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  6. Creating Effective Learning Environments

Creating Effective Learning Environments

Our team models and supports inclusive, equitable, accessible, and anti-racist pedagogical practices. We facilitate student and faculty success by offering support for envisioning, managing, and navigating classroom dynamics. We are here to help you build a safe and inclusive classroom, to build community with your students across modalities, and to cultivate a supportive learning environment. 

We provide pedagogical and technological solutions for collaborating and building community with and among your students no matter the modality of your courses. This might mean using a technology tool such as Panopto or Jamboard, building community on Canvas or Zoom, integrating OER materials and open education practices, setting communication guidelines with your students, or incorporating pedagogical tools such as discussions to facilitate communal learning.  

One of our primary suggestions for building a safe and inclusive classroom is to start each quarter by setting community agreements with your students. A community agreement encompasses the expectations for all communication between everyone in the course, including any face-to-face class sessions, online communication within discussion forums, emails, peer reviews, and general communication and interaction among students and the instructor. We can help you set a foundation for this process by crafting a Safe Space Policy and prepare you for setting agreements communally with your students. We can also help you envision and create a learning environment that is open, supportive, and flexible in times of stress and crisis (see 2020-2021). Our Instructional Designers are here to support you if you would like to learn more about this. Please reach out to us with any questions. Our eLearning team also includes Canvas administrators, program coordinators, and instructional technologists to assist with issues outside of our instructional design expertise. 

Our LEAD program also has courses devoted to facilitating effective discussion boards, OER and open education, Zoom, instructional design, and many other subjects related to classroom dynamics. If you are a full-time or part-time faculty member at any of the Seattle Colleges and are interested in these courses, please check out our LEAD page. If you complete the LEAD program, you will receive a $500 stipend. 

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