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Teaching Practices & Course Design to Enable Every Student to Thrive

28Feb’22

Teaching Every Student

This page offers teaching practices and strategies for course design that open the classroom to a wide range of different students to best help everyone in the course learn. Creating a classroom that welcomes students of different experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives provides a learning atmosphere in which all students can thrive to the best of their abilities and feel comfortable asking their questions and sharing their ideas. 

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Communicate & Support High Expectations

Communicate high expectations and provide students with the support to meet them. Students thrive when challenged if they understand the expectations, how to meet them, and feel the instructor believes in their capabilities.

  • Provide multiple strategies to approach the work and indicate that all students can meet the challenge with practice.
  • Build in low-stakes, well-structured practice on skills required for tests and assignments.
  • Give students feedback that includes recognition of your high standards and the sense that the student can meet them. 

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Create a Sense of Connection

Facilitate students' sense of identity within your field and your class. Being a part of a class community or a field can bolster all students' performance and persistence in a discipline. 

  • Give students authentic tasks, such as primary research, analysis of authentic data, or other versions of practices in the discipline appropriate for the course level.
  • Provide students with a variety of role models in your field.
  • Ask students to reflect on how their backgrounds can contribute to their success.
  • Reach out to talented students in your class to encourage them to continue in your field. 

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Facilitate a Growth Mindset

Help students see that academic ability develops over time and takes effort. Developing a "growth mindset," the sense that academic ability is something that develops through struggle, can help students overcome tendencies to attribute difficulties in a class or field to a lack of ability. 

  • Stress that struggle is normal. Those who do not see themselves as typical Penn students in particular will be more likely to persist if they see their difficulties as common ones.
  • Give students the chance to hear from peers or work together, so they can see that others struggle and learn how they overcome difficulties.
  • Emphasize to students that taking advantage of help or mentorship is something successful students do. Connect students with support resources at Penn. 

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Incorporate Meaningful Group Work & Active Learning 

Group work and active learning strategies improve learning for all students while increasing student confidence, and have a particularly strong effect on students who may be less likely to see themselves in the field. 

  • Restructure the use of lecture or recitation time to include student polling, brief writing exercises, or pair work. 
  • Provide groups with sufficiently difficult tasks that focus on learning goals and students will benefit from working on together.
  • Design groups so that students feel they connect to the class: the groups are small enough to make sure everyone has to participate, and various levels of students are grouped to encourage all to contribute. 

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Get to Know Your Students

Understanding the interests and backgrounds of your students can help you connect students to the field, recognize their variety of strengths, and check your assumptions about them. 

  • Meet individually with students at some point in the semester, perhaps to discuss a class assignment, get their feedback, or understand why they are in the class.
  • Invite students to bring their experiences and interests into class discussions or assignments without singling out students or asking students to be spokespeople for those of their background.
  • Reach out to students who appear to be struggling, but do not assume that they are not working hard. Such students may be working quite hard, but not effectively. 

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Understand Social Psychology

Awareness of social psychological phenomena can help instructors to develop welcoming practices and avoid common pitfalls. 

  • Students tend to perform better when they believe their instructors have faith in their abilities to learn the material.
  • Small, often subtle and unintentional, comments and actions that target particular groups or individuals, can create an unwelcome classroom environment. Such comments may come from classmates, as well as the instructor.

Teaching Every Student

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