Key messages to take away

Viji and I hope you have found many of the ideas in this course useful. We have found in our own teaching when we incorporate more structure through practice that we can make our course more inclusive and that structure comes into our classroom interactions with our students, our curriculum, as well as our classroom activities. Once you adopt a mindset of structure, you’ll see your teaching with a whole new perspective. In fact Viji and I often see this outside of our own teaching in daily activities. We’ll often text each other about places that we see could use a lot more structure.

For example, noisy airports that don’t have visual messaging and lines on the floor for lining up, as well as swim meets we’ve been to as parents where we think they could use color coding and numbers for the kids ages 10 and under. To adopt this mindset in your teaching, we think you should ask this one question to yourself over and over. And that question is “Can I bring more structure to what I’m doing?” And it’s often very helpful to think about certain students in your course to help you think about that structure.

For example, if you’re doing a classroom activity, you might ask “How would this work for a multilingual student?” “Would a quiet student be successful with this activity?” As we continue to ask that question, we’ll find places where we can incorporate more structure into our class and we’ll see that that inclusive mindset comes easier and easier. Once we adopted this mindset in our own teaching the results were seen in responses to student surveys as well as the outcomes in our own courses. We felt empowered by embracing this mindset and we hope you will too.

Thanks for taking part in this course. We hope you found it enjoyable and useful and we really encourage you to join in the discussion. And if you want to learn more check out our book ‘Inclusive Teaching: Strategies For Promoting Equity In The College Classroom’ More details are below in the lesson.