Inclusive excellence

What works? Find out in the Instructor's Guide to IE:  Equity Strategies (introduction).

Start by developing as an IE practitioner by understanding institutional advantage and disadvantage, how stereotypes, implicit biases, and stereotype threats work and strategies to counter these issues. Understanding the role that instructors play in helping students develop a growth mindset and feel that they belong at UWL can be particularly useful for First-Year Experience courses, although reiterating those messages in later courses not only helps catch transfer students but also reinforces those messages for all students.

A useful framework for thinking about effective inclusion includes High Belief, High Challenge, High Support. Follow the links in the left menu for specific ideas to enact this framework. For example, enacting High Belief starts with challenging the "deficit model".  Providing High Challenge examines the effective use of High-Impact Practices (HIPs), and Providing Excellent Support examines several strategies identified in the research literature to support student learning, starting with some initial strategies like transparency and scaffolding complex learning, moving on to teaching your discipline's unique skills, and pondering multiple ways to provide supplemental instruction.

Instructors might also want to consider effective ways to work with our Diversity and Inclusion colleagues in our shared support of students.

Start with the Instructor's Guide to Inclusive Excellence and peruse the menu items on the left.  For example:

The Theory and Practice of IE in the Classroom summarizes the range of perspectives and emphases for several forms of inclusive pedagogy (theory). The section on Design offers suggestions from the research literature on ways to implement these ideas as you are envisioning your course.  The last section (Teaching) considers issues that can arise as you are teaching your inclusive course. Both the Design and the Teaching sections are still under development.

Many instructors struggle with particular forms of teaching, like managing group work, or designing effective discussions.  Consult those resources, but don't hesitate to ask for help as well.  Keeping discussion of controversial topics productive for everyone's learning can be a further challenge; don't hesitate to ask for help with those as well.

Approaches that include particular groups of students are here.

Bringing diversity into the content of your course provides multiple benefits for inclusivity and for learning in general.  Students from populations historically underserved by higher education learn that your field includes people like themselves.  Students from populations historically well-served by higher education learn that your field values inclusion.  How to add diversity to the content of your course can be trickier in some field than in others, but here are some strategies for thinking about it. 

Many academic degrees include student learning outcomes aimed at the professional development of their students.  Many employers and graduate programs value collaborative skills, and particularly seek people who can engage differences productively.  Here are some strategies to get you started, but departmental approaches and conversations within professional associations can take you much further to understanding the value of effectively diverse teams.

• Design collaborative learning
• Design for good discussion
• Manage difficult discussions

When you are implementing changes to your teaching, we recommend pacing yourself.  Many teaching and learning experts suggest starting with a concept that students typically struggle to understand, and focusing your initial changes there.  Keeping track of the changes you make and monitoring their impact will help you develop a good teaching improvement piece for retention, tenure, or promotion or even for publication.  Here's a resource to help you plan for documenting teaching improvements.

IE Inventory (good practices for instructors) (Qualtrics) This resource is dated, but many instructors still find it useful.