I have been learning about UDL for about 3 months now. It all started in July with a week of live sessions with Katie Novak and my fellow Trailblazers. Since then, the journey has been all about trying UDL implementation whilst learning more about it in our monthly sessions with Katie.
So far it has been a good learning experience and I think I am getting somewhere with my implementation, rather, my experimentation. As a trailblazer, I am asked to share my journey, my successes so far, my setbacks, and some of the things I have learned. I have decided to use this Blogger site to share with you what I have learned and been up to.
To be honest, it is a bit nerve-wracking to have so many of you read about what I am doing and 'judging' me. But one of the reasons I signed up for this was that I wanted to be a risk-taker, so here it goes!!
Look for my first big sharing moment in a week's time on Wednesday, November 3rd!
I will continue to post on this blog about my journey (some posts will be related to a topic we are covering with Katie, others will be of my own discoveries and findings). Because this is a journey, the blog starts at the beginning and I am forcing you to scroll down to reach the most recent one!!
At the beginning of this journey, Katie Novak had us think about the barriers we already knew all or some of our students face in their learning. This was during the summer (in July) so we could only think about our students in general terms based on prior knowledge but not specifically about our new students' profiles in Powerschool and our own personal experience with them. It is incredible how many potential barriers we identified solely based on our experiences. !
I teach a grade 1 class that happens to be a HUB partner class. Therefore I knew that I would have at least 2 or 3 students that would receive some type of ISP (Tier 2+ and above) support or tier 2 support. I could identify that some students would have some self-regulation and behavioral needs and that my lessons need to take their need for movement and their shorter attention span into consideration. All grade 1 students have a shorter attention span than 4th-grade students, so time focused on listening to lessons is already a barrier for all.
Some other barriers to the student's well-being and learning could be social-emotional, self-management, and lack of collaborative skills. Our students are COVID kids and have known only restrictions and restrictive learning environments. I knew that I would need to be mindful of these barriers and slowly develop their independence with the help of various supports and scaffolds. After all, they are learning to be learners and they were going to be brand new to our campus and to "how we do things". The challenge was even greater as my own learning space was restricted and I would need to find new ways to create a learning environment that mitigated the barriers put up by COVID as much as possible. Not an easy task.
By far, one of the major barriers to learning I knew I would need to focus on is the language barrier for non-English speakers. MEAL (Mainstream EAL students) students, or Level B as they are called now, were not going to be a new thing for me and the rest of the grade 1 team. However, SEAL students, now called Level A students, would be brand new to us. In the past, we had dedicated SEAL classes to help our non-English speakers get started and "up-to-speed". This year each class would get up to 3 Level A students who need extra support in class.
So, even before we met our students and had a chance to identify some of their specific barriers, we already had a good long list of barriers that we either had already been addressing in our teaching or that we would need to address in our teaching. UDL training could not have come at a better time. When I finally met with my students, I could identify more specific barriers for each learning goal.
As you embark on your UDL practice, think of your specific goal (What do you want the students to learn or to demonstrate?), then think of the barriers your students could face in reaching the goal. Next, look for and offer different pathways that would allow students to reach the learning goal. The aim here is not for you to end up making 20 separate lesson plans, but to give your students options that will allow all of them to overcome their barriers. Allow your students to try different options and soon they will find the one that fits their learning needs.
I know, I know...easier said than done!! But That is what I am trying to do in my practice. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes I need to return to the drawing board. It's a process!!
Early on in this journey, I focused my attention on communication between the students and me. wanted to improve both how I communicated the information I wanted them to have and how they communicated their learning to me. Seesaw was the tool of choice to help me with this and here is why:
Seesaw is a tool that allows me to use multiple ways to give instruction/explanations/support for a task so that all students know what they are expected to do and can do it feeling as independent as possible. Seesaw has been around for a while and is constantly finding ways to improve itself, adding some great features that can help us overcome barriers for our students.
Check out the video below about some of its features:
or this infographic:
So I started my UDL journey by improving my Seesaw activities, making sure that I added visuals in my instructions (Seesaw icons), voice recording, and videos wherever I could. This gave the student the choice/support to get the information they needed to get the task done.
