planning with udl

Universal Design for Learning in curriculum planning and lesson design

Posted on by

In my last few blogs, I have unpacked UDL principles and UDL thinking. Once people understand the basic principles of UDL they often ask how to use those principles in class and lesson planning.

The quick and easy answer is to consider all your learners, and use the UDL principles throughout every aspect of the design and planning process. But this advice is not always practical enough to be very helpful. In response, Linda Ojala and I have synthesised some earlier work from a variety of sources 1 into a framework to support the planning process.

planning with udl

Download this chart (PDF)

Let’s break this down…

Universal Supports

Does the everyday learning environment provide a range of supports to cater for student variability?

Universal Supports are those things that exist in the learning environment that the teacher does not have to think about or plan for daily, thus saving teachers time and energy.

They are typically supports that are common to several learning activities. Universal Supports include the physical, emotional, and learning environment in the classroom as well as well-established systems and protocols that are so embedded that they are simply ‘the way we do things around here’.

Some examples are:

  • having black pens for your whiteboard rather than green ones that are harder to see
  • daily routines and timetables (and visual displays showing these)
  • having a variety of furniture and spaces to suit different tasks and preferences
  • visuals and posters to support thinking frameworks, problem-solving, task completion etc
  • having digital technologies that students can use to personalise their learning.

Goal or Purpose

Ask: Does everyone know what they are doing and why?
Goals give us direction, so it is important that everyone is clear about the purpose of their learning and what they need to do to achieve success. Articulating goals can be as simple as stating them at the outset of a lesson, or writing them on the board, but should always be expressed in ways that are understood by all.

Group or whole-class goals should allow for student variability so that each student can see how the goal is appropriate for them. Lastly, always make sure that the means of achieving the goal is not confused with the goal itself.

For example, if students are researching content material, the means of doing the task may include reading, but, unless you are purposefully targeting reading, this should not be part of the goal. In this scenario, students who cannot read the material (such as those with dyslexia), can still successfully complete the task by using tools like text-to-speech technology.

How the goal is met should not interfere with achieving the goal of learning that content—just as a GPS doesn’t provide only one route to a destination but may offer alternative routes based on variable factors, such as traffic, non-highway options, and so forth2 .

Teaching approaches and activities

Ask: Will the teaching approaches and options for completing activities work for everyone?
When planning teaching approaches and learning activities, consider if the way you plan to do things will work for each and every student in the class.

For example, the following poster by Richard Wells may make us rethink the effectiveness of whole-class teaching.

the class a teacher talks to

If you know (or think it is likely) at the outset that it won’t work for everyone, ask:

  1. Why are we doing it this way?
  2. Is there another way of approaching the teaching and learning that is more likely to work for everyone?
  3. What extra supports are needed to ensure everyone is successful?

Co-creating with students often provides a powerful alliance as students can identify innovative ways to do things and provide ideas about the things that work for them.

Resources and Materials

Ask: What resources or materials will I need to make it work for everyone?
Supporting resources can help students to know what to do, how to do it and what success looks like.

Resources that support students to undertake the task come in a variety of formats and include:

  1. frameworks that break tasks down into steps
  2. exemplars
  3. visuals to aid comprehension
  4. cheat sheets
  5. word lists
  6. materials or multimedia resources that allow students to learn in a variety of ways.

Ask: Are the resources or materials accessible and usable by everyone?
When designing resources, consider whether they are accessible and usable by all. Worksheets and workbooks are inaccessible for students who need reading support and those who have low vision or who are blind.

By digitising content, students can personalise how they access the material. For example, the text could be read aloud using text-to-speech, enlarged for students who have low vision, or converted to Braille.

Assessment and outputs

Ask: Can the students show what they know in a way that works for them?
For some students, assessments in specific formats or under certain conditions may not provide a good gauge of their learning. A strengths-based approach with flexible assessment conditions can more accurately assess student learning.

For example, if we ask a student who has difficulty using a pen to write to show their learning and comprehension, we may learn very little about their learning and a lot about their writing ability — something it is likely we already knew.

Flexible assessments options can be achieved by:

  1. using a range of formats for evidence of learning (e.g. audio, video, and a variety of multimedia options)
  2. identifying barriers for students, and providing tools such as text-to-speech, voice typing and other reader/writer options to overcome these
  3. provide flexible timing, scheduling, and accommodations to gain the best evidence of learning.

