.: Group and UDL: What I do, What I could change.

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.

SOURCES:

Group and UDL: What I do, What I could change.

No comments:

Post a Comment