Caring for Students Playbook: Six Recommendations

This playbook has been designed to provide instructors with examples to support putting student care into action. While the impetus for this playbook was the COVID-19 pandemic, the information and resources provided represent high standards of student support regardless of the environment.

In this playbook you will find detailed recommendations broken out into six sections. Each of these Six Recommendations for Caring for Students provides practical recommendations, concrete strategies, and resources to support instructors in operationalizing equity-focused, inclusive teaching strategies that put student care into practice by acknowledging student challenges while identifying student assets.

Before exploring the Six Recommendations for Caring for Students, we also recommend that you explore our resource on Getting Started with Key Terms, Challenges, and Approaches. An excellent tool for educators of all experience levels, the document provides an overview of key terms (i.e., diversity, equity, and inclusion), challenges (i.e., academic, financial, and socio-emotional), and approaches (i.e., culturally responsive teaching, trauma-informed teaching, and universal design for learning, or UDL) that are integral to caring for students. This resource is also intended for educators who may be new to some of the concepts on centering student care that are presented in this playbook, giving historical context and empirical evidence as support of the Six Recommendations for Caring for Students offered here.