»How to Develop a Classroom Practice

Developing a classroom practice requires intentional effort but can make the biggest difference for your students by providing high structure in your course. When done thoughtfully, it supports deeper learning, fosters student confidence, and provides an inclusive learning environment for students.

Inclusive Teaching: Creating Structure to Support Student Learning

“Inclusion is a culture in which all learners feel welcome, valued, and safe” (Hogan & Sathy, 2022, p. 10). Providing high structure in a course with frequent low-stakes assessments provides transparent opportunities for students to learn and engage with course content before, during, and after class with guided instructions or activities. High structure benefits all students by allowing multiple opportunities for feedback throughout the course.


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What do we mean by structure?

To ensure that learning outcomes are truly met, they must be aligned with frequent and deliberate practice throughout the term. This means identifying what we want students to accomplish and providing opportunities for them to engage in structured and required exercises to build those skills. When scaffolded practice is paired with continual feedback, students gain a clear understanding of how to meet course expectations. Deliberate practice involves focused effort toward improving performance, activities aimed specifically at addressing gaps in understanding or skills, and immediate feedback. These elements must work together in a recurring cycle that reinforces growth and mastery.

The Value of High-Structure

Course structure increases the perceived value of a course to students and has shown a variety of benefits including closing achievement gaps between first-generation students and non-first-generation students and between black and white students. Hogan and Sathy (2022) noted, “inequities in achievement were reduced when there was structured deliberate practice paired with a culture of inclusion.” Importantly, implementing structure does not harm students who already have the skills to do well in a course, but it does greatly benefit students who have not yet developed those skills.

Creating a High-Structure Course

Here are some examples of what high structure looks like in a course. Provide guided reading (or watching) questions for assigned readings and videos, and give students options for demonstrating what they’ve learned—such as a short quiz, discussion post, or reflection video. To support note-taking, provide skeletal outlines for lectures, and accompany those lectures with recordings or mini-lecture videos posted in Canvas. Students often benefit from engaging with the material multiple times or at their own pace. During class, ensure directions for activities are clear and presented both verbally and in writing—for example, on a slide, handout, and/or in Canvas.

Examples of High Structure

  • Provide guided reading (or watching) questions for assigned readings/videos. Give students options for demonstrating what they’ve learned from the reading/video (short quiz, discussion post, create a reflection video, etc.). 
  • Provide skeletal outlines for lectures to guide students in their note-taking.  
  • Provide a recording of the lecture or create mini-lecture videos to post in Canvas; students often benefit from viewing/hearing the information multiple times, or when they can listen and take notes at their own pace. 
  • Directions for in-class activities are clear and presented both verbally and in writing (e.g., on a slide, a handout, and/or posted in Canvas). 
  • Provide objectives for each lesson to indicate what students should be able to know or do after the lesson; start each lesson with this list of objectives and check them off as they are completed. 

Student Conceptions of Rigor

Oftentimes, there is a misalignment between what students think of rigorous courses and what instructors believe to be rigorous. Understanding intellectual and logistical rigor can help you reduce barriers for yourself and students early on in the semester.

  • 100-level students identified affective terms, stressors such as fast pacing, high workload, unclear relevance to their life or careers, and low faculty support.
  • 300-level students identified cognitive complexity as a contributor to course rigor, but course design elements as easing the learning process.

(Wyse & Soneral, 2018)

The difference between intellectual and logistical rigor is that intellectual rigor refers to cognitively challenging students where they are engaged in deep learning, and critical thinking with meaningful assignments. Intellectual rigor can include competency-based learning but also uses transparent expectations and student-centered pedagogy to engage students while logistical rigor relies heavily on rote learning, unnecessary busywork, inflexible policies, ambiguous expectations, unclear assignments, bell-curve grading, and tradition-bound practices that lead to anxiety-ridden students.


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Why Reduce Logistical Rigor?

  • Conserves cognitive bandwidth for critical thinking 
  • Helps students learn relevant skills (not tricks to pass the class) 
  • More equitable for an increasingly diverse student body  
  • Lowers cognitive load for professors as well! 