In my templates for their responses, for every sentence I typed, I added a voice recording of myself reading the sentence. I linked resources and added visuals as much as possible. In turn, I gave the students opportunities to respond in different ways (the only rule is that each option was connected to the learning goal). With Seesaw, students can take pictures, record videos, and their voices. They can type and draw as needed if they choose to go that route. It is a fantastic tool that really can help all students express their learning in ways that are engaging and that overcome their barriers.
In grade one, sometimes the barrier is simply not being to write as much as one wants, or not being able to spell the words one wants to use to share one's learning. The ability to record a response allows students to still show me their understanding without penalizing them for their novice writing skills.
In my next post, I will share one example of a lesson task that got a UDL makeover and uses Seesaw. I submitted this lesson to Katie Novak for evaluation and it got positive feedback. You will see that it is rather simple to add options. Some options seem kind of obvious at but if one does not take the time to think of the barriers, the opportunity to provide different pathways to the learning goals can be lost. I won't lie, it takes a bit of extra prep time (ok, maybe a lot at times), but it's worth it.
Seesaw is not the only solution out there to allow kids to learn and to share their learning of course. But it is a start.
Beyond Seesaw: Assistive technology
Assistive technology is a great way to overcome barriers. Read the article in the link below to get to know a bit more about assistive technology
Recently, one of our colleagues tweeted his use of Assistive technology. Grade 5 teacher Matt Ives used the Google translate camera feature to help his EAL students translate their classmate's presentations as they happened. This allowed all students to be active participants as the presentations happened, not after the fact. Check his Tweet HERE.
I also learned about Mote ( extension available in the Google Chrome store) from a fellow Trailblazer, Mandala Barab. Mote allows you to insert voice recording in Google slides, Google docs, and more!! Check out his presentation on Wednesday, November 3rd during our UDL sharing sessions. Mandala introduces Mote on his first slide and uses it throughout his presentation.
If you know of any other great assistive tech and cool digital tools that can help our students overcome barriers, please let me know in a comment below.
As I mentioned in my previous post. I submitted a lesson plan that got a UDL make-over to Katie Novak. This was part of our homework for one of our modules. The lesson here is a bit more detailed than what I would usually write/prep to reflect my thinking. I primarily had my EAL student in mind but a lot of the supports/options benefit all students.
It was a good exercise that made me realize that I could do this and that we could do a lot to help our kids.
When one reads the UDL guidelines on the CAST website, the first part of the guidelines focuses on providing multiple means of engagement. Part of my UDL journey is going further in understanding Engagement (Engagement deals with the 'WHY' of learning).
The first thing that I found interesting is that I had a very narrow and naive view of student engagement. Students listening to lessons, participating, and "having fun” while learning, to me, was engagement. But in digging deeper. It turns out that this is a rather superficial view of engagement. It is not completely wrong, but it is not exactly it. My initial understanding is only a small part of it.
Engagement is not about how much fun kids are having while learning rather it is about how much they are invested in their learning. There is a lot of student agency in engagement. Students have to be motivated to learn, they need to have made the decision that they can do a task and that they want to do it. They need to know why they are learning what they are learning and decide to do it. As teachers, we can help by providing them with ways to get them motivated and engaged (the manifestation of motivation). Our job is to develop the skills they will need to be engaged and become expert learners.
Engagement is divided into 3 parts and both teachers and students have a role in each part. The three parts are :
Recruiting Interest
Spark excitement and curiosity for learning
Our job as teachers is to find ways to get kids to want to engage in the lesson, not because they have to, but because they want to. There are strategies we can use to help with this.
For example, simply by knowing your students and their interests, you can modify your lessons and their content to connect with them. If students feel a connection between themselves and the learning, they will be more interested. It means that the lesson you reuse yearly for certain topics needs to be tweaked so they feel more relevant to the audience in front of you.
I like to find out what cartoons, books, and toys are popular with my kids so that I can use them in my lessons:
In our opinion writing unit, if I model an example with something that matters to only me, the kids will be passive. However, if I use a topic they are familiar with and can relate to, let's say "the bad Guys" book series, then not only will they be active learners in the lesson but when the time comes for them to write their opinion, they will much more motivated to write and share because of the excitement and interest we would have just generated.
Another way to boost engagement using culturally responsive engagements is to connect things to the real world, to their world. You can do this in math with real-world applications of their learning or in social studies by bringing in the local aspects of what you are studying.
