6

Highly structured and active classes and modules help students learn and succeed, and help faculty implement and assess their equity-minded practices.

If you’ve had a hard time imagining how to incorporate the ideas shared so far into your day-to-day teaching, this unit should help. What do we mean by structure, and how does it relate to equity-minded teaching? We introduced one form of structure earlier in the guide, in Section One: the backward design method of designing a course. You’ll recall that L. Dee Fink’s systematic approach to designing courses entails aligning the key parts of your course: the learning goals, assessments, and learning activities. In this unit, we describe how adding structure to your day-to-day teaching is a similar process. The course segments will vary based on what kind of course you’re teaching. In a face-to-face course, you may be structuring a whole class session or an activity, whereas in an asynchronous online course, you may be structuring an online module or a learning activity within a module.

Because the term structure may be new to you in relation to teaching, we’ll start with a specific illustration of how structured course elements affect student success. This example is from a 2011 study by education researchers Scott Freeman, David Haak, and Mary Pat Wenderoth.¹ They tested the hypothesis that highly structured course designs can lower failure rates in an introductory biology course, relative to low-structure course designs based on lecturing and a few high-stakes assessments. Freeman and the team found that failure rates were lower in a moderately structured course design and were dramatically lower in a highly structured course design. What made the highly structured course highly structured was the use of reading quizzes and/or extensive in-class active learning activities and weekly practice exams. In this unit, we expand on Freeman and colleagues’ use of the term structure to also include the careful alignment of course components, the detailed planning of a class session and activity, and the design of online modules.

Adding structure to our teaching practice supports student learning and equitable outcomes for several reasons: First, as Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan put it, “too little structure leaves too many students behind.”² Our colleges and universities abound with invisible ink—expectations and rules that (as fish might say about water) we as faculty simply don’t see. The structural enhancements we describe in this unit make expectations and guidance more explicit to students, just as transparency does for assessment design (see Unit 2). More structured courses make it less likely that students disproportionately benefit from or are penalized by their varied levels of “college knowledge.” Second, structure helps us advance more equitable outcomes by requiring us to pay extra attention to our learning objectives and how they relate to the activities we assign, making it more likely that students learn. Finally, attending to structure can help us implement and assess the impact of our equity-minded strategies, including evaluating how these strategies affect students’ sense of belonging and their levels of trust.

While high structure is important in all modalities, it’s critical in asynchronous online classes, so in this unit you’ll find ample guidance on structuring online courses. As we’ve noted elsewhere, students taking an asynchronous online course must be able to navigate course materials, motivate themselves, organize their time and tasks, and engage in many other self-regulating behaviors. Since we’re generally not able to answer their questions in real time, it’s important for the structure of the course itself to be easily navigable and supportive.

To illustrate this point, consider a course consultation that coauthor Flower Darby gave several years ago. A well-meaning professor was new to online teaching and had been offered no support in developing his first online course, so he asked Flower for feedback. When she clicked into the class, she was alarmed to discover that the entire course was one gigantic page. Everything was located on the main landing page: the syllabus, readings, videos, quizzes, assignments, and more. Getting to anything required extensive scrolling, and it was difficult to see how any single element of the course fit into the bigger picture. While Flower recognized that the professor was not to blame, as he’d never seen a good online course or learned how to design one, she also experienced tremendous empathy for his students, who would likely flounder in such an unstructured environment.

On the other hand, sometimes online courses can be confusingly or overly structured. Whether we create the online course or use a template course, the location of items and the relationship among them often seem intuitive to us, but when students enter our courses, alone, it’s not always clear to them what’s where or why. In this way, the structure and flow of online courses can exacerbate inequity. If students are already experiencing a low sense of belonging, for instance, they may interpret their difficulty navigating an online course as confirmation that college is, in fact, not for them.

We begin this unit with a brief distillation of research on course structure and turn quickly to a high-level “Putting the Research to Work” section dedicated to equity-focused instructional design and lesson/module planning for both in-person and online courses. Then, we feature another “Putting the Research to Work” segment that includes a set of practical recommendations, proposing four equity-minded ways to add structure and support to your day-to-day teaching.