Inclusive teaching

Inclusive teaching refers to intentional approaches to curriculum, course design, teaching

practice, and assessment that create a learning environment where all students feel that their
differences are valued and respected, have equitable access to learning and other educational
opportunities, and are supported to learn to their full potential. Rather than being a static
checklist, inclusive teaching can change depending on context. Inclusive teaching is an explicit
intellectual and affective inclusion of all students into our fields and disciplines, through course
content, assessment, and/or pedagogy. A philosophy of teaching that provides equal
opportunities for all students to have a successful learning experience. In inclusive teaching the
content and other course objectives are explicitly viewed from the multiple perspectives and
varied experiences of a range of group and help students understand how they construct
knowledge in any field or discipline.

Equity is the core concept in inclusive teaching and it means striving to structure the classroom
environments that maximize fairness, wherein all students have opportunities to verbally
participate, all students can see their personal connections to the subjects that are taught, all
students have the time to think, all students can pose ideas and construct their knowledge, and all
students are explicitly welcomed into the intellectual discussions.

Inclusive teaching calls for the utilization of pedagogical strategies in the classroom that reflect
an understanding of social identity development so that we can anticipate the tensions that might
occur in the classroom and be proactive about them. That is the teaching strategies should be
contextual and should make use of cultural values of the learners in that classroom.

Inclusive teaching ensures that class participation is broaden. We defined the term ‘broadening
participation’ to mean efforts that develop talent and promote the inclusion of students and
scientists from all social backgrounds in all levels of the life sciences. The aim of this is so that
the broadening participation efforts would be a vibrant scientific enterprise that continues to
harness the contributions of those from traditionally well-represented backgrounds while
fostering full participation and engagement of those from other backgrounds (e.g., women, racial
and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, sexual and gender minorities, first-generation
students, those from low-income backgrounds).

Inclusive teaching approaches take into consideration contextual factors both within the
classroom and outside of the classroom that can influence the teaching and learning process.
Being an inclusive educator requires reflection on an instructor's own beliefs and approaches to
teaching diverse students and social identities which means inclusive pedagogy include learners
based on individual profiles, learning styles, and interest.
Key principles of inclusive teaching
Establishing an inclusive learning environment is a collaborative endeavour, involving teaching
staff, support services and students. These key principles of inclusive teaching can be apply
across different settings and contexts. Following these principles can help to create an inclusive
learning environment where students feel valued and that they belong.
1, Finding out about our students: Before we start teaching, we can start to address inclusivity
by thinking about who our students are and what they need to achieve in their learning. This can
help us to design teaching that is appropriate and meaningful for our students. The level and type
of information we know and can find out about our students will likely vary according to the
type of teaching we're doing as well as our role and responsibility. In a large lecture, it is
uncommon to have very detailed information about each student, and this would not be practical
for a large group. However, we can still consider relevant factors such as:
 the skills and knowledge that students need to build and develop during their course
 what students may have already studied during their degree
 how students will be assessed
 what we want students to gain from our teaching
 the year-group of the students attending
 differences between students' prior knowledge
 whether students will have different disciplinary or educational backgrounds
 whether individual students have shared Student Support Plans outlining required
adjustments to teaching
 common requirements for disabled students.
Information about students and their programme of study comes from various sources including:
course handbooks, colleges and departments. We can also find out information directly from
students, for example, by encouraging them to share their academic interests or designing
activities that will help us to gauge their prior knowledge and learning.
2. Communicating with students: What we communicate to students and how we do this
impacts on students’ learning. This can range from practical details, to broader issues such as the
language and examples we choose to use when explaining concepts. Key to communicating with
students is clarity of expectations. Students will have different expectations about how they
should participate and complete work, the desirable qualities of the work produced, how they
should use reading lists and other resources, and so on. By making our expectations explicit all
students will be better placed to achieve and work towards specified goals. As well as clarifying
expectations, inclusive communication means:
 connecting students learning, making it clear why students are learning something and
what else it links to in their degree
  establishing an environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and try
out ideas
 promoting respectful discussion, which may require clarifying appropriate language and
communication, particularly when discussing sensitive topics
 using language that is respectful of different student identities.
3, Making teaching accessible: The term accessibility relates to whether all people can use,
participate in or benefit from a particular resource, service or environment regardless of any
disabilities or other needs. In an educational context, it refers to the removal of barriers faced by
learners with disabilities in acquiring and reading teaching materials and participating in
activities.
Accessibility is important for all students, some of whom will have mild and
undiagnosed Specific Learning Difficulties. Sometimes students will require accessibility
adjustments that we cannot anticipate. However, by following accessibility guidelines we can
remove most common accessibility issues from the outset. It is good practice to follow these
guidelines for all students, regardless of whether they have disclosed a disability. Doing so will:
 benefit all students by increasing readability of material, giving students time to prepare
and so better participate, and giving students greater autonomy in their learning
 reduce the need for students to disclose a disability
 reduce the need for tutors to retrospectively spend time adapting teaching to meet the
needs of disabled students.
4, Diversifying our teaching: Even if we're not actively reflecting on this issue, many of us
diversify what we teach and how we teach it in order to increase student engagement and
participation. When we do this, we are recognising and valuing the diversity of our students.
Some of us do this by diversifying the materials we teach with, for example, using texts, images,
objects or videos. When we do this in a way which is inclusive, it sometimes means swapping or
replacing existing materials to create greater variety rather than greater quantity. Many of us
diversify our teaching by using different ways to give feedback, for example, using peer
assessment activities, and typing written comments. Sometimes we take this one step further by
giving students some choice about how they receive feedback, acknowledging that this can be
particularly important for some students, such as those with specific learning requirements. Most
of us give students a range of ways of demonstrating and reflecting on their learning, for
example, asking them to do writing tasks, to give presentations, to work on group projects, to
engage in debates, or to contribute anonymously. This involves identifying tasks that will
support students to develop the skills and knowledge that will be assessed during their degree.
Giving students some choice can also support and motivate students. This might mean giving
students a range of questions, topics or formats to choose from. However, giving students too
many choices can be overwhelming, particularly if these are unfamiliar. So when we do give
choice, it is best to limit this and provide guidance to help students to make an informed
decision. Currently, many of us are thinking about ways we can recognise and promote a variety
of perspectives in our teaching. For example, by showing different approaches to a question or
alternative arguments so one single perspective does not dominate. This includes representing a
range of contributors to the field and in doing so showing that voices from different cultures,
genders, races, and backgrounds are present and valued. This can shape our students' experience
of learning by increasing their engagement, sense of inclusion and even attainment.

