“Take a Deep Breath and Re-Center the Student's Perspective”: Partnering Instructors and Disabled Students for Accessible Teaching

Abstract

Background

Because accessible and anti-ableist teaching is rarely prioritized in instructional development programs, a new initiative was developed at a large, public university. Launched in January 2022, it piloted strategies for shifting instructors’ mindsets about and pedagogical approaches to accessibility. Using a professional learning community model, disabled students served as course consultants to instructors, working closely together in a semester-long partnership.

Objective

The purpose of this study was to research the program's effects on the participating instructors.

Method

Multiple raters coded qualitative data collected over a period of five months from meeting notes spanning 30 instructor–student partnership meetings, four all-team meetings, two student focus groups, three instructor focus groups, and six online discussion boards.

Results

The results showed the mindset shifts and teaching strategies that emerged through this semester-long initiative. They also revealed the program elements that had the greatest impact on instructors.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates the role that disabled students can play in helping instructors learn about accessibility and how learning community models support substantive changes in teaching.

Teaching Implications

The results of this study should help psychology teachers and departments improve their courses and engage in ongoing development to improve access and equity in their courses.

Psychology programs need to improve the experiences and outcomes of disabled students. One-fifth (20.5%) of all college students report having a disability (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022a), yet for instructors, this level of prevalence is not apparent, since only one-third of these students report their disability to their college (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022b; Newman & Madaus, 2015). This growing postsecondary enrollment by disabled students reflects hard-won improvements in educational access, partly due to federal laws (in the USA, the Americans with Disabilities Act) that have led to a more diverse student body than ever before. Once they enroll, however, many disabled college students face numerous barriers to inclusion and success, making it challenging to complete their college education (Newman et al., 2016).

While all disciplines should strive to better include disabled students, this goal is perhaps particularly essential for the field of psychology. Psychology departments train future counselors and clinicians who will work with disabled people. They also produce foundational knowledge about human development, cognition, social functioning, learning processes, and organizational behaviors—research that not only shapes our understanding of disabilities but also influences policies affecting disabled people. The field needs the perspectives, skills, and strengths of disabled students, just as disabled students need equitable opportunities to pursue careers in psychology. As it stands, however, only 5% of the psychology workforce identifies as disabled (American Psychological Association, 2022). As a result, ensuring access and inclusion for disabled students should be a priority for psychology programs.

Increasing Access and Inclusion in the Classroom

Improving teaching is an important part of making psychology programs (and higher education) more accessible and inclusive, and in turn, increasing student retention and graduation rates. Due to low institutional disclosure rates from disabled students, instructors need to move beyond a focus on legalistic accessibility compliance in response to accommodation requests (Lowenthal et al., 2020). A proactive focus on improving course design can ensure better learning for all groups, including disabled students who have not disclosed to their institutions (CAST, 2018). Improving teaching also depends on cultivating the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary for designing accessible courses (Addy et al., 2021; Hogan & Sathy, 2022; Oleson, 2020; Schley et al., 2021).

In recent years, universities have recognized that instructional development plays an important role in improving teaching in ways that support diversity, equity, and inclusion. Instructional development programs, however, have often failed to improve inclusion for disabled students. One reason is a failure to focus on accessibility. Because efforts to improve equity and inclusion in the classroom have often emphasized other aspects of diversity (Shallish, 2017), many teaching programs have given less attention to access for disabled students (Lombardi & Lalor, 2017). Although the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, developed initially for K-12 settings, offers strategies for improving accessibility by providing more options for how students can engage and learn, its uptake in higher education has been limited (CAST, 2018; Lombardi & Lalor, 2017; Tobin & Behling, 2018), and university teaching centers and disability service offices often do not collaborate to support UDL practices (Behling & Linder, 2017). Even when instructional development programs do focus on accessibility, traditional formats, such as one-time, short workshops, have low instructor participation and limited impacts (Chism et al., 2012; Stes et al., 2010; Wright, 2023).

This study looks at a novel instructional development initiative designed to address these challenges. The program sought to help instructors make proactive, practical shifts in their approaches to teaching while also addressing their mindsets about disability and accessibility. The study examines both the program's outcomes for instructors as well as the program features that helped to produce these outcomes.

Beyond the Workshop: Designing Instructional Development for Long-Term Change

Research shows that community-based approaches to instructional development provide support to instructors and work against factors that negatively affect engagement. Mutually supportive learning environments such as teaching groups, communities of practice, or professional learning communities (PLCs) promote critical dialogue and the exchange of ideas in a recurring, collaborative setting, helping instructors incorporate new ideas and strategies into their own courses (Boschman et al., 2021; Cox, 2004; Heinrich, 2013; Pleschová et al., 2021; Wright, 2023). Bringing instructors together also creates a shared vision and responsibility for improving student learning and can provide a sense of purpose for instructors to better their practices with the help of one another (Timmermans et al., 2018).

