts in the comments below or use the hashtag #ITeachMSU to further engage in the conversation on Twitter or Facebook.
Additional Reading
Angelo, T., K.P. Cross. 1993. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 1555425003. http://www.amazon.com/Classroom-Assessment-Techniques-Handbook-Teachers/dp/155425003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450279809&sr=8-1&keywords=classroom+assesment+techniques
Freedman, S., S.L. Eddy, M. McDonough, M.K. Smith, N. Okoroafor, H. Jordt, and M.P. Wenderoth. 2014. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111(23): 8410-8415. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full.pdf
Johnson D.W., R.T. Johnson, and K.A. Smith. 2006. Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom. Interaction Book Co. ISBN: 978-0939603145. http://www.amazon.com/Active-Learning-Cooperation-College-Classroom/dp/093960314
Smith, K.A., S.D. Sheppard, D.W. Johnson, and R.T. Johnson. 2005. Pedagogies of engagement: Classroom-based practices (cooperative learning and problem-based learning). Journal of Engineering Education 94: 87-101.http://personal.cege.umn.edu/~smith/docs/Smith-Pedagogies_of_Engagement.pdf
 
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Salk, K. Planning for Cooperative Learning. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

Designing Your Course
The semester will begin soon, and we’re sure you’re busy prepping your course. This design work before the beginning of the semester is an essential part of overall student learning and provides a framework you can respond to as you gather assessment evidence across the semester. As you are designing this week, we want to provide some guidance by sharing “backward design” principles from our Preparing Future Faculty for the Assessment of Student Learning (PFF-ASL) Institute. We’ve found these principles extremely helpful for making sure student learning is always in focus and all elements of our courses are aligned toward our learning outcomes.
Designing Your Course “Backward”
Initially introduced by Wiggins and McTighe (1998), “backward design” for curriculum involves building your course from end-of-course learning outcomes, through evidence you’ll gather out of assessments, and finally to the instructional activities students will engage in to help them learn towards readiness for assessments and meeting learning outcomes. Below, Dr. Cori Fata-Hartley further outlines essential steps of backward design:

https://youtu.be/DTxnTNXPK3g
 
Using Dr. Fata-Hartley’s outlining of backward design principles as our guide, here are four questions to help you this week as you’re designing your course:
Four Questions for Designing Your Course “Backward”
1) What Do You Hope Students Know and Are Able to Do?
This question can help anchor your creation of learning outcomes. We’ve found “Students Will Be Able To” (SWBAT) as a helpful lead-in statement to direct the writing of our learning outcomes. And remember, your learning outcomes should be observable (and thus assessable), which leads to question # two.
2) What Assessment Evidence Will You Gather?
Answering this question allows you to think about how you’ll know if students have met course learning outcomes. Assessments provide the necessary evidence of learning out of which you can make decisions about where you and students are along the way to meeting learning outcomes. 
3) What Learning Experiences Will You Provide for Students?
The learning experiences you plan across your course builds towards the assessments students will do towards learning outcomes. What will students and you engage in at each step along the way? How do these steps lead towards assessments and learning outcomes?
4) Is Your Course Design Aligned?
Tracing across your answers to the previous three questions, you can begin to see whether your course design is aligned. This can allow you to make the necessary revisions towards best alignment and student learning, and keep elements that are already working. This alignment work is a constant process across–and even after–your course as students respond to your design.
 
We’d Like to Know: What are some of the ways you’ve linked learning outcomes, assessments, and learning experiences? How do you respond when you see that some elements of your design aren’t aligned?
 
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by Design. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Skogsberg, E. Designing Your Course “Backward”. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

I once tried to copy over content from a text document and it didn't drop in well. The spacing was weird. Additionally, the bulleting feature didn't show right when I published the article and the heading feature did not work. So I am testing this now. First, let's test the headers: 
This is a 'header 1'
let's see how this works. Headers are important for accessibility. 
This is a 'header 2'
Why is it important? They help assistive technologies read the content and sets up the ability to use functions that enable users to advance through the materials in helpful ways.
This is a 'header 3'
Imagine if there is a 60 page paper. What many of us are used to papers and publications that have section headers, titles, subtitles, and the lot. If I am seeing impaired, I won't be able to 'see' those features of the piece. But, assistive technologies plus the use of built in features like headers, allows readers to navigate through the text via the titles and subtitles (depending on how it is set up...the assistive technology that I use reads out the lines and gives me to choice to go to the next and also navigate through the various header levels). Now onto the bullets. Bullets and numbers are important. I like lists. Lists can be helpful when I want to present materials in a certain way, but often when you copy content over from somewhere else (and if that content already has bullets), it will not paste in correctly. So while you might 'see' bullets it might actually be a series of spaces followed by a special character dot and an assistive technology might read "space space space space space space space dot" and then read the content after the bullet...and this is rather annoying to listen to. So let's see how the site handles bullets:

this is a bullet
this is another bullet
this is one more bullet
this is the last bullet
wait you know what, I don't want to be a bullet. I want to be a number.


Ah ha! Now I am a number. 
Wait...what is happening, now I am a different number. 
Ahhhhhhh [identity crisis looming]

Phew...normal text again.