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Hi, I'm Kam Yee. I'm a Team Engagement Manager with the REC Foundation. Welcome to the Mentor PD+ tutorial. Today, I want to talk about how you create an inclusive learning environment. We'll go over some of the tips. I know a lot of you already have a lot of skills in this, but it's always fun to talk about some different ideas.

We know that students leave programs when they don't feel a sense of belonging. So how do you create a STEM education learning space that feels like they can all belong in? One of the things you can do, and this is the really fun one, is to normalize failures. Nobody likes to fail. Nobody wants to feel like they don't know what's going on, but failure is a part of learning and it's especially a part of the engineering design process. If you're not failing during your process in something, that means your brainstorming probably didn't go that deep and your plan didn't try anything innovative. So we want to normalize that failure.

A fun way to do it is, you might want to do something I love to call the "fail wall." You can have a space within your teaching area that highlights all the fails. I've seen folks do Instagram accounts, where students get to post pictures of their projects that didn't quite work the way they had hoped to and call it "Fail Fridays." Or you can have a "Wacky Wednesday." You can also have what I'd like to call a "glorious goofs wall" outside of your learning space. So that's a little bit more public, and we normalize talking about failures and talking about things that don't quite work as we think because that step de-stigmatizes, takes the sting out of the so-called failure, and makes it a little bit easier. If we can talk about those failures and move past them, that's where your students are gonna gain their confidence.

One more way you can build failure into how you have your learning environment is to build it into the meeting agenda. You can do a reflection toward the end of every one of your sessions or every unit. Have students reflect and share things they are really glad happened that way or things they wish would have happened a little bit differently and talk about it that way. That reflection, holding that space in every single one of your meetings, will do an incredible amount of de-stigmatizing something that normally we don't like to talk about.

Another strategy is normalizing not knowing. Students come into your learning space with all kinds of different background knowledge, information, and things they want to learn about, but everybody has something they don't know. What sometimes happens is that when you're in a learning space, we tend to do this—I do this all the time—where I ask the student, "Hey, who knows about how batteries work?" But then you will have, out of say 20 students, two students who know a lot, and they start blurting out answers. They knew every answer, and they started volunteering and sharing a lot of their experiences. While it's really great for that student to connect, and we do want to hear that, it can skew the view of what is the expected knowledge walking into a lesson.

So one of the ways that you can do that is to do an anonymous survey. When you do a survey, you can do an old-fashioned piece of paper and a box, or you can use an app for students to text in their answers. What I like about doing an anonymous survey is that you tend to get a little bit more honest response, and you're also focusing on what students don't know so that we can normalize not knowing. You'll find that the majority of your students may not know something, but they don't want to say it because they have this feeling that everybody else knows more than they do.

As you see here in this classroom example, we have multiple students who feel like they know nothing.

Thank you for joining me in this tutorial. I hope these strategies help you create a more inclusive learning environment. Remember, normalizing failure and not knowing are key steps in fostering a supportive and engaging space for all students.

And now that's nine students that probably wouldn't have spoken about all of you asking questions. So this is a great way, not just for you as an educator to know, but it's also extremely important for your students to see that result and see that, "boy, most of the class don't know anything either, so I'm not alone."

We know students, people in general, but especially teenagers, really do not want to stand out as the person who doesn't know things. So this is how we can help by normalizing and saying, "it's okay, most of us are in the same boat." You belong here. This builds that sense of belonging.

The third strategy I want to talk about is reframing success. Students do well when they know they can be successful. When you have a diverse group of students who have different backgrounds, such as racial background, gender background, and identities, income background, or learning style or different experience that they've had with any kind of STEM learning or in any kind of learning institution, that's a lot of different things that you're coming in with. Having only one way to be successful typically doesn't work out for everybody. So finding multiple ways to be successful and framing those successes that way will be helpful to your group.

Of course, the best way to do it is to put it back to the students. Asking the students, what do you want to be successful on individually and as a team? For some students, it can look like, "oh, I want to be the best winner in the whole wide world." For some students, it could be, "I just really hope the thing works." And for some students, it could be, "I don't really care about the robot, but I really want to participate in something after school so that I feel good about myself and have somewhere to go to." Allowing different kinds of success and finding that out from the students is really great.

Being able to share that back out, to have the students or you share it back out to the students, is also a really good community-building event so that you each know what the other person wants to be successful on, so you can help each other be successful in that. As you cultivate buy-in from students and have students feel that they are part of a learning community and not just a receptacle for information, be mindful of separating out preparatory knowledge and STEM skills.

What I mean by that is that sometimes you can see students who have STEM skills, but really what they have is prior exposure to STEM education. If they've been on a robotics team before, that doesn't necessarily mean they have good STEM skills; that means that they've been exposed to robotics before. We often see, especially a lot of girls, who don't want to speak up often in groups, but that sometimes is seen as a STEM skill that they need. Really, it's just that some people have had more practice in speaking up in groups. Those are privileges that have been gained through having preparation, access, and opportunity.

I want you to focus on what STEM skills look like and how we can be successful in the STEM skills, not necessarily things that are out of students' control, but what students can control are things like how they can ask questions because that's how scientists and engineers think. Students can also look at things through a critical lens. That is a strong STEM skill that even if a student has never been exposed to robotics before, has never been in any kind of technical role, they can still be really good critical thinkers.

In addition to reframing what your student's learning environment is, I highly encourage you to also reframe what being successful in STEM looks like.

I hope you had a great time thinking about this, and I really encourage you to share some of your thoughts in our PD+ Community. I'll see you next time.

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