In addition to collaborating with colleagues, instructors also benefit from working with students in development initiatives. In students-as-partners (SaP) programs, for example, students serve as course consultants to instructors. These programs reverse the traditional flow of expertise by taking advantage of students’ insights and lived experiences in classrooms, especially their experiences of difficulties, which instructors often never see. SaP programs promote instructor–student relationships, improve teaching materials, and broaden instructors’ understanding of student perspectives, particularly around invisible inequities in the classroom (Cook-Sather, 2011; Cook-Sather et al., 2014; de Bie et al., 2021; Healey et al., 2016; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017; Roy et al., 2021). Conversations between instructors and students promote a critical exchange of knowledge and perspectives when focused on classroom practices, especially “sticky” and harmful areas of practice, and can also identify actionable, straightforward solutions (Atkins et al., 2021; de Bie et al., 2021; Schley et al., 2021). Students may also assist implementation and feedback processes for new strategies and practices, serving as observers in instructor partners’ classrooms (Cawthon et al., 2019). In these ways, students step into the role of experts, thought-partners, observers, and evaluators.

The Collaborative for Access and Equity

Drawing on these two approaches, the instructor development initiative studied in this paper was built on a PLC model that also incorporated student–instructor partnerships. It was designed to increase the accessibility of learning environments for disabled students at a large, public university in the southwestern United States. It approached disability as a broad and heterogenous construct that encompasses sensory, learning, and mental health disabilities, some congenital, others acquired later in life, some highly visible, and others invisible to instructors and peers. The Collaborative for Access and Equity (referred to as the “Collaborative”) spanned the 2021–2022 academic year. Preparation and recruitment took place from September through November in 2021, and the learning community launched in 2022, lasting from January until May. In a structured, online environment, the Collaborative provided recurring spaces for dialogue between university instructors, administrators, and students about factors promoting inclusive classrooms, accessible course design, and disabled student perspectives.

Student participants were recruited to engage in a “student coach” role, meeting with instructors on a biweekly basis to exchange perspectives on the accessibility and inclusivity of each instructor's course across a range of core components (listed below). Dialogue about how instructors approached these components served as the basis for understanding how new strategies could be implemented in at least one area:

Syllabus and Course Planning

Presentations and Content Delivery

Group Work

Independent Assignments and Exams

Supporting Student Mental Health

After discussing each of these areas, student coaches and instructors collaborated on a “mini action plan” to improve course accessibility through the implementation of new or improved technology tools, pedagogy strategies, or classroom policies. Monthly gatherings of the full learning community complemented the biweekly student coach/instructor meetings and allowed for sharing across pairs and with the other participants within the project, such as the project coordinator, principal investigator, and participants from campus offices such as the teaching and learning center and IT department.

Research Questions

To examine whether, and how, this initiative was able to influence instructors’ approaches to access and inclusion in their courses, we explored the following questions:

How did the program affect instructors’ understanding of disability / accessibility?

How did the program affect instructors’ teaching strategies?

What elements of the program mattered for facilitating instructor change?

Method

Participants

Participants for this study include a community of instructors, staff, and students. The core participants consisted of seven instructors who served as “instructor partners” and five disabled students that served as “student coaches.” Although the program was designed and led by educational psychologists, it intentionally recruited instructors from diverse fields to explore the program's effectiveness for those teaching within varying disciplinary constraints and cultures. As a result, although one instructor had a psychology background, the full range of instructors’ backgrounds included appointments in colleges of education, information sciences, communication, and natural sciences. All instructors had achieved promotion to the highest or second-highest academic rank in their track: “Professor,” “Associate Professor,” or “Associate Professor of Practice.” The five student coaches included four undergraduates and one graduate student. Their academic backgrounds included programs in educational psychology, natural sciences, engineering, and information sciences. The student coaches each self-identified and self-disclosed as having at least one disability, including ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, TBI, mental health conditions, and learning disabilities. Each had some interaction with the institution's office of accommodations which requires documentation for support services.

Each instructor was paired with one student coach, a ratio made possible by two of the student coaches agreeing to each work with two instructors. Student–instructor pairs met biweekly throughout one academic semester to discuss a range of topics related to disability, course design, and accessibility. By including instructors and students from a range of backgrounds, including psychology, we sought to explore the program's effectiveness both for psychology courses and for other disciplines. We obtained Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for the study prior to data collection (approval #00002318). All participants provided written consent, and all were included in the analyses.

