When I teach, I want everyone to succeed and master the material, and I think that everyone in the course can. I only have so much time to work with and guide the students through the material, so how should I spend this time? What can I do to maximize student mastery? Are there seemingly neutral actions that might impact some students more than others? For example, before class this fall, I would chat with the students who were there early, sometimes about computer games. Does those conversations create an impression that "successful programmers play computer games"? To these questions, I want to revisit a pair of posts from the past year about better including the students.
The first is a Communications of the ACM post from the beginning of this year. It listed several seemingly neutral decisions that can bias against certain groups. Maintain a tone of voice that suggests every question is valuable and not "I've already explained that so why don't you get it". As long as they are doing their part in trying to learn, then the failure is on me the communicator.
The second is a Mark Guzdial post on Active Learning. The proposition is that using traditional lecture-style advantages the privileged students. And a key thing to remember is that most of us are the privileged, so even though I and others have "succeeded" in that setting, it may have been despite the system and not because of the teaching. Regardless of the instructor, the teaching techniques themselves have biases to different groups. So if we want students to master the material, then perhaps we should teach differently.
Active learning has a growing body of research that shows using these teaching techniques help more students to succeed at mastering a course, especially the less privileged students. Perhaps slightly less material is "covered", but students will learn and retain far more. Isn't that better?
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