Importance of inclusive teaching

Inclusive learning and teaching look at the way schools, classrooms, programmes or lessons are
designed so individuals are actively involved. By considering a range of needs, inclusive
teaching provides fair access to learning for all. The advantages of these teaching methods
impact the wider community too by increasing skill acquisition in the next generation. Here are
the main benefits of inclusive teaching in today’s society.

It looks at the needs of individual students: The application of inclusive and special education
teaching methods in the classroom allow all students to engage meaningfully with the
curriculum. This means that students of all backgrounds and learning abilities have an
opportunity to achieve their true potential. With the right structure in place, children can attend
lessons in regular classrooms, preventing segregation or exclusion in the school environment.

It recognises diversity in the community: One of the main benefits of inclusive teaching is the
recognition and nurture of diversity in communities. It aims to bring different children together
in a classroom, allowing everyone the same chance to grow and learn. As a result, it can foster
relationships outside of school, boosting cooperation and collaboration in the local area between
parents, children and neighbours.

It means no-one is excluded because of their identity: Inclusivity means that all children
receive appropriate programmes for education. Therefore, there will be more participation in co-
curricular and extracurricular activities. By ensuring inclusion in early childhood education,
schools can give students the best chance of making friends and greater opportunities for
interactions with others.

It is transformative: The education we need in the 21st century should enable people of all genders,
abilities, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds and ages to develop the knowledge, skills and
attitudes required for resilient and caring communities. In light of pandemics, climate crises, armed
conflict and all challenges we face right now, transformative education that realizes every individual’s
potential as part of society is critical to our health, sustainability, peace and happiness.

Inclusive instructional practices, on the other hand, aim to remove unnecessary barriers and
improve access for as many learners as possible. But inclusive instruction is more than the just
the elimination of individual and systemic barriers. It means designing for variability so that all
students can contribute to, and fully engage in, their learning. It means checking our assumptions
about why some students succeed and others struggle, and why some students seek help and
others don’t. Moreover, inclusive instruction is about fostering a sense of belonging. Having a
sense of belonging positively impacts students’ motivation and ability to learn.