Data Sources

We collected, coded, and interpreted the following data sources as part of our thematic analysis. The qualitative coding manual, as well as the interview questions and discussion protocol, are openly available (see Sievers et al., 2024).

Student Coach/Instructor Partner Meeting Notes and Discussion Board Posts

Student coaches and instructor partners met on a biweekly basis throughout the collaborative to discuss topics related to each instructor's course design, classroom strategies, and approaches to instruction. Specifically, each dyad had five, one-hour-long discussions about syllabus design, content delivery, small group assignments, independent assignments, and support for students’ mental health. During the latter half of the semester, each dyad focused their conversations on an action plan seeking to address accessibility in one or more of these key areas of the instructor's class. During each meeting, student coaches and instructor partners were encouraged to keep notes to track any insights or interesting details from their conversation. Each participant then synthesized their conversations in a biweekly online discussion board so that insights could be shared across dyads and create a conversation between all student coaches and instructor partners.

Student Coach and Instructor Partner Focus Groups

At the conclusion of the semester-long project, student coaches and instructors were split into groups and asked to participate in an hour-long focus group interview. These gave each participant the opportunity to reflect on their role in the Collaborative and discuss how this role interacted with their experiences as a student or as an instructor. There were two focus groups for the student coaches, and three focus groups for the instructor partners, totaling 5 hours overall. Each focus group was facilitated by a member of the research team and was conducted online. Audio, video, and automatically generated transcript files were collected for analysis after receiving the consent of the participants.

Analysis

Data analysis for the Collaborative relied on documentation collected throughout the partnership semester (see Data Sources). The researchers, including one primary and secondary coder for each data source, adapted the steps of thematic analysis (TA;Braun & Clarke, 2006) to code the data, create themes, and generate a report of findings. TA offers a flexible process of qualitative interpretation to researchers without requiring commitment to a single theoretical approach. Instead, TA focuses on creating high-quality, rigorous descriptions of key data while relying on research question(s), deductive (theory-driven) and inductive (data-driven) approaches (Clarke & Braun, 2017). Thus, TA was suitable for our process of identifying latent and manifest meaning within and across our diverse data sources, while remaining focused on the goals of the collaborative (Cawthon, 2021).

At first, the researchers took either a primary or secondary coding role for each data source and began familiarizing themselves with the data by reading each source carefully. They met to discuss the initial set of a priori codes and created a codebook to assist with understanding each code's definition when applied to the data. The researchers then assigned these initial codes to individual excerpts across each data source, including a mix of both descriptive (e.g., “pedagogy strategies that support accessibility”) and interpretive codes (e.g., “how this collaborative supports learning environments”; Braun & Clarke, 2006). Assigned codes from both primary and secondary coders were tracked and tabulated in a shared, online spreadsheet. The researchers discussed any discrepancies in interpretations of the data to ensure consensus in the assigned codes.

In the next step of the analysis, the researchers grouped some initial codes together and identified emergent patterns or themes that could be found in the data related to the a priori codes. The researchers then met to ensure agreement among the organization, naming, and definitions of each code and theme, and they checked that each accurately reflected the content and information found in each data source included in the analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). At this point in the analysis, the student coaches from the Collaborative were asked to verify the coding assignments for accuracy. Four out of five student coaches engaged in this member-checking process to increase trustworthiness of the analysis. Lastly, the authors collaborated on a report of each theme in the descriptions found below (see “Results”), with results aligned with the research questions outlined in the study. For data reporting purposes, all participants were assigned pseudonyms.

Researcher Positionalities

We approach this study as instructors and doctoral students in educational psychology who focus on learning and motivation in school contexts and systems, with a particular goal of improving equity in postsecondary education for disabled students. Six of the co-authors identify as disabled and bring their own experiences in higher education to their analyses. Two co-authors held leadership roles in the instructional development initiative and helped design the associated research project, while another three co-authors were in research-only roles focused on data collection, coding, and interpretation. The final four co-authors were student coaches who joined the research team for the purpose of checking the coding, ensuring that researcher interpretations aligned with participant interpretations.

Results

The study's results showed instructors gaining practical strategies for increasing accessibility—the how of dismantling ableist teaching environments—from their participation in the learning community and their work with disabled student coaches. The results also revealed that instructors significantly shifted their mindsets and concepts about disability, access, and teaching—the bigger why questions that can lead to longer-term and more systemic change. In addition, the results revealed the critical program design features that led to these changes.

