How Inclusive Are Your Courses? Tools for Self-Assessment

by Debie Lohe, Director, Reinert Center

As part of the Reinert Center’s ongoing focus on inclusive teaching, we continue to add just-in-time resources and tips to our website, in order to help faculty act on their commitments to design and teach courses with inclusion as an explicit priority.  In spite of our best intentions, we can sometimes find it difficult to imagine, in practical terms, what inclusive courses and course materials look like.

Our newest resource — Before/After Course Materials — provides concrete examples of course materials in two forms, how they appear before they were revised to be more inclusive and how they appear after revisions. These materials supplement our brief Resource Guides and other practical resources.

For those who want resources more directly applied to their own courses and teaching, we recommend the following tools:

• Strategies for Inclusive Classrooms: This checklist activity reflects the literature on inclusive teaching practices and asks instructors to take stock of which practices they already use or might use in the future.
• Inclusive Teaching Checklist (Univ. of Tasmania): Adapted from the University of Calgary, this checklist also includes concrete inclusive teaching practices, also reflecting the literature on inclusive teaching.
• Inclusion by Design: Survey Your Syllabus (Brantmeier, Broscheid, & Moore): Inspired by the learning-focused syllabus rubric developed by the University of Virginia, this self-survey tool explicitly adds the focus of inclusion. Faculty may find it beneficial to use this tool to structure self-reflection on their own courses.

Each of these tools provides a way to self-assess how inclusive their teaching and courses are, while also prompting new ideas for additional strategies that may be adopted. You might find one or more of these tools helpful as you reflect on your spring courses over the winter break.

This blog post is part of the Reinert Center’s 2016-2017 focus on Inclusive Teaching. To learn more about the year’s theme, and about programs and resources associated with it, see our webpage on Inclusive Teaching [LINK]. To talk with someone about how you can design and teach courses in more inclusive ways, contact the Reinert Center at cttl@slu.edu.