Final word

We hope this framework helps you apply UDL principles in a class or lesson-planning context. In the end, it is really about having that important question at the heart of everything you do: Will it work for everyone?

 

Resources and further information about UDL:

 

1 Including work from CAST, Chrissie Butler, and this article by David Gordon

2 How UDL can get you to personalized learning, eSchool News, David Gordon (CAST).

Image “The class a teacher talks to”, by Richard Wells @EduWells More @Eduwells.com under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

read more
Posted in
te reo: how do you say...

Does Pronunciation Matter? Is it Māori or Maarry?

Posted on by

te reo: how do you say...

Pronunciation of te reo Māori — or any language for that matter — is important, as it can change the meaning. It’s a sign of respect, too. The history behind place names is important, as it locates you, and you see, or find, the history that brought about the name. I can think of several stories relating to the pronunciation of my name; another blog post perhaps?

If you’re someone who would like to improve your pronunciation, there are some practical steps you can take:

  • Ask for help. Most people are willing to assist you if they know you are trying.
  • Make an effort; don’t give up. Make an effort, and don’t give up, as we know change often happens in small steps. Even if you ‘move closer’ to where you would like to be, people will notice the effort and admire it.
  • Find resources. Look for resources to assist you.

I was having a discussion with my colleague Te Mako Orzecki (two names that regularly get mispronounced) about the pronunciation of “Kaikōura” and the multiple ways we have heard it recently in public on T.V. and radio.

Mispronunciation can change the whole meaning of a word. I have been impressed with Radio New Zealand and the effective strategy they use. When I constantly hear te reo throughout and every name is pronounced correctly in te reo Māori, after a while I just ‘hear’ the essence of what is being said and forget whether it is in English or te reo (this is because of the repetition, and because it is mainly introductions and greetings).

I have also noticed that the uptake of macrons in the media is still very slow. Past CORE blogs have discussed the importance of macrons in te reo Māori. If you’re unsure of how to add macrons, follow these simple guides:

Without wanting to get into the many reasons why te reo Māori is mispronounced, Te Mako and I thought we would choose 15 well-known place names and offer a free course to improve your pronunciation. The course involves interactive activities to support te reo Māori pronunciation, and a one-on-one virtual session with Te Mako or Anaru. If you are interested in enrolling in this course, register here:

Ngā Ingoa Wāhi o Aotearoa

Te Mako and I would also like to continue to gather ideas on te reo Māori and kaupapa Māori ideas to support whānau, learners, and staff. If you have any questions or stories to share please leave a comment below or tweet us: @anaruwhite or @OrzeckiT, or use the hashtags #correctPronunciation and #tereo. You can also use #TransformWithCore.

 

He rauemi

read more
Posted in
learning-is-required-feature

Framing a powerful Professional Learning response…

Posted on by

learning is required for teachers

Consider this …. you have gathered a considerable amount of achievement data that shows a particular group of students is underachieving compared to the rest of the school in mathematics.  They have come through the school as a group who have consistently, year after year, shown the same trend. All the students in this group have had Reading Recovery and have continued to receive some sort of teacher aide or other intervention support for much of the five years they have been at school. While this group has been on your radar for some years they have not been the ones who have been referred to any sort of resource teachers or special education; as their teacher last year put it, “They are low, not bad”. They do not have individual education plans (IEPs) or any other personalised programme planning, but they do get extra attention of the teachers in the classroom, as they have all tried to get them achieving more highly.

The group’s achievement in literacy is more variable, with some achieving ‘at’, some ‘below’, and some ‘well below’. Teachers find the group quite frustrating and have tried hard to get them engaged and keep them on-task.

What will you do with this group in 2017? How will you make a difference for them? How will you make sure that you are not trying things that have been already explored and have not worked in the past? What new things could you try this year that WILL make a difference?

This is the challenge, or one that is quite similar, that we often face as leaders and teachers in schools and kura at the beginning of each year. The questions we ask ourselves are about how we can finally make some impact on a group of students who have been resistant in the past.

I invite you to use different strands of the eLearning Planning Framework (eLPF) as a scaffold for things to consider, and to explore the range of professional learning opportunities that CORE Education offers to support a targeted and effective response to the challenges you have in your setting.

For those who are not familiar with it, the eLPF is a self-review framework, which, while it focuses on e-learning specifically, is also a great place to start when considering how to respond to challenges in student achievement.