Pedagogical Strategies That Support Accessibility

During the Pilot: Taking First Steps

During biweekly meetings, student coaches met with their instructor partners to talk about the instructor's course and teaching. The conversations enabled instructors to learn about accessibility from hearing disabled students’ experiences and by having a partner help them reflect on their courses. The conversations also allowed students to understand instructor perspectives on teaching, including their constraints, challenges, and goals. These conversations formed an ongoing space for re-examining instructors’ strategies as well as their beliefs and mindsets about teaching.

Most commonly, these conversations focused on pedagogy strategies that supported accessibility. The high frequency of this topic reflected that both the instructors and student coaches also wanted to achieve practical improvements to courses. The strategies that began to emerge from these meetings varied but fell into several broad categories.

Designing courses and assignments with more flexibility. Throughout the pilot, student coaches saw instructors become more open to offering flexibility in response to circumstances or student needs after hearing about student's experiences with inflexible policies. One student coach, Meera, reported this change in approach: Professor Barrera mentioned the importance of checking in with students and emphasized flexibility. After checking in with students, she extended the final assignment deadline by a week, which helped reduce students’ stress.

Seeing policies and timelines in the syllabus as starting points, rather than rigid rules, gave instructors room to create courses that responded to student needs.

Beyond these instances of reactive flexibility, instructors also began thinking about flexibility more proactively, including building flexibility into the course from the beginning. For example, Professor Ester Herman began giving students no-questions-asked extension options or an extension hour “bank” that gave students more control over how they requested additional time. Others considered make-up credit policies and more flexible deadlines.

Increasing transparency. Instructors also considered ways to increase transparency, clarifying for students the why, what, and how of the course's structure and assignments. For Professor Iris Hall, this meant clarifying grading expectations by providing templates, rubrics, and examples of successful work or outlining the steps for successfully completing work. Others, like Professor Lily Barrera, sought to share assignment instructions earlier with students, giving them more time to prepare and ask questions before beginning an assignment.

Fostering an inclusive environment. Instructors emphasized improving the classroom climate and fostering positive connections between students and instructors. Professor Herman realized that she needed to address and eliminate ableist language. Professor Alberto Russo made it a policy to “try to have a personal conversation with each student, even when the class sizes are significant” to open two-way conversations with students. Others, like Professor Hall, sought to create classroom environments that were more supportive of mental health and wellbeing by including stress-relieving and mindfulness activities or by self-disclosing about their own challenges.

Making an action plan. These planned changes, in addition to others, ultimately informed the “mini action plans” created by each dyad. These action plans ensured that instructors would emerge from the program with specific, implementable course design changes. The emphasis on “mini,” however, also kept the stakes low. Instructors were not tasked with a complete course redesign. Rather, they had only to identify a few next steps to take as they started their journeys towards accessibility.

During the Pilot: Behind-the-Scenes Processes

Our analysis used several additional codes to capture aspects of pedagogy beyond the strategies themselves, including “Instructor experiences—negative,” “Technology tools that support accessibility,” and “Existing technology tools that are challenging.” These yielded important insights about the processes of considering new pedagogical approaches that the instructor and student partners experienced. These might be considered the behind-the-scenes work that instructors must do before they are ready to implement changes.

Identifying challenges. Instructors discovered difficulties in making their courses accessible, including navigating privacy policies when working with TAs or balancing trade-offs between flexibility and student engagement goals. For example, Professor Barrera, Professor Hall, and Professor Frederick Graham found that when students accessed in-person courses via Zoom sessions or class recordings, these technologies, while adding helpful flexibility, introduced new challenges to relationship building, student privacy, attendance, and collaborative work among students.

Recognizing problematic teaching practices. An important part of instructors’ journeys was recognizing prior missteps. Often, conversations with student coaches revealed issues that instructors had not realized were barriers to students, such as course organization features that made navigation difficult. Terra noted of her instructor's course: “In past classes, there were tabs with no folders / files and there was an excessive amount that would make navigating Canvas difficult.” Emilia observed that “Before a more clear rubric was posted, students had lots of concerns about whether they were doing the assignment correctly.” For instructors who were used to feeling expert and competent, these realizations could be difficult. Yet they were key first steps towards improvement.

Accepting the role of learner. Instructors discussed the necessary but uncomfortable process of admitting that they lacked expertise in accessible pedagogies. Many bemoaned a lack of formal training. Professor Russo noted that “Professors are usually here to do research but are also expected to teach. I was never taught teaching, since I was given tenure based on research.” However, they also came to realize that they would need to learn directly from disabled students’ experiences of disability in education. Many of the things they needed to learn, in fact, could not easily be learned from books or workshops, but only from those who had first-hand experience.