Assessment in inclusive classrooms

Inclusive assessment is the on-going activities that allow students and instructors to understand
student progress on meeting the course learning objectives. Inclusive assessment is about more
than evaluating students. Assessment of student learning is defined as “process by which we
ascertain through data collection if students have learned the skills, content, and habits of mind
that will make them successful; if students are not learning, we decide on changes in the
curriculum or teaching strategy to improve learning. Assessment procedures and methods must
be flexible enough to allow adjustments to overcome any substantial disadvantage that individual
students could experience.

Inclusive practice means:

 Ensuring that an assessment strategy includes a range of assessment formats
 Ensuring assessment methods are culturally inclusive
 Considering religious observances when setting deadlines
 Considering school holidays and the impact on students with childcare responsibilities
when setting deadlines
 Considering students' previous educational background and providing support for
unfamiliar activities eg, for students unused to group work
  Considering the needs of students with disabilities - our guide on making assessments
accessible can help with this
 Have a variety of types of assessment rather than only two or three high-stakes tests, and
make each individual assessment worth a lower percent of the course grade.
 If grading class participation or engagement, allow many different options to
accommodate different student comfort levels and preferences.
 Use formative and summative assessments, and have assessments frequently throughout
the term.
General Principles
 Student learning is prompted by early, low-stakes, frequent assessment and feedback for
learning.
 Assessments should utilize multiple and varied methods of student performance.
 Student learning is enhanced by exercises or assignments that promote self-assessment
and self-awareness. An example of this may be the use of exam wrappers.
 Assessment occurs before, during, and after learning.
 Assessments need to be transparent in their design. This includes clearly articulating step-
by-step instructions as well as the criteria for success.
Types of assessment
Pre-assessments. In order to design a lesson that truly helps students learn from where they
are, pre-assessments are important indicators of student readiness for a topic. Ensuring that
these assessments contain the essential standards the student must know and learn for the
unit is vital. After lessons are designed around these assessments, frequent assessing is
important. That leads to the next type of assessment.
Diagnostic assessment is a form of pre-assessment that allows a teacher to determine students'
individual strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, and skills prior to instruction. It is primarily used
to diagnose student difficulties and to guide lesson and curriculum planning.
One type of diagnostic check is done at the beginning of the school year. It is a check and
assessment of the quality of knowledge from the previous education which is considered to be
the necessary basis on which new knowledge from a certain field will be upgraded. This also
includes entrance exams and qualifying exams. Diagnostic testing is not related only to the
beginning of the school year. It is also performed during the year - before the implementation of
each new stage of learning.
Benefits of Diagnostic Assessment
As you may have surmised, diagnostic assessment benefits both the instructor and the students.
First, it allows teachers to plan meaningful and efficient instruction. When a teacher knows
exactly what students know or don't know about a topic, she can focus lessons on the topics
students still need to learn about rather than what they already know. This cuts down on student
frustration and boredom.
Second, it provides information to individualize instruction. It may show a teacher that a small
group of students needs additional instruction on a particular portion of a unit or course of study.
He can then provide remediation for those students so that they can fully engage with new
content. Similarly, if a teacher discovers that a group of students has already mastered a large
portion of a unit of study, he can design activities that allow that group to go beyond the standard
curriculum for that topic through independent or small group study.

