Horizons 2009 ~ CUE BC Presentation ~ What is UDL?

CUE BC 2009 - UDL_1

We had five “learning intentions” for participants in this presentation.

  1. To gain an understanding of UDL
  2. To understand why it is important that we understand and embrace UDL in our classrooms now as we are eager to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations, and as we need to make decisions about the types of technology we purchase and the pedagogy that drives it’s use.
  3. That UDL is not about the technology.
  4. That UDL is a subtle shift in paradigm that is having a profound impact on learners
  5. That creating Universally Designed schools and classrooms is a journey into which we have taken our first steps with a long way to go…

Continue reading Horizons 2009 ~ CUE BC Presentation ~ What is UDL?

Back to school advertisements…

Back to school advertisements make me crazy!!! The Staples’ – “Its the most wonderful time of the year” advertisement is running continuously. The picture of those two children dreading school makes me sad. (Wow – the commercial is on again – second time since I started writing this post/rant). I so want school not to be something they dread –  a bitter pill – nobody wants to take it but it is good for you so you must. The father skipping through the store so gleeful about sending the kids off – what are we saying to our kids??? (There it is again!! – granted it is 1:54 am so I am writing slowly but reeeaaally). Reality is that many kids do dread school – I really believe we can do better than this for our kids. As a parent I get that it is nice to have time away from the kids but could this not be something we keep to ourselves? I get that this commercial is intended to be cute and make people smile but it really just makes me sad.

Ableism: My thoughts 1 year later…

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2009

Last January I blogged about my reflections following reading: New Directions in Education: Eliminating Ableism in Policy and Practice by Thomas Hehir. The following thoughts stuck with me and guided my practice over the past year.

  • Hehir defines ableism as ” deeply held negative attitudes toward disability that are analogous to racism”.

Then I looked up “racism” according to Merriam-Webster racism is:

UDL Presentation at the CASE Spring Conference

Today I spoke at the CASE (Council of Administrators of Special Education) conference. I was thrilled to have been asked to be a part of this conference and very much enjoyed sharing the exciting things that have been happening in Coquitlam. I based most of what I said on my previous blog posts “How UDL has changed my job” post and my “UDL Success” post. The most important messages I wanted to share during this presentation were:

  • Our appreciation and thanks to the BC Ministry of Education and to SET BC for their role in bringing the UDL movement to BC. We are very excited to be a part of this shift in paradigm.
  • That this project is perfectly timed with a change in the questions educators are asking about technology. In the past educators questioned “why” and “should we” use technology in education. Now educators are asking “what?” and “how?”. Universal Design for Learning provides a framework within which teachers can make informed decisions about the use of technological tools to help students succeed at school
  • The amazing progress our students have made in gaining reading skills since we began the project, and what we believe to be the reason for their success.

I uploaded the presentation slides to SlideShare:

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The blogs / web resources I referred to in my presentation were:

UDL Success!!!

The process of transforming the way we work with our students is gradual. One of the first things we have been working on is moving away from the ‘resource room’ model where kids who are not reading/writing at grade level miss classroom instruction to be involved in extra instruction to work on their areas of weakness. We continued pulling kids but only in short-term focus groups set up for a specific purpose (this term it was phonemic awareness). Some kids who are on our support list did not need this group so the only support they received was to monitor their progress. Interesting thing – all of the kids who received in-class only support made great progress since their last assessment. Below are my musings about why this may have happened…

Continue reading UDL Success!!!

Learning Intentions – What are we really teaching?

As a staff we decided that one of the first things we would do when we began to design Universally Designed lessons was to ensure that we were clearly stating our Learning Intention to our students at the beginning of each lesson. Some of our teachers now write the learning intention for each of their lessons beside their daily agenda on their board. Teachers who are using Interactive Whiteboards build their first slide as their learning intention slide. I wanted to share two things I have discovered as a result of doing this:

My first discovery is a bit embarrassing but here goes… I always thought (assumed) what I was teaching was obvious. I wasn’t convinced that simply stating the learning intention would make a great deal of difference. One day I was teaching phonemic awareness to a small group but hadn’t planned ahead to discuss the learning intention. On the fly I decided to do this. One problem… I quickly realized that I was unable to articulate it in a way that would make sense to my students. I realized at that moment that the lesson I had planned did not have a clear intention, that I was actually intending to teach my students a whole bunch of things. Being that I work with students with learning disabilities who have not been able to gain phonemic awareness from classroom lessons, I instantly knew this could not go well. This was the turning point for me in my understanding of backward design – beginning with the end in mind. After all – how can we expect to get to our destination if we are not clear about where we are going. 

My second discovery has been about how clearly articulated learning intentions make it easier to make adaptations for students when necessary. One of our students has autism. He is currently on an adapted program (he is working towards the same learning outcomes as his classmates but may need to learn and show his understanding differently). Adaptations have been far easier since his teacher has begun adding the learning intention to the classroom agenda. When I walked in to work with this student the other day the class was working on a math sheet. Because I had missed the lesson, the worksheet the students were using made no sense to me. Being that this student is not currently able to make sense of verbal instructions, the lesson had probably not have made much sense to him either. Luckily the learning intention was to ‘make things balance’. I quickly found a balance scale and some cubes and got him involved in adding cubes into the baskets until the scales balanced. His activity looked quite different from his classmates’ activity, but he was still working towards the same learning intention. Had the learning intention not have been stated I would have had difficulty determining an appropriate adaptation. In an attempt to accommodate this student I may have selected a different aspect of the task to focus on. 

In a perfect UDL world the teacher and I would have met prior to the lesson, discussed the activity, determined the barriers within the lesson for learners including this one, and found ways to remove the barriers. In our world where on-the-fly happens more often than we care to admit, the simple act of articulating the learning intention makes a huge difference for our learners.