In Grade 1, right now, we are focusing on communities, so we are making sure that the students not only make connections with their current community here in Singapore but also with their community back home (As we have lots of expat kids).
Sustaining Effort & Persistence
Tackle challenges with focus and determination.
Another job we have, beyond getting the kids motivated, is teaching persistence and helping them realize that their efforts will lead to success. I was so happy to listen to this short podcast "Struggle for Smarts?" as it highlighted the importance of not only trying but accepting that struggling is an essential part of learning. It also highlighted that effort and a growth mindset approach to learning should be celebrated. We, as teachers, need to help students develop a growth mindset, develop the grit and stamina needed to see a challenge through and what we need to do is create a culture where we support and celebrate effort. I really like that Dr. Stigler presented struggle as an opportunity and not as a sign of low ability.
Effort and persistence are in vain if students do not have a clear goal in mind. Students need to know where they are going, what they are doing, and how to measure their progress and eventual success towards a precise goal. Their effort, persistence, and struggle are directly connected to the 3rd part: self-regulation and reflection.
Self Regulation
Harness the power of emotions and motivation in learning
Reflection, self-assessment, and self-regulation, all come from within. We can assess kids, we can just tell them what we see and we can tell them what to do, but if the students are not part of the process and just expected to do as they are told, one's class will just be populated by students who display either Strategic compliance or Ritual compliance.
What we want to create is a classroom where students display high commitment (and ideally high attention as well, but I am ok with a bit of chaos if there is high commitment).
Our job here is to teach the kids skills that will help them cope emotionally with struggle. Resilience has to build up and we need to support the kids in their effort and help them realize that their efforts will bear their fruit. While we provide a learning goal for the kids with every lesson, it is important that the student develop the skills to self-assess and reflect on their learning and their process. If we want them to become expert learners, they need to regularly check on their progression and decide what their next step is. We are here to facilitate this through providing tools for self-assessment and providing feedback (first we provide it and eventually, you want the student to independently seek feedback from the teacher AND peers).
The learning environment we provide is key. If we provide an environment that promotes autonomy, decision-making on the part of the student regarding their goals and is flexible as to remove barriers, then our students' motivation and engagement will not only be high, but we will also have helped them become expert learners.
This UDL journey has been made possible by my current school, Stamford American International School, and I am grateful for it. The school set up this UDL Trailblazers program for us to work with Katie Novak and learn to apply the UDL framework in order to benefit our learners.
As a "Trailblazer", I am tasked with taking some courses, completing some assignments, and deepening my understanding of UDL. Easy enough. I am also tasked with trying things out and encouraging my team (Grade 1) to be risk-takers and tweak or rethink some of their lessons with a UDL lens. Part of that is both easy and difficult.
I find that trying new things and retooling lessons in order to remove more barriers can be both challenging and rewarding. Sometimes it is even, dare I say, easy. Sometimes, it is just a matter of changing the way the information is delivered ( audio, visual, kinaesthetic), or how my students respond and show me their understanding. Sometimes, it is a headache because the goal of the lessons requires students to do certain things a certain way and there are barriers that I just cannot be taken down outright. I am thinking about writing or reading mostly as these are things that have to be done. Don't get me wrong, UDL has given me new ideas and new pathways to help students in both reading and writing.
Anywho, the purpose of this short post is to send the message that trial and error is par for the course and that I am not alone in this. Sometimes I feel like I am but last Wednesday, I was reminded in a reassuring way that, no, I am not alone and that others are having the same struggles and the same successes as I am having.
Our school has a weekly meeting called "Inclusion Wednesday '' when the school engages in a variety of activities that revolve around inclusion and specifically our sandbox year of learning to implement UDL in our planning and teaching. We have had a sharing session where the school Trailblazers share their journey. This is how this blog came about. We have had a few sessions where others shared their UDL work, their resources, and ideas to inspire the whole staff. But last Wednesday, I was part of a small session that gave me more than a new set of resources. I sat down with our head of Teaching and Learning (Thomas Marshall), our Director of Education for Asia (Andy Hancock), and most importantly 6 other trailblazers. And we just had a chat, a good talk about what it has been like, and it was so good.
