Schools

Creating and adapting lessons

Do you have a great lesson, but feel like it’s not engaging boys and girls equally?

Follow these steps to adapt your lesson to be more gender-inclusive.

  1. Audit for gender balance and gender representations.
  2. Remove any gender representations that enforce stereotypes of women and girls in STEM. Or keep them, but actively challenge them and present alternative viewpoints to students.
  3. Augment existing resources (human, text, video) to ensure a balanced gender representation. Particularly look for women in relevant STEM careers who demonstrate creativity and collaboration.
  4. Design in opportunities for collaboration.
  5. Anticipate the need for extra support in technical or hands-on activities and provide those opportunities.
  6. Augment learning experiences to include social relevance.
  7. Open up learning and assessment tasks to include choice and creativity.
7 guiding principles to creating gender-inclusive learning environments

Want to design or annotate your own lessons?

Using the Seven principles of gender-inclusive lesson design, you can design lessons that will engage not only girls, but all your students in STEM.

View the seven principles

Resources

Lessons

Wendy Wright with a juvenile rhinoceros

Poster series

From Associate Professors to Research Scientists, here are a range of posters ready to download featuring women in a variety of STEM roles.

Find out more

More information

This project is funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.
© Education Services Australia Ltd, unless otherwise indicated.

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