Finally, it creates a baseline for assessing future learning. It shows both the teacher and the
students what is known before instruction has occurred. Thus, it sets a baseline on a topic. As the
students move through instruction, they can see what they are or aren't learning, and the teacher
can provide remediation or enrichment as needed.
Formative assessment
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback
that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their
learning. More specifically, formative assessments:
o help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
o help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems
immediately
Formative assessments are generally low stakes, which means that they have low or no point
value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to:
o draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic
o submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture
o turn in a research proposal for early feedback
Formal ongoing testing and assessment in the true sense of the word should be understood as a
continuous process of monitoring and checking (controlling) the performance of students’
achievements in teaching, in order to collect data for evaluating them. Formal assessment and
verification must be carried out continuously so that it can also intervene over the course of the
event process. Formal checking starts from the individual attributes (subjective and objective) of
each student, and therefore teaching must be adapted to those possibilities. Formal checking does
not end with an assessment, especially with an officially summative assessment and registration
of the numeric grade.
Formative assessments for inclusive pedagogy are not designed to level students and put them
into tracked so-called “ability groups” but, rather, are used to help teachers answer these
questions:
  What background knowledge and prior experiences do the learners each bring with them
to this area of study?
 What skills have they each developed that pertain to this area of study?
 What motivations and interests do students have that can be woven into this area of study
 What are learners conceptual schema related to this area of study?
 And as classroom learning proceeds through the area of study, what specifically are
students learning and what are they not learning that needs to be retaught?
Ongoing classroom assessments need not be complicated or time-consuming, and indeed, can be
considered instructional activities in and of themselves. There are almost limitless genres and
formats for informal classroom assessments, from quizzes and tests to semantic maps and
learning logs. Some teachers find a few routine assessments that they use frequently, which
provides continuity and predictable routines for students, such as the use of an exit slip with a
simple written prompt to assess if students “got” the key teaching point for the lesson.
Also, these ongoing classroom assessments also help students become metacognitive about their
own learning and more able to trace and understand their own learning over time. Such
assessments can also help learners develop metacognitive awareness of how they each learn, thus
developing greater self-regulation and power as learners. By involving students in keeping track
of their own assessments teachers can greatly increase the students’ activation of knowledge.
Summative assessment
The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional
unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.
Summative assessments are often high stakes, which means that they have a high point value.
Examples of summative assessments include:
o a midterm exam
o a final project
o a paper
o a senior recital
Information from summative assessments can be used formatively when students or faculty use it
to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses. It is carried out at the end of certain
stages or periods of the teaching process, such as so-called classification periods, such as
semester or end of the school year. The purpose of this checking and assessment is to fully
understand the results of the students, i.e. summarizing the achievements and assessing their
quality. Depending on when and to what purpose the summative check is carried out, one can
speak of the following types: - Micro-summary checks and evaluations; - Formal stage micro-
summary checks and evaluations; - Final checks and evaluations. There are also types of
verification and assessment according to who performs them.
Differentiated Assessment Methods
With any one of these assessments, teachers have the opportunity to get creative with how
students demonstrate mastery. Instead of just giving students multiple-choice, fill-in-the-
blank, or essay tests, the way in which students are assessed can be differentiated so that any
disability the student might have can be bypassed and learning can be gauged appropriately.
Here are some different ways in which teachers can help students demonstrate learning.

Cubing: Here, students can be provided with a three-dimensional cube made out of foam or
cardboard with a variety of questions scaling up Bloom’s taxonomy (Wormeli, 2006). One
side might contain a question that demonstrates knowledge, where students can remember
and recite the content they remember. One side demonstrates comprehension, where
students show how they understand the concept. Yet another side might have students use
application by using what they know in a different situation. The fourth side would contain
an analysis question, where students break down and then analyze the concept as a whole.
The fifth side would allow students to synthesize information by connecting contradictory
topics and forming new concepts. The last side would allow students to evaluate by taking a
specific criteria and judging the validity or success of the criteria for a concept. Students can
roll the cube and answer three questions from the cube successfully in order to demonstrate
mastery.

RAFT(S). With this assessment, students can choose the role, audience, format, topic/time,
and, if deemed necessary, “strong verbs” that students must include. Since students can
choose one piece from each part of the RAFT(S) rubric, the assessment is differentiated
based on student interest and ability. Here is an example:

Role Audience Format Topic Strong Verb

Percent of Students Argue against decreasing
A young male The governor of the
A letter. Living in Poverty the athletics budget
living in poverty. North.
with Enjoy Sports using a percent equation.
Defend activities by
The importance of
constructing inequalities
Video-taped standards-based
Your teacher The Principal to show upward or
monologue hands-on activities
downward trends in
for student learning.
learning.
Generate a poem that
The young author’s Real-life situations
A poet Poem describes the importance
society using equations
of equations

Assessments are most productive and appropriate when students are provided with materials
that are not only developmentally appropriate, but cover the essential standards. The types
of questions and how they are worded can vary depending on the student, but the challenge
with differentiation is ensuring that students also demonstrate competency with the essential
standards. There is nothing wrong with occasional multiple-choice tests just as long as
students are taught the skills to answer the questions. Always keep in mind what deficits
might get in the way of students completing a summative assessment and help them work
around it so that you are testing the ability of the student with your content area, not with
their disability. And if you haven’t read Wormeli’s book, it’s an excellent source of
information on how to differentiate assessments with finesse. I did receive a copy of this
book in exchange for an honest review, but I honestly could not put the book down when I
began reading it. Just remember when you’re assessing your students that “Fair Isn’t Always
Equal” and that sometimes means that some students demonstrate learning in different ways
than others.