In an event of an incident that can affect the teaching and learning climate (e.g. bias incidents on campus, national and global events), consider one or more of the following actions (choose a response that you are comfortable with):

Downloadable resource for instructors:  Incident Response and Resources

• Take a minute at the beginning or end of class to acknowledge what happened and the impact it has on our community (students, faculty and staff); you can refer to the news, a message from the administration, etc. This can be a sentence or two.
• Encourage your students to seek support from each other, campus resources, and family and friends.
• Share resources for affected individuals (campus offices) and those who wish to support them (e.g. intergroup dialogue). Feel free to project the resources on the attached slide deck in class.
• Acknowledge that not everyone is affected in the same way.
• Ask students to consider their place in Cornell’s community, and what they can do to contribute to making Cornell more welcoming and affirmative of targeted students.
• Ask for a moment of silence to hold the space and affirm those who are targeted.
• Consider lightening the cognitive load in class (e.g., offer review sessions, extend timelines / due dates, etc.) as students work through their responses to the incident, which will be significant for some. Moments like these can have an adverse effect on learning.
• If you are comfortable, facilitate a short write-pair-share exercise. Allocate about 3 minutes to write individually, ask students to pick a discussion partner, and then ask each person to share for about 3 minutes. Writing prompts might be, “How has this incident affected you? What do you think the impact has been for your peers?”