Experimenting with new tools. Many instructors were willing to try new technologies. For example, Professors Barrera, Herman, and Hall experimented with improving the organization of their learning management system (i.e., Canvas or Blackboard) pages, creating more options for class engagement via technology, or allowing students to use electronic devices in class so that at-home students could see everyone on Zoom. Leveraging technology in the classroom also led to more nuanced discussions of how improving accessibility in some areas might impede it in other ways. For example, Professor Barrera debated recording class discussions, weighing greater access to information against the quality of class discussions. A benefit was that class meetings would be available after each meeting for all students, including those who were unable to attend synchronously. A drawback, they learned, was that students who knew they were being recorded might feel less willing to share openly about sensitive or personal topics.

After the Pilot: Making Broader Changes

After the partnership semester had concluded, instructors were interviewed in small focus groups without the student coaches present. At this point, their thoughts now turned towards holistic reflections on what they had learned. Not surprisingly, pedagogy strategies for improving accessibility remained the most frequent topic, though other topics increased in frequency as instructors began to articulate additional outcomes of the program. At this later point, the most common pedagogical topics included broader shifts in their teaching approaches.

Focusing on supporting rather than policing students. Instructors expressed a sense of freedom upon realizing that they could focus on supporting student learning rather than on policing problematic behaviors. This discovery led to changes in policies. Professor Russo explained this shift:

I was starting to make design choices in the course that were around preparing for worst-case scenarios, like using Proctorio [an online exam proctoring program] in an online class despite realizing really quickly that a lot of the students found it incredibly inaccessible, and it caused great anxiety. But I was so focused on those 10 students who were going to try to cheat […] [I was] so gleeful when I decided to get rid of Proctorio and just trust the students … you know, with the flexibility that they needed to take the exams.

By realizing how anti-cheating policies reduced accessibility for many students, he was able to achieve a significant reorientation towards supporting student learning.

Including new assignments or content. New content and assignments were additional pedagogical outcomes that instructors reflected upon at the end of the project. For example, to recognize multiple forms of engagement, student coach Meera worked with Professor Barrera to develop self-assessments for students’ class participation. When describing this new assignment, Professor Barrera noted how Meera had been key to implementing this change.

Another thing that we built is having students self-assess their own participation in discussions in class. That was something I knew I always wanted to do, but never took the time to pull all the resources I had together and develop it.

Similarly, Professor Graham incorporated more content related to accessibility into his courses.

In terms of my own thinking, I am going to incorporate not only an awareness of this as part of my class. I’m actually going to give a week within the semester to readings and discussions about the whole idea of accessibility more broadly.

These course design changes reflected an ongoing interest in building accessibility into the course and curriculum from the beginning.

Foregrounding students’ health and voices. Many reported an increased readiness to support student wellness. Others embraced centering student voices and experiences, especially disabled students. Professor Sylvia Day reported that process in this way: The class I teach is on autism and neurodiversity … and I am not on the spectrum, and I start off the class centering the idea that I'm not an expert and that there are students with lived experiences that are the experts.

Moving student experiences and voices into a place of expertise was a significant shift in thinking for many instructors, but one that they found they valued after doing it.

Mindset Shifts About Accessibility, Inclusion, and Ableism

During the early and middle portions of the pilot program, instructor–student coach discussions yielded relatively few comments reflecting what we coded as “mindset shifts” related to new “definitions of accessibility.” However, by the end of the pilot, when instructors were interviewed in exit focus groups, both categories emerged as significant topics as instructors reflected about how the semester-long work with student coaches had changed their teaching.

Understanding Accessibility in New Ways

Acknowledging invisible disabilities and recognizing blind spots. First, instructors discovered that many disabilities were invisible to them–a realization that, at first, could be intimidating. Professor Graham admitted that: “I think [the program has] made me very sensitive to the idea that there's a lot of invisible problems—invisible to me … . You look at that and it's kind of—whoa. Sort of overwhelming.” Recognizing invisible disabilities was often a precursor to a second realization: that they as instructors, even those with their own disabilities, knew little about the wide range of challenges disabled students faced in university courses. Professor Herman shared:

We as a culture, … have such a focus on physical disability. And as teachers in the classroom, I think our other construct of disability is often the media perception of ADHD … And I think the thing that struck me in terms of defining accessibility and talking about disability is […] How do we develop this new language, these new symbols, that suggests that there's a whole range of different types of circumstances that we all face?

