Principles for inclusive teaching and learning
These principles will support you in designing your teaching and learning more inclusively:
1. Know your students
While it is not always possible to find out everything about your students before you start teaching them, do find out as much as you can to inform your planning and design of materials and learning.
For example, some disabled students may have Study Support Plans – you should check these for any specific requirements in eVision. This is a good starting point for design but remember that many other students may benefit from an inclusive approach which allows them to play to their strengths and reflects their individual learning preferences.
Equally, do not assume anything about your students in terms of their background, prior qualifications, ability or knowledge of your subject. You may find it valuable to incorporate ‘getting to know you’ type activities in your first few sessions.
For large cohorts, doing a quick Menti quiz with some general fun questions such as favourite sport to watch, could help to learn more about your students to feed into the design of teaching.
2. Communicate with your students
The way we communicate with our students can have an impact on their learning experience:
- Make expectations explicit: Being explicit about the expectations of your students is important for their success. From the outset, explaining your expectations of them in your sessions, which can differ between lectures and seminars, practical workshops and labs, as well as personal academic tutorial sessions, can support students in their learning journey. Articulate the learning outcomes and assessment criteria and highlight why they need to do the things they do. Do not assume they will know what to do, we need to scaffold students in thinking through things and understanding what is expected of them.
- Connect with students: In class – whether your cohort is large or small, it is important to make some connections with your students, even if you only ask a couple of students their name each session or share some of your own interests or learning experiences with them.
- Communicate in a variety of ways: You should also be mindful of providing a variety of communication modes as not all students will feel comfortable engaging face to face.
- Make space for students to communicate with you: Be sure to make space for students to communicate with you, and particularly to let you know if they anticipate difficulties in fulfilling the expectations of the classes or the planned assessments. If you can make alternatives available to any student, articulate these carefully and make sure that students have a way of expressing their preferences, confidentially if they wish.
3. Make your teaching accessible
Accessible means being able to use, participate in or benefit from a resource irrespective of any disability-related needs. Most of us have Blackboard courses associated with our programmes where students can find relevant information about the unit as well as learning materials. However, sometimes these resources are unintentionally inaccessible to our students. Blackboard has an inbuilt accessibility checker ‘Ally’ that can support you in ensuring your content is more accessible. The Digital Education Office (DEO) also has a wealth of accessibility guidance. As a starter SCULPT, an acronym for six basic frameworks to introduce accessibility can be used:
Structure – use headings and styles in your materials to help people using assistive technologies work through your documents
Colour and contrast – use sufficient contrast for text and background colours and avoid making colour the only means of representing information (for example use labels in charts)
Use of images – provide alt text or mark as descriptive
Links (hyperlinks) – write them in a descriptive way rather than just saying ‘click here’
Plain English – avoid hard to understand language such as jargon or unexplained acronyms
Table Structure – create simple tables, one per topic
Also ensure your materials are available 48 hours in advance of each class as per Bristol’s policy.
4. Provide variety in the way that you teach
We all learn in different ways, some of us prefer to read about new concepts, others like to have visual support through videos, some like the opportunity to discuss and articulate their understanding with peers or apply their learning to practice, problems or challenges.
Some students like to gather their thoughts in writing before speaking to peers. Ensure that you provide variety in what you do in your teaching and the learning opportunities you provide to cater for a large range of students.
Laurillard’s different learning types and the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) are helpful frameworks for you to consider your teaching variety in your planning to support inclusivity.