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Last quarter, I tried something new in my large undergraduate sociology lecture: I banned laptops. The change may seem modest on the surface—students swapped keyboards for notebooks—but the effects were striking. Engagement deepened, discussions became more animated and the classroom felt less like a silent co-working space and more like a community.
Several students even thanked me, saying my class was one of the few spaces in their week where they could peel themselves away from their devices, breathe and connect without the constant pull of notifications. For a generation that lives tethered to their screens, this kind of break can feel liberating.
But the decision also sparked controversy. When I shared my experience on social media, disability advocates pushed back. One pointed out that a laptop ban is ableist because it effectively forces students with invisible disabilities to out themselves if they need an accommodation. Another argued that professors should find creative ways to engage students while allowing everyone to use laptops. Others offered alternatives, such as rotating note takers whose typed notes could be shared with the class, thereby solving the outing problem.
I take those critiques seriously. I have had many students with a variety of disabilities over the years, and I have worked hard to support them with dignity and flexibility. But those efforts have brought into sharp relief for me a fact that often goes unstated in conversations about inclusive pedagogy: every teaching decision involves trade-offs. Despite the widespread mantra that methods that support marginalized students help all students, the reality is that trade-offs are inevitable.
To be sure, simple steps like learning students’ names are a win-win. But once we move beyond these straightforward practices to more consequential pedagogical decisions, trade-offs become unavoidable. Inclusive pedagogy celebrates diversity as an educational good. But diversity means heterogeneity in needs, preferences, skills, identities and constraints. That heterogeneity makes it literally impossible for a single pedagogical choice to benefit all students equally.
Take laptops as an example. Allowing them in class may create essential access for students whose disabilities make handwriting difficult or impossible. Yet the very same policy can disadvantage other students—those with attention challenges such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who are more susceptible to distraction, as well as students without disabilities who are nonetheless pulled off task by the glow of nearby screens.
The research evidence is remarkably consistent: Randomized controlled trials have shown that when laptops are permitted, students score lower on exams, and the effect spills over to their peers who are distracted by the screens around them. These are not small differences—they are measurable, educationally significant declines in learning. In other words, a policy that ensures access for some students may come at the cost of diminished learning for others.
Trade-offs aren’t accidents of bad pedagogy—they are the inevitable by-product of diversity itself. Inclusive pedagogy’s challenge is not that it’s wrong about equity, but that it too often underestimates the inevitability of conflicting needs. We need a more honest framework for talking about teaching. The complexities of classroom pedagogy are less like engineering, where every design tweak can in principle optimize performance for everyone, and more like policymaking in a diverse society, where every choice distributes benefits and burdens differently. Some students gain more, others less, and sometimes the very same measure that removes a barrier for one group erects a new barrier for another.
Seen this way, the central responsibility of teaching is not to find mythical “win-win” methods that benefit everyone equally, but to navigate trade-offs with transparency and care. That means being explicit with students about the values guiding your decisions, acknowledging the costs as well as the benefits, and connecting those choices to the best available research. In my classroom, for example, I explained why I adopted a laptop ban, shared the evidence about its effects on learning, outlined the steps I would take to ensure access for students with accommodations and acknowledged the limits of the policy nonetheless.
What we don’t need are simplified binaries—“marginalized” versus “privileged”—that flatten the real heterogeneity of students’ needs. Diversity is not a single axis; it is an array of differences, some of which come into conflict. A pedagogy that pretends otherwise risks promising more than it can deliver.