Professor Graham located the blind spot not in the culture at large, but in the limited perspective of each individual instructor.

Accessibility is really about removing whatever obstacles people perceive are in the way, that you probably can't perceive at all because they're not an obstacle for you. So if you take for granted that the space is navigable … You don't see the obstacles.

By recognizing these blind spots, they began to see ableism that had been invisible to them, and to broaden their definitions of what accessibility might mean.

Moving beyond the checklist. Instructors also came to realize that, given the range of disabled students’ experiences, accessible teaching could not be understood merely as a checklist of strategies to be implemented. Many ultimately defined accessibility as a new way of relating to students, one that includes ongoing listening and responsiveness. Professor Herman shared her changed definition in this way:

So, the biggest takeaway for me, being partnered with Terra [the student coach], was thinking about the fact that no one is ever going to be an expert on how to make everything accessible for everyone. So, the best that we can do is to create an environment where our students feel comfortable talking to us about what they need to fully participate, and working with them to support them in putting that structure into place.

This instructor grasped that learning about accessibility could only take place if she kept communication open with students. Professor Christie Singh experienced a similar realization:

I now don't think of accessibility kind of like … a checklist of things that I could do, and then get a gold star, and be like, “My course is accessible now.” But rather I’m thinking about it in terms of incremental changes that I can make, and to consider the extremely wide range of experiences that I'm trying to accommodate.

In this view, dismantling ableism and creating accessible classrooms must be an ongoing, iterative project.

Approaching Accessibility in New Ways

“Plus-one thinking”. Changing their understanding of accessibility led to changes in how they approached it. First, some realized that if accessible teaching is an ongoing process, not a checklist, then changes can be implemented one step at a time. As Professor Singh put it:

I was uneasy about … engaging accessibility, because, again, I felt like this is a huge thing. We're gonna have to burn down my course and completely rebuild it from the ground up. But the first article that [we] read, where it talks about “plus one thinking” [Tobin & Behling, 2018] and just doing one thing. … doing something, anything, rather than nothing – is helpful. … So I think reframing engaging with accessibility for faculty who are afraid of it like me … as – it's kind of a small thing and it's a process. You'll get there, if you work on it over time.

This instructor discovered that a more complex understanding of accessibility could also feel less overwhelming.

Universal design. Several instructors started to think of accessibility as part of how they designed the course from the beginning, rather than as offering accommodations after a student disclosed a disability. Professor Russo noted that: This is kind of like a 30,000-foot-level shift—thinking about how accessibility should be there at the start of designing a course—part of its DNA—as opposed to something that gets applied like band-aids to an existing course.

Adopting a universal design framework led to a variety of changes to policies, assignments, and resource structures. For example, Professor Barrera explained a new resource she provided to everyone.

Some students may […] want notes or a note taker and so, in my first check-in with Meera [the student coach], she prompted me to think—why don’t I just do this on the front end before I even know if a student may need this, because we know that [the student disability services office] is a little behind—I can just do this proactively.

By removing barriers in advance, instructors can make courses more accessible even for students who do not formally request accommodations.

Viewing syllabi as learning supports, not legal contracts. Several instructors realized that course policies need not be treated as legal contracts and could instead be handled more flexibly to improve access for learners. Professor Hall shared:

I think teachers, professors, feel like there are these limitations. “No, we can’t do that.” But actually you can do some things that are a little outside of the box, I think. And I think our students need to know that they're valued as individual human beings […] and sometimes that means a little extra time, sometimes that means a little more one on one.

This mindset shift reflected a broader pattern of recentering student learning as the goal of teaching, which in turn enabled instructors to see course policies as a part of accessible pedagogy.

What Program Features Led to Instructor Change

When instructors were gathered in focus groups after the pilot had concluded, frequently they discussed aspects of the project that had led to their own learning.

Learning From Student Coaches

Interactions with student coaches emerged as the single most impactful element of the project for instructors. They repeatedly mentioned the value of gaining a student's perspectives on their courses, revealing surprising insights. “The idea of partnering with students just needs to be done, as much as we can. I think … there's a lot of cross learning that happens … particularly around accessibility,” said Professor Barrera. Professor Russo described conversations with his coach, Emilia, this way:

We did so much back and forth learning. I know there were so many points over the course of our time together where I was like, “I literally have never thought of that from a student perspective, ever […].” And likewise, I think, from her perspective, she realized a lot of the normative and logistical challenges that are on the instructor side and the TA side of things, too … . I kept thinking, my goodness, if every professor had one student and they did this all the time, how much good would come from that.

