Defining Your Course Goals

Designing an equitable and inclusive classroom begins with defining your course goals. A first step is ensuring that your curricular or course goals are explicit, rather than assuming students will discern them. We encourage you to describe what you hope students will learn and learn how to do in your course in your syllabus. Clear course goals can clarify to students what they are learning and why, which studies show can facilitate students’ motivation and their ability to focus on the skills and content you are teaching.

In addition, you might choose course goals that engage diversity, equity, and inclusion. For instance, you may want students to grapple with a broad range of arguments or scholarly perspectives on an issue. You may wish to students to recognize and reflect on knowledge gaps in your field that remain to be filled. You may wish students to explore and engage voices and experiences that have been elided by the received historical narrative

We point to the general education requirement on Culture and Difference as another guide to identifying course goals that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Courses that carry this designation ask students to: 

• Acknowledge distinctive cultural traditions, creations, or practices . . . to illuminate larger dynamics of human meaning and experience. 
• Explore how various forms of social difference (especially involving categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and class) are constructed and contested through literature, art, and language, and through social, economic, and political institutions and practices.
• Reflect on the role of power in society, particularly by focusing on differences that are salient to understanding persistent sources of conflict, inequality, oppression, or violence. 
• Pay significant attention to the experiences of historically marginalized or oppressed social groups, and incorporate contributions from authors and texts whose background or identification is with such groups.

Finally, you might invite students to help you to create a sense of belonging in the classroom in order to increase feelings of connectedness and community among students. 

Action Steps:

• Reflect on what you want students to know and be able to do by the end of your course. What are the key learning goals you hope your students will achieve during the semester?
• Decide what aspect of equitable and inclusive teaching you would like to address, given both our students and your subject matter. For instance, are there curricular changes that would be useful (such as offering a more diverse array of voices)? How can you create a sense of community and belonging among your students? Is there an assignment you can add that encourages students to make connections between course materials and pressing contemporary issues?
• State your goals clearly and directly on your syllabus, and talk through your motivations and expectations with your students. As you plan your assessments, remind yourself of your broader course goals and consider how your assessments help you to evaluate whether your students are meeting them.

Planning for Inclusion

There are many ways your equitable and inclusive course goal(s) can inform your course design process, from small changes that require minimal effort to broader-scale shifts in your course structure. We recommend that you look carefully and critically at your course syllabus, which acts as your students’ initial introduction both to your class policies and to how they will access and interact with your course material. 

For this reason, we invite you to write or revise your syllabus to be as explicit, clear, and welcoming as possible: orient your students to the questions of the course, explain your learning goals and how you will assess them, and describe your course policies, making particular efforts to explain what you mean by terms such as “course participation” or “seminar engagement.” It is easy to forget that your students may not inherently know what you mean by “participation” or “office hours,” both because they may not be familiar with conventions at Princeton or in higher education and also because instructors approach participation in different ways. 

Make sure to clarify any course logistics and be explicit about resources available to your students: bureaucratic and organizational hassle has been shown to negatively impact the sense of belonging (which in turn is correlated closely with performance) especially of historically underrepresented students. 

Action Steps:

• Use this Inclusion by Design worksheet to help you to assess various aspects of your syllabus for equity and inclusion.
• Make your course policies clear.
  • See our Sample Syllabus Policies for Faculty, in which we offer a précis of some important university policies and sample text that you may use or adapt for your own syllabus. 
    • Review the University's Discrimination and Harassment FAQs and index the University's anti-discrimination policy in your syllabus.
    • Review the Office of Disability Services information for faculty regarding accessibility for students with disabilities and inform students of the Office of Disability Services in your syllabus so they know where to turn for accommodations.
    • Check religious holidays each semester to make sure they do not make your course calendar challenging for some students to be involved. Academic regulations allow for excused absences or missed assignments for religious holidays when students notify faculty and plan to make up work.  
    • Provide information about where students can find academic support and support for their mental health and wellness.
• Consider your students’ academic and social experiences, preparation and expectations that they bring to coursework. Are there prerequisites for the course? What content and skills can you expect your students to bring with them? How can you introduce any skills they may not bring?
  • Create a welcoming and inviting classroom environment by reaching out to students in advance, inviting them to share about themselves in a pre-semester survey.
    • Ask them to describe their academic and social experiences, preparation and expectations for the course.
    • Invite them to share any challenges they foresee or anxieties they may have. Periodically, during the semester follow up to check in on any additional challenges they may be experiencing.
    • Ask them to share their pronouns, if they wish. (Because questions about pronoun use can make people feel vulnerable and uncomfortable, writing to students in advance rather than asking on the first day of class about pronoun use may feel less invasive and more welcoming.)
• Add structure. Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy argue that “structure plays a key role in inclusive teaching” because it “provides the organization, scaffolding, and accountability many students may need” and “has been shown to improve student outcomes . . . disproportionately for those who are underrepresented in higher education” (19).
  • Require that students complete low-stakes assignments before, during, and after class. For example, hold students accountable for pre-class work like reading or watching a recorded lecture by having them collectively annotate the video or reading or reflect on the material in a class discussion board.
  • Establish a consistent pattern of assignments in your course. Increase the level of difficulty as students move from pre-class work, to in-class activities, to post-class homework. Provide students opportunities for low-stakes practice before they are evaluated. 
  • Consider starting class with a lesson objective–a statement about what a student should be able to know or do after the class. 
• Make your “hidden curriculum” explicit. 
  • Given who your students are and the experiences they bring to your course, what skills might you need to teach?
  • What social experiences and cultural knowledge may give some students an advantage in their participation in class or their comprehension of course content?
  • Clearly define the terms of your assignments and explain terms like “summary,” “analysis,” “critique,” etc.
• Explain how your students can contact you and how to use office hours. This is especially important for first-year students and students from some under-represented groups. Anthony Jack writes, “Something as simple as professors describing the purpose of office hours in the first class of the semester could be a step on the way toward making explicit the tacit expectations that permeate so many facets of college life” (191).
  • Encourage your students to use office hours. For instance, you might incorporate a discussion with faculty into one of your early assignments (i.e., a revision workshop, discussion about research proposal, etc.) 
• Clearly state your expectations for participation in discussions, and explain how students will be evaluated and graded.
  • Invite students to share their own expectations for classroom participation and discussion. 
  • Give students an opportunity to share any barriers to participation they are experiencing throughout the semester. 
  • Check in with students about their participation during the course of the semester.
• Diversify your course materials.
  • Locate places where you can incorporate diverse perspectives into what you are already teaching, making sure to integrate them fully into your curriculum so as not to tokenize any one perspective. 
  • Recognize that diversifying your course content may involve shifting the structure of the course altogether, for example from a “survey” to a more thematic or  “issue-based” approach.
  • Consider context. As you diversify your course materials, think about how you might introduce your students to the ways in which political, economic, and historical contexts shape knowledge in your field.
  • Encourage students to question the role and presence of underrepresented voices in your field. How have lesser-heard voices shaped or been restricted from shaping knowledge? How might the content of your course reflect this influence, presence, or absence? How might you challenge your students to think about this content from the perspective of marginalized groups?
  • Highlight histories of resistance to oppression or exclusion. 
  • Consider how you might create assignments that help students apply the course material to broader issues of equity. Princeton’s Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES) can partner with you to design assignments where students work closely with community organizations. 
• Make your course documents and materials as accessible as possible.

Cultivating an Inclusive Classroom

With your course goals made clear and your syllabus set, you can continue to cultivate an inclusive classroom by establishing ground rules for discussions, treating students with respect, and encouraging active learning and metacognition.

Action steps:

• Create a community agreement early on in the semester. By setting class norms together, you ensure all students are aware of expectations for behavior in class and encourage students to engage thoughtfully with one another. This is particularly important in courses where difficult topics are at the center. 
• Be aware of contemporary terms for cultural identities. Use terminology that is clear and inclusive, but not divisive or essentialist. Preferences within cultural communities change over time and vary across regions. If you are unsure what term to use, consult the style guide for your discipline (see the APA's Inclusive Language Guide, for instance)..
• Treat students as individuals rather than as token examples of an identity or group. Do not assume a student belongs to a particular group or can represent a unitary perspective on behalf of a group. 
• Show respect for perspectives and ideas that do not match your own.
• Create active learning opportunities, as studies show that active engagement and peer learning help to foster disadvantaged and marginalized students’ learning, especially in STEM fields. These might include activities such as polling during lectures, problem sets, class discussion boards, small group activities, or social annotation. See our Active Learning at Princeton guide for additional ideas.
  • Digital tools for asynchronous engagement, many of which integrate into Canvas, including Ed Discussion, VoiceThread, and (if your course is text heavy) an annotation tool such as Hypothesis or Perusall can help to facilitate active learning activities.
• Give students time to process material. 
  • Pause and allow students to take a quiet minute to think of responses to key questions or jot down new questions. This practice enables everyone to more confidently contribute to class discussion. 
  • Give students brief opportunities to pair up to discuss key questions and share back with the group to provide a stronger basis for individual participation. 
• When assigning small group work, be sure to create well defined tasks and when possible, avoid outnumbering or isolating students from underrepresented groups. 
• Connect individually with your students. Encourage students to meet with you one-on-one at least once during the semester.
• Frame feedback to students in terms of a “growth” rather than “fixed” mindset and emphasize your high expectations and your belief that your students can meet them, strategies that have been shown to improve the motivation and performance of minority students in particular.
• Leave room for metacognition. As part of active learning assignments and activities, invite students to reflect on their learning in addition to demonstrating their mastery of course content, for instance, in a self-reflection statement accompanying final projects.

References and Additional Resources

• Addy, Tracie Marcell, et al. What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC, 2021: pp. 47-72.
• Fox, Helen. When Race Breaks Out: Conversations about Race and Racism in College Classrooms. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2014.
• Germano, William and Kit Nicholls. Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything. Princeton University Press, 2020. 
• Hogan, Kelly A. and Viji Sathy. Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. West Virginia UP, 2022.
• Jack, Anthony. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Harvard UP, 2019.
• Landreman, Lisa M., ed. The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators. Stylus Publishing, 2013.
• Steele, Claude. Whistling Vivaldi: and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.