I loved that session because it made me realize that I was really having the same journey as others and that I was doing ok. I needed that affirmation that I was doing ok. I realized that I was knowledgeable through the training I am receiving but also through my applying UDL and implementing it more and more often in my planning. I also realized in the session that I need to check in more often with my team. I need to do more than share resources and learning engagements that I tried to make more "UDL" in nature. I came out of the session re-envigorated and with some clear goals in mind.
If you are like me and learning to be better at identifying barriers and in planning lessons that provide the opportunity for all students to meet their learning goals, then make sure you talk with colleagues and support each other. This journey is much better with some company.
Happy Trails!
As part of my assignment for our 7th session with Katie Novak, I was asked to write a newsletter to parents on representation and using to UDL framework to help our Language learners.
"ok. I get what UDL is, but how do I implement UDL in Classroom? I need strategies!".
I think that is the number one thing I hear when discussing UDL and our implementation in our school. I would say that it is a pretty safe bet that this question and this desire for strategies are echoed in many schools by tons of educators.
The internet to the rescue!! The internet is a beautiful thing as it has many resources out there that can not only shed more light on implementing the UDL framework but there are some that provide strategies.
In my browsing I found Goalbook. Goalbook is a site/company dedicated to working with schools and school districts to help them implement the UDL framework in their instruction. It is a paid service, however, they are kind enough to share a great long list of UDL strategies, that, even if your school/district is not a member receiving their service, can help a teacher implement UDL in their classroom.
The picture below is only a small portion of the list however one can see how useful it is already. The strategies are organized under the 3 domains outlined by CAST: Engagement, Representation, Action/Expression.
But there is more!! If one clicks on the strategies, one gets a description/explanation of the strategy* and a notation referring to the CAST guidelines checkpoints. Each strategy can match more than one checkpoint and/or domain (see example below).
*Note that to get the implementation tips for the strategy, and examples, one has to have a membership. So if your school has a membership, you are golden!! If not, maybe send that off to your admins, they might join.
I love group work projects in Grade 1. I find that they have so many benefits in developing important ATLs, (social and communications skills being the 2 biggest ones) and help kids learn and share their learning. That is my opinion.
I am pretty sure that group work was a great UDL approach to removing barriers, but I wanted to see how a recent group task my kids did stack against the UDL guidelines. . So I set off to do a bit of reading and thinking to see if I was indeed correct. Here is what I have found out:
My first stop was CAST's UDL guidelines to look into the matter. 2 Checkpoints seem quite relevant for Group tasks:
7. 2 Optimize Relevance, Value, and Authenticity.
one of its subpoints states; Provide tasks that allow for active participation, exploration, and experimentation. Group tasks allow for 3.
8..3 Foster Collaboration and Community
Create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities
Provide prompts that guide learners in when and how to ask peers and/or teachers for help
Encourage and support opportunities for peer interactions and supports (e.g., peer-tutors)
construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities
Create expectations for group work (e.g., rubrics, norms, etc.)
It looked like I was off to a good start. indeed my group work hit these points but I also noticed that I needed to refine (and research) a few things. For example, my latest group tasks had clear goals and expectations. My students knew that they needed to use their available tools ( their prior knowledge and their peers', online research tools like PebbleGo and Epic) to create a poster that will help them teach the class about a habitat. The kids were clear about the task and excited. I did not spend a lot of time as a whole class discussing organization, roles, and responsibilities. I think that would have been helpful.Instead, I let each group get started and troubleshot as needed. I had some groups who set to work quickly and effectively, while I had some groups that needed support in their decision process, organization, and collaboration.
As I read more about UDL and about group tasks, I found a few things to improve upon and change:
I should explicitly include time for discussing the expectations and establishing the norms/roles/responsibilities before launching the task
Another thing that I could and should change is creating a rubric (kid-friendly with visuals) for the kids to guide and remind them of the outcomes/goals of the task. Don't get me wrong, I had those displayed on my whiteboard but thy were in bullet points and it required the kids to have to look at the board instead of having their rubric in hand.
After doing some more reading, I realized that I could have provided a bit of flexibility / some options in how the kids showed their research and learned about a habitat and how they shared it. For this task, they only had the option of creating a poster representing a habitat. They were asked to show some of the features, plants, and animals for their habitat and asked to use labels.
I did a few things 'right' that helped my students overcome some barriers and allowed each group to be successful.:
I created balanced groups where my language learners had peers that could/would support them well. My groups were balanced also on personalities and I made sure that there was a mix of strengths in the group. For example, a strong reader that could access more information and pass it on, a student who was well organized, another who had strong creative skills, etc...