Strategies for Reducing Logistical Rigor

  1. Make students co-owners of the course  
    1. Co-Create/Negotiate Policies and Procedures 
    2. Creates a sense of ownership and increases student investment  
    3. Reduces cognitive load because logistics are partly self-imposed 
    4. Promotes student-professor teamwork vs. animosity 
    5. Teaches real-world responsibility, not automated compliance 
  2. Reduces overhead planning for professors 
    1. Offer no questions-asked extensions 
    2. 1, 3, and 5-day extensions on request before deadline (each is only usable once)  
    3. Students have more flexible deadlines 
    4. The onus is on students to plan throughout the term and ask for an extension in advance 
    5. Believe students for absences, but set limits 
  3. Review syllabus and assignments 
    1. Clarity of expectations and grading helps guide student effort 
    2. Explicit instructions reduce confusion and mistakes 
    3. Scaffolding assignments reduces anxiety and leads to better learning outcomes

Activity to Rethink Rigor

Here is an activity that you can try on your own to rethink rigor in your own course.  

Read through your syllabus, looking at items such as course policies, grading practices, number of assignments, etc. Identify items that might be considered logistically rigorous.  

  • How can you reduce logistical rigor in your course(s)?  
  • How can you help align student expectations and perceptions of rigor with those of the professor? 

Course Workload: Perception vs Reality (Quantity vs Quality)

College students often cite course workload as a source of stress and have reported increases in workload in recent years. Is this a result of students’ perceptions about workload or failure to approach learning effectively? Or is there a disconnect when it comes to determining how much work to assign students for a course and how much time this work takes students to complete?   

Many of our students are not adequately prepared for the college environment due to their learning experiences during the pandemic. This does not mean that we cannot, or should not, have appropriately challenging coursework, but we can be mindful of how much we are asking students to do, especially outside of class. We might also consider the idea that a high workload does not necessarily support student learning, and that “flexibility and understanding can coexist with challenging students” (Supiano, 2022).   

As indicated in the policy on credit hours in Chapman’s Curriculum Handbook, a 3-credit, 15-week course requires approximately three in-class contact hours and six hours of assigned coursework per week. Tools such as the Course Workload Estimator can be helpful in estimating the time it will take students to complete tasks such as reading, writing assignments, and taking exams. You can hear Besty Barre, one of the creators of the workload estimator, talk more about how (and why) to use this tool in this podcast episode.    

Hogan and Sathy note in their book on inclusive teaching that an instructor’s job is “not to cover all the content, but to ensure that all students learn” (2022, p. 63). As you plan for your next class, take a closer look at your assigned learning activities, and consider the following:  

  • Do students really need to read every chapter in the textbook?   
  • Is a lengthy paper or exam necessary to show what students have learned? What are some other ways you can capture evidence of student learning?   
  • Do all the activities clearly align with course outcomes? Are they meaningful, or will students see them as busy work?   
  • Are course and assignment instructions and expectations clear?   
  • How might lessons and activities be re-focused to support learning of critical thinking skills rather than trying to teach them (to memorize) everything about a topic?   
  • Does the class include regular, low-stakes activities that are designed to help support student learning?

Students’ Sense of Belonging is Essential to Their Success

We all share the human need to belong, but research suggests that students’ sense of belonging is critical to their persistence and success in college (NSSE, 2022). Sense of belonging refers to a feeling of connectedness, being cared about, accepted, respected, valued, and important to the campus community – and according to (Strayhorn, 2019), “it can affect a student’s degree of academic adjustment, achievement, aspirations, or even whether a student stays in school.” Students who feel like they belong are more likely to be engaged in class and perform well. On the other hand, feelings of isolation or “belonging uncertainty” are “negatively associated with achievement, performance, and well-being” (Ryan et al., 2022).


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Building community and students’ sense of belonging

To build community and students’ sense of belonging, those within the campus community can: 

  • Make sure students’ basic needs are met (e.g., connect students to campus resources)   
  • Give students many opportunities to share their experiences, and demonstrate they are heard by following through with appropriate support.   
  • Increase collaboration to ensure that students are at the center of decision-making.   

Social Belonging Messages

ne way to support students’ sense of belonging is through “social belonging messages”, which can be used in course syllabi and direct communications with students. Two key components to effective belonging messages include:   

  1. Acknowledgment that students’ concerns about belonging are perfectly normal; and   
  2. Reassurance that belonging gets better over time, as they continue to develop relationships with the campus community (Ryan et al., 2022). 

To learn more about building a sense of belonging in your classroom and the wider campus community, see Seven Practices for Building Student Belonging.

Interested in exploring any of these ideas further or discussing how you might implement them in your own teaching practices? Is there a tip you’ve tried that you’d like to share with colleagues? Contact CETL or schedule a consultation to continue the conversation.

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