Brown Bag Seminar: Building Equitable Classrooms

Providing equitable learning opportunities, rigorous and intellectually deep curriculum, and equal outcomes for all students in heterogeneous classrooms is a serious pedagogical challenge. Developed at Stanford University, Complex Instruction is a pedagogical approach designed to create and support equitable classrooms for students with a wide range of previous academic achievement and proficiency in the language of instruction, as well as socially and culturally diverse backgrounds.

In this Brown Bag Seminar, Professor Rachel Lotan will discuss the Complex Instruction approach, which emphasizes equal-status interactions among students and specifies the conditions under which teachers can establish and support such interactions. Teachers build equitable classrooms by crafting appropriate learning tasks, organizing the classroom for productive collaboration, developing the student’s facility with the academic discourse of the discipline, assessing and providing feedback to groups and individuals and, most importantly, by addressing status problems that arise in small working groups.

Professor Lotan is Director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). Her teaching and research focus on aspects of teaching and learning in academically and linguistically diverse classrooms as well as topics in teacher education. Previously, she co-directed the Program for Complex Instruction at Stanford, where she worked on the development, research, and worldwide dissemination of complex instruction, a pedagogical approach to creating equitable classrooms. For ten years before starting graduate work, Professor Lotan taught English and French in junior high and high school.

Her current research interests include: teaching and learning in heterogeneous classrooms; teacher education; sociology of the classroom; and the social organization of schools.