I provided two options for students to share/demonstrate their learning and having met the task's goals. Each group would present the class and each member was encouraged to speak but I also set up a Seesaw task where kids took a picture of their poster and could present their learning through voice or video recording. This allowed kids to be able to express themself with more confidence and share more of their learning.
The Seesaw task also had a reflection built-in for students to reflect on both their learning but also on how they worked as part of a group. They were asked to reflect on 3 specific ATLs: Research, social, and communication skills. There too, kids could record their voice, a video, or type their answers. I encouraged speech to text as this was not a writing task, so there was no reason not to use it.
The seesaw activity allowed me to better assess the kids individually
So yes, groups tasks are a great UDL approach to learning and overcoming barriers. Like everything else, groups task have to be proactively planned with your students' strengths and barriers in mind. From this reflection, I have a pretty good idea of my next steps and what I can do to design group work tasks that will help all my students be successful. Katie Novak did tell our cohort that UDL lesson design is an ongoing process of tweaks and refinements.
So sadly, our sessions with Katie Novak have come to end. This does not mean the end of my UDL journey, it just means that a part of it ended. I have learned and changed a lot along the way. This post is about reflecting on how I have changed as an educator and about what I have learned that changed me and my practice.
One of the first things that jumped at me when we (me and my fellow Trailblazers) started this learning is that we actually already included many of the practices and principles of UDL in our teaching. For example, we were already using tools that allowed us to present content/information in different ways and allowed students to express themselves in varied ways. Another example was our school's commitment to inclusion for our language learners within the mainstream classroom with adequate support, training, and tools to help remove as many barriers as possible.
The second thing I realized is that I could be doing more and I could be taking down more barriers for my students if I proactively planned for them instead of reacting to them. I learned that there were many ways to this
For a refresher about UDL, Check Katie Novak's infographic. More of my reflection after the infographic
Using the tools that CAST, Katie, and my own research provided, I learned how to recognize potential barriers in my planning and I learned ways to mitigate them. I had to unlearn a few things and break some old habits and perceptions. It was work, it took time; I spent a lot of time retooling 'tried and true" activities that had some flaws. Indeed I noticed flaws in my planning I had not seen or solved before I looked at things with a UDL lens. I myself became an expert learner; I paid attention to feedback from peers but most importantly from students and reflected on it.
I learned that feedback from students comes in many ways and I learned to recognize it. More than half the feedback I got from students is the feedback they did not realize they were giving me. I paid more attention to their body language, their reactions to task, their struggles, and what clicked with them and what did not click with them. So I reflected on it, evaluated the choices I had made in my planning and delivery, and made changes accordingly.
I also learned that when Katie said it was work and that when she said that some of the example lessons she shared with us took time to tweak and 'get right, she was not joking. But I learned that the work and time spent paid dividends for my students.
I learned to recognize missed opportunities. There were quite a few occasions when I said to myself "I could have done this or that instead of..." or "I forgot to..." and the oh so familiar " I could have added this option for the kids". I am actually proud that I can do that now. It allows me to make positive changes in my kid's learning.
So my journey continues, but this time my learning is even more self-directed and independent. Right now I am still working with fellow trailblazers in getting our CAST certification levels 1 and 2. I believe it is a good way for me to test my knowledge and to show what I have learned. When I apply to future schools, I want to be able to show them that I would be an asset to them and their students and that I possess the skills and knowledge to make all learners succeed.
I plan to continue sharing everything I learn with my team. When we plan collaboratively, I will continue to engage them in thinking proactively about possible barriers and providing a variety of pathways for our students to reach the lesson/task goals whenever possible. I will encourage and support my team to take risks and try new ways to make lessons and learning engaging for students.
Something I would like to engage my team to do at some point is doing something similar to these CAST videos:
Ideally, we would do it with our own lessons by inviting each other to observe or by filming ourselves, but that might a have to wait until some barrier like being uncomfortable with being observed and critiqued by peers are overcome.
I am excited about starting a new phase of my UDL Journey. I am thankful for what I have learned from Kaite, my colleagues, and my research. as I know that it benefited my practice a lot and most importantly, my students.
Reader, I wish you well on your own personal UDL journey.