Hearing a student's perspective on the class opened a whole new way of understanding how students experienced the course—something this instructor could only learn from a student coach, not from another instructor or staff member.

Notably, the student coaches found that they were empowered to have a voice through this framework. Sol noted how their disabilities and experiences brought unique value: “…Being autistic, and ADHD, and neurodivergent on a larger scale kind of allowed me to also interact with the topic as an expert on the topic, too.” Being listened to in this way could be surprising, as Terra explained:

When I was working with my faculty partner […] she was very receptive and I wasn't really expecting that … professors are really set in their ways, and they wouldn't want to receive that feedback. So I think that was super rewarding, that she was able to listen to my perspective.

Because instructors do not see invisible disabilities, and many have never experienced a disability, students’ expertise fills a critical missing space in their development.

Multiple instructors mentioned that learning from the student coaches was made possible by several key program features. First, student coaches were not enrolled in the courses of the instructors they were coaching. Second, they had been hired for their direct experience with disability. And third, they received training as part of the broader PLC. As a result, they were empowered to share their perspectives in ways that ordinary, enrolled students might not feel. Professor Herman noted: “I think one of the really amazing things is that we were able to have these conversations in a space where people felt like they could be open and honest, and that is so important to the learning.” All agreed that they needed to create more mechanisms for having honest conversations with students in the future.

Ongoing, Not Once-and-Done, Learning

Instructors noted how important it had been to have recurring time set aside for reflecting on and planning for accessibility in their courses. The project's biweekly meetings between instructors and student coaches and monthly meetings across the broader learning community meant that, even during busy periods, this work was still prioritized. Professor Barrera said that:

My meetings with Meera were […] some of the most generative, exciting moments of the week and I definitely looked forward to blocking off the time and having conversations and having that more like meta, sitting back thinking about the course.

Because overload is common in academia, these instructors found it essential to have time routinely carved out of their schedule for this deeper work, as Professor Russo explained: I was meeting with Emilia and it was a nice way to … pull back and zoom out of the trees each week and really have a chance to take a deep breath and re-center the student's perspective on things.

Notably, this “zooming out,” when conducted with student coaches, also led to a recentering on student's experiences and learning—the key goal for the project.

Cultivating Broader Change

Several instructors noted how the learning community created a safer space for instructors, not just students. Some planned to share resources from the pilot with colleagues. Professor Barrera volunteered to engage with future cohorts of instructors in a learning community: “I think it may be interesting to think about what a learning community could look like if those of us who have gone through this [shared our experience … ] and [have] that be a model for another group of faculty.” All found community support to be important to their own development. Professor Singh also noted that: Many of us who are involved in this initiative are involved in other student wellness or other teaching excellence initiatives. And to start knowing and seeing repeat faces allows you to know who are allies … .

Cultivating community was seen as foundational to moving instructors from making individual changes to spreading their approaches more widely in their departments and colleges.

Discussion

Although it is clear that instructional development has an important role to play in improving accessibility for disabled students, identifying models that achieve this goal has been challenging (Lombardi et al., 2011; Salzberg et al., 2002; Tobin & Behling, 2018). As a result, this study attempted to examine the outcomes of a specific instructional development model that sought to improve access and inclusion for disabled students.

Extending the Research on Instructional Development for Accessibility

Our findings corroborate and extend key findings from previous literature on student–instructor partnerships and PLCs. In support of other studies that have explored students-as-partners models (Cawthon et al., 2019; Cook-Sather & Abbot, 2016; Healey et al., 2016; Schley et al., 2021), this study revealed specific ways in which empowering students as teaching consultants to instructors can support the pursuit of accessible teaching. The value of instructors learning from students with disabilities was the most frequently cited program element for most instructors, who discovered that there was no substitute for hearing directly from disabled students about their experiences and insights. This reversal in the flow of expertise created an ongoing shift in dynamics, re-centering students and their learning. It revealed how disabled students bring insights about invisible disabilities and barriers that both non-disabled and disabled instructors could not discern on their own. Moreover, it taught instructors to value student voices and perspectives on teaching and learning, a fundamental shift in thinking for many of them. In this way, the study demonstrates the potential of student–instructor partnerships for reducing inequities and increasing inclusion (de Bie et al., 2021) by suggesting how instructor collaborations with disabled students are necessary for anti-ableism and accessibility efforts.

