It always seems to come as a surprise to faculty that there are many college students in their classrooms who have disabilities who don’t have accommodations. The formal process for getting an accommodation involves a significant amount of paperwork and presumes that the student has access to getting medical testing and a physician’s evaluation. For a student without money, transportation, and time, this can be unachievable. Additionally, students may have an emerging diagnosis that has not yet been confirmed by their doctor. In some cases, students may also choose not to disclose their disability to their instructor, because they are nervous about the stigma surrounding their condition.
As instructors who want to support their students both with and without formal accommodations, below are five easy ways to increase the inclusivity of your classroom and teaching practices.
1. Use Zoom (or a similar application)
Adding an online meeting link to each of your class sessions can handily accomplish three different inclusive teaching practices.
First, it provides robo-captioning to students in your classroom who may be hard-of-hearing or who have an auditory discrimination issue. Students who have difficulty with focus or who are not native speakers of your language can also benefit from having captioning available on their classroom experience.
Second, recording your online class meeting helps a multitude of students: from those who are easily distracted to those who may need to hear or watch your lectures multiple times in order to comprehend difficult concepts.
Third, this helps students with chronic illness who may be having a flareup of their condition and cannot physically be present on campus. That they can join class while lying in bed or similarly relaxing, means that they won’t miss out on valuable class content while managing their physical symptoms.
2. Attach your rubric to each assignment
HigherEd students come from a variety of backgrounds and differing levels of preparation for the college classroom. Grading each assignment with a rubric and attaching that rubric to the assignment so students can see how they will be graded, is a huge benefit to those who may be unsure of what is expected. You can also review the rubric with the students prior to the assignment due date and discuss whether there are any aspects of the assignment that are unclear.
3. Always ask “What questions do you have?”
This is such a simple change from the “Does anyone have any questions” query that is so common in a college classroom. Instead, ask the question slightly differently, to ask What questions do you have?, becomes an easy opening for them to raise their hand and ask something. Always follow your question with at least ten seconds of waiting time (or even more). Though the silence can feel unsettling, it’s vitally important to create an opening for students to process your question and create a response. I’ve sometimes set a timer for 60 seconds to wait for questions in class, to ensure that everyone has time to process and consider what questions they might have to ask me.
4. Give voice or video feedback on assignments
All of the modern Learning Management Systems (Canvas, BlackboardLearn, D2L) offer an option for faculty to record audio or video feedback for assignments. From several years of experience in doing this, I’ve learned that students generally internalize the spoken feedback better than when they see a marked-up paper. When I record my video feedback I generally start out by telling the student something that they did well, that echoes my written feedback on their work. Then I discuss if and how they are meeting the expectations for the course assignment, and I close my video feedback with some advice for how they might want to focus their time in the future. In general this feedback is quote well received and I’ve seen significant student improvement in future assignments as well. This mode of feedback not only humanizes the grading experience, it offers feedback to students in a multiple modalities and allows me to personalize the feedback for every students’ unique skills and talents.
5. Give time estimates on assigned readings
Most college students are not adept at time management and often leave course readings until the last minute. When they do this, they often skim the content superficially and do not come to class well-prepared. Although more uncommon, it is also the case that some students pore over readings and spend far more time doing the reading than is expected or necessary.
To help students with managing their time I generally give an estimate of how long the pre-class reading will take and I will sometimes offer reading questions that they need to be able to answer about the reading or will offer general guidance about what they ought to know to be prepared for class.
There is a great tool available, the Course Workload Estimator, to estimate the length of time it will take students to read, that you may find helpful to bookmark. One of my favorite features of the Course Workload Estimator is that it allows you to select the type of reading that you want the students to do, to survey the content, understand the text, or engage with the reading. The amount of time suggested by the tool differs accordingly.
None of the suggestions that I’ve made in this article are time-consuming, in fact most take just a moment to do. Yet incorporating these five changes into your classroom will help students, with and without disabilities, to engage, succeed, and feel more included in their learning experience.