Every physics teacher wants to give his or her students the opportunity to learn physics well. Despite these intentions, certain groups of students—including women and underrepresented minorities (URMs)—are not taking and not remaining in physics. In many cases, these disturbing trends are more significant in physics than in any other science. This is a missed opportunity for our discipline because demographic diversity strengthens science. The question is what we can do about these trends in our classrooms, as very few physics teachers have been explicitly prepared to address them. In this article, I will share some steps that I've taken in my classroom that have moved my class in the right direction. In the words of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman and psychologists Lauren Aguilar and Gregory Walton:
“By investing a small amount of class time in carefully designed and implemented interventions, physics teachers can promote greater success among students from diverse backgrounds. Ultimately, we hope such efforts will indeed improve the diversity and health of the physics profession.”
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More details about this unit can be found at http://tinyurl.com/URMUnit.
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