It also corroborates and extends research on how learning communities can lead to deeper and more substantive development for college instructors. Several features of the learning community model proved critical. Instructors noted the importance of recurring, dedicated time for reflecting on teaching. Even instructors who cannot participate in a semester-long learning experience may be able to find other ways to carve out regular time for “zooming out” and thinking more deeply about their teaching goals and approaches. Deprivatizing teaching practices, through instructors’ discussions with their student coaches and colleagues, also proved critical for examining practices with fresh eyes and creating reflective space around teaching. Instructors found that the learning community helped create a consistent focus on student learning, rather than on the daily tasks and problems that instructors often discuss with colleagues, creating a student-centered frame of reference for all decisions about teaching.

Although these findings align with prior research on the ingredients that make communities of practice and pedagogical conversations with students powerful (Cook-Sather et al., 2014; Pleschová et al., 2021; Rainville et al., 2024), this study demonstrates how these practices are particularly necessary to cultivate anti-ableist teaching and increase access for disabled students in college. It also connects accessibility initiatives to prior work that has identified the intersection of partnership models with learning community models—“partnership learning communities”—as particularly important for instructional change initiatives (Healey et al., 2016).

Practical Implications for Teachers of Psychology

The study's findings have several implications for teachers of psychology. Although there is no single checklist for creating an accessible class, psychology instructors should explore the teaching strategies that emerged from the study. These included thinking about flexibility, both from the beginning of the course but also as an ongoing process across the semester in response to circumstances and student needs. Similarly, transparency emerged as an important strategy. Transparency meant explaining the instructor's thinking behind course policies and practices as well as clarifying the rationale, expectations, and evaluation of assignments through detailed assignment instructions, rubrics, and examples. Cultivating an inclusive course environment was another important strategy. Participants identified a variety of practices that could improve the environment, including relationship-building with and among students, removing ableist language, and acknowledging students’ mental health challenges.

Adopting a learning-centered rather than legalistic approach to policies is another strategy. Focusing course policies on a few possible bad actors can decrease learning opportunities for many other students, but re-framing policies to support learning increased accessibility. Changing or adding course content or assignments also emerged as important for some instructors, particularly those who had relied heavily on a single form of assessment (such as exams) or whose courses dealt with topics where disability was a relevant framework. Finally, participants noted the importance of teachers becoming learners , including admitting to mistakes, experimenting with new tools and strategies, and staying open to changing their practices.

Before instructors take steps to improve their teaching, they often must undergo mindset shifts about the meaning of ableism and accessibility. These mindset shifts emerged, in our study, as foundational both for immediate implementation of new pedagogical strategies but also for instructors’ commitment to ongoing development and improvement.

Foremost among these changes is expanding instructors’ understandings of disability and accessibility . For some, this involved learning about the range of invisible disabilities in their classrooms and acknowledging their own blind spots. For others, it involved recognizing that a university's legal compliance framework falls far short of creating true accessibility for students. For all, cultivating a working knowledge of concepts around disability and ableism was important to expanding their thinking. Part of this process entailed developing an awareness that many existing practices that seem neutral can create ableist barriers for many students.

These changes in understanding led to new approaches to changing their teaching. Taking an incremental approach to change , encapsulated in the “plus-one thinking” concept (Tobin & Behling, 2018), helped reduce overwhelm for instructors. In this approach, accessible and inclusive teaching is a journey, not a destination, that involves gradually but continually iterating one's courses in response to learning about students’ needs. Thinking in terms of universal design also helped instructors design courses for increased accessibility from the beginning, rather than retrofitting them after receiving an accommodation request.

Limitations and Future Research

This study has several limitations. Although the semester-long format created space for regular conversations between instructors and student coaches, many busy college instructors cannot commit to longer-format programs (Wright, 2023). Future research should examine whether, and how, similar programs could retain key elements of the model while reducing instructors’ time commitment. This study also included instructors from non-psychology departments, enabling a more generalizable set of insights but potentially overlooking challenges specific to the teaching of psychology. Future research should explore the insights yielded by students-as-partners programs for psychology instructors teaching commonly taught courses for both psychology majors and non-majors.

Conclusion

Improving disabled students’ postsecondary experiences and outcomes needs to be a priority for psychology teachers and departments. Accessibility, however, often is not emphasized in instructional development programs, even those that aim to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, helping instructors substantively change their teaching is difficult. Instructors often find the topic of accessibility to be overwhelming. Because they may be unaware of the range and prevalence of student disabilities in their courses, they may not even see it as a priority. As a result, the field needs to identify not just the kinds of teaching practices that support disabled students, but also the kinds of instructional development experiences that work with instructors.

This study offers practical implications both for teachers of psychology, and for psychology departments wanting to better support instructor development related to improving accessibility and reducing ableism.