Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity

Description:

"A host of simple teaching strategies—referred to as “equitable teaching strategies” and rooted in research on learning—can support biology instructors in striving for classroom equity and in teaching all their students, not just those who are already engaged, already participating, and perhaps already know the biology being taught. Equity, then, is about striving to structure biology classroom environments that maximize fairness, wherein all students have opportunities to verbally participate, all students can see their personal connections to biology, all students have the time to think, all students can pose ideas and construct their knowledge of biology, and all students are explicitly welcomed into the intellectual discussion of biology. Without attention to the structure of classroom interactions, what can often ensue is a wonderfully designed biology lesson that can be accessed by only a small subset of students in a classroom."