STREAK method: a teaching practice that supports students in a mixed classroom community

Every student, class, and semester is unique. Developing a welcoming classroom means that students with any combination of personal identifiers, demographics, or characteristics need to feel supported, significant, and integral to the course. Creating a welcoming environment for every student can be a challenge due to the heterogeneity of student backgrounds, perceptions, needs, and expectations. In microbiology, we use a streak plate to isolate individual colonies of microbes from a mixed population and enable individual species to grow and thrive. We related this core technique to a method we propose here, STREAK, that encompasses six distinct techniques in a novel combination to help individual students thrive in a classroom community by enhancing their sense of belonging and connection to their peers, instructors, and course content. STREAK is: Stop stereotypes, Time, Respectful reactions, Expectations, Access, and Know your Students. This method highlights the value of each individual student and their contributions to the classroom community, with the intended effect of increasing a sense of belonging. Additionally, feeling welcome should enable students to grow and develop on a personal level in addition to potentially enhancing classroom performance. We successfully integrated STREAK into a microbiology course and obtained evidence that this method does enhance student experience in the course when compared to similar courses that did not include STREAK. The STREAK method can be applied across various types of student populations, courses, and enrollments and provides a framework to improve the classroom environment through six research-backed best practices.