Who Are You Teaching To?

This week's Guest Blogger is Sara Brownell, PhD. Dr. Brownell is a neuroscientist turned full-time education researcher. As a Science Faculty with Education Specialty, she uses both qualitative and quantitative data to better understand how undergraduate biology students learn and how instructors can develop more effective ways to teach.

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One of the great benefits of being a college-level instructor is that we have great flexibility in what we teach (e.g. what example to use, what level of detail to omit) and how we teach it (e.g. case studies, demonstrations, or traditional lecturing).  However, in designing our lesson plans, we can also be inadvertently choosing who we are teaching to.  

This is obvious, but each student is unique and their life experiences before showing up in our classes can be incredibly different.  They come to our classrooms with different prior knowledge in biology, different reading levels, different math abilities, different interests and motivations, and different social identities – race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, political ideology, etc.  We want to create classrooms where we don’t just teach a select few students, but rather we are as inclusive as possible to all students – but this won’t just happen automatically.  We have to be conscious of our own biases and structure our classrooms to promote equity.    

A recent study of mine has shown that in large introductory biology classrooms, even though female students make up 60% of the classroom, their voices are only heard 40% of the time.  While we don’t know why there is a gender gap in participation in introductory biology, we do know of a very simple strategy to get rid of this gap: random call.  Instead of having instructors either call on students they know by name or a student who raised his or her hand, an instructor can call names out from a randomized class list.  This ensures equity in who gets the opportunity to share out in class.  A low budget way of doing this is to have students fill out index cards with their personal information on the first day of class to get to know them and then shuffle the cards before class to determine the order of calling on students.  Another easy way to do this (especially in large classes) is to randomize your class list using Excel’s random number generator feature and just bring the printout of the list to class.  For the tech savy instructor, there are even apps that can do this for you! (Click here for a short video about the technology)

Although students may balk at being singled out, instructors that do random call are giving students the experience of sharing their ideas in a low-stakes environment. Effective communication of ideas is an important skill for students to develop and in-class participation is a way for them to hone these skills.  However, for random call to work, it is important that instructors create a classroom environment where it is OK if a student does not know the answer and that being wrong does not mean that the student is dumb.  Some students will feel less comfortable sharing in front of the whole class and instructors need to be patient with students and create an atmosphere where the student can participate without feeling judged.  Even if a student shares an incorrect idea, this can be learning experience for the student and the rest of the class.  Instructors need to be mindful that how they react to wrong answers will influence whether students feel safe participating in class. 

Random call is just one of many methods that instructors can try to ensure that all students get the same opportunities to participate in class. 

Additional Resources:

• For 21 easy teaching strategies to promote equity in your classroom, please see a recent article by Kimberly Tanner: http://www.lifescied.org/content/12/3/322.full
• For more information about gender gaps in introductory biology, please see: http://www.lifescied.org/content/13/3/478.full

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