An inclusive classroom environment is an important component of student learning. Taking steps to develop your skills in creating an inclusive classroom will be beneficial not just to students who feel marginalized and excluded, but to all students in your class. Additionally, learning how to create an inclusive classroom environment will provide you with a set of valuable skills transferable to a wide variety of professional settings.


Steps You Can Take


Take Required Online Course on Professional Standards and Ethics in Teaching

The GSI Professional Standards and Ethics Online Course will introduce you to policies, practices, and standards that all instructors need to know in order to perform their responsibilities professionally and ethically. In addition to helping GSIs learn about essential campus policies, the online ethics course introduces GSIs to the importance of promoting learning through diversity in inclusive classrooms. While specifically geared toward classroom teaching, the information that you will learn in this course is applicable to many types of interactions both within and beyond academia.

Participate in Interactive Theater and Other Workshops on Promoting Inclusive Learning Environments

Each year, the Teaching Conference for First-Time GSIs includes an Interactive Theater event that introduces key components of promoting an inclusive learning environment for students at Berkeley. This program—a collaboration between the GSI Teaching & Resource Center, the Division of Equity & Inclusion, and Berkeley Interactive Theater—includes an in-depth, participatory exploration of microaggressions and the ways that GSIs can respond when they occur in the classroom. While the program focuses primarily on classroom teaching, GSIs learn skills for identifying and responding to microaggressions that are transferable to a wide variety of contexts. Additionally, the GSI Teaching & Resource Center offers a post-conference follow-up workshop, called Creating Inclusive Classrooms, that elaborates upon the character and consequences of microaggressions and provides additional resources for addressing them.