The framework is split into five strands:

  1. Beyond the Classroom
  2. Leadership and Strategic Direction
  3. Learning and Teaching
  4. Professional Learning
  5. Technologies and Infrastructure

As you consider your student-achievement information alongside the other data you have gathered, the following could be questions to ask yourself or your team in these three areas:

 1.   Beyond the Classroom:

  1. How well do you really know these students? Is the programme they are experiencing sufficiently engaging for them to put in the effort required to improve?
  2. Are families and whānau fully engaged with the school and in ensuring that their children succeed?
  3. Do the family and whānau goals and indicators of success align with those of the students, the staff, and the school?
  4. Have you gathered student voice? Do you know what the students really think? What do they have to contribute to the understandings around their success — what are they actually really good at that can be a platform for success?

2.  Learning and Teaching

  1. What changes in pedagogy have been tried with this group? (Not simply breaking the learning up into smaller and smaller steps and getting a Teacher’s Aide to work with them, but doing things in different ways).
  2. How well do the teachers know and engage with the learners?  Do they know specifically where the ‘blocks/barriers’ are?  Do teachers have the pedagogical and content knowledge to address the specific issues the students have?

3.  Professional Learning

  1. Has this group been a specific focus of professional learning for teachers in the past?  Has this knowledge been shared with the new teachers and everyone else who will need to know?
  2. Has a Professional Learning and Development (PLD) response to their needs included the students and their families?

CORE Education specialises in these very areas, and I’ve seen the benefits many times of what such professional assistance brings. Let me show you the kind of offerings and examples of CORE Education can provide.

We are privileged to have here at CORE some of the most highly skilled facilitators in the country, who understand how to ‘get to the bottom’ of learning challenges, and explore possible ways of supporting teachers and other staff to uncover and address what solutions might be. CORE has a range of PLD options that schools and kura can access to help address just the sorts of scenarios described in this post. For example, We can support your team in customised and bespoke ways and also have face-to-face half-day workshops and 20-week online courses that introduce and extend ideas and understandings that our experience tells us are valuable components of effective, personalised, and sustainable school change. If you need courses on a specific aspect of practice, or the opportunity to work independently or together with a team from your school to extend your practice, there are courses that will meet your needs. Developing and extending your professional learning networks, is an added benefit — one that enables you to draw on, and learn from, the expertise and experience of others.

A new initiative from CORE in 2017 is that we have sets of iPads and Microsoft laptops to support schools prototyping 1:1 programmes. If you would like to know more about accessing these, please contact me. Our Apple, Google and Microsoft accredited and certified teams can help with the effective utilisation of collaborative tools, spaces and pedagogies that support student learning.

Transforming practice and implementing Modern Learning (MLE) and Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) pedagogy for teams and whole staff are CORE Education specialties. As an accredited Ministry of Education PLD provider, this support is accessible through MoE funding — and we can support you with your application.

Having coaching and mentoring support for change-leadership teams and leaders can also be invaluable. That external perspective, and someone to challenge and invite reflection, has been hugely valuable to those we have worked with in the past. During 2016, a colleague and I worked alongside a team in a large primary school, prototyping and leading the implementation of collaborative and ILE pedagogy in their school. Feedback from the team and their principal was that the challenges and provocations provided by the targeted and focused questioning, and the models for change and classroom practice we shared with them, magnified both the pace and effectiveness of the changes they made in their practice and in the effectiveness of their support for others. Through the mentoring they could share and ‘bounce ideas off’ someone else and ensure that the things they were considering were planned, well-thought through, and the most likely to have the biggest impact. A target group, similar in many ways to the one described at the beginning of this post, showed greatly increased engagement and outcomes in their learning as a direct result of the developments in teacher practice. Individual students also often made huge progress in their standardised curriculum outcomes.

As you delve into the data on student achievement, we would encourage you to consider the factors that may sit behind and around the information. Dig into it, and dig deep. Get to the influencing factors for student outcomes, and do not just treat the symptoms of non-success. Seek support where you need it and where it can help accelerate professional learning — and of course, we are here to help!

 

Image credit: Learning is required — by a student (Enokson – Flickr) under CC 2.0

read more
Posted in
baby-cyber-feature

Once upon a time…in 2017

Posted on by

cyber baby

One of the great things about our Christmas and summer holidays being rolled into one, is the opportunity to take a break from our everyday routines, sit back, and have some space to think. We educators find ourselves in the unaccustomed situation of having time to reflect —  and to allow ourselves the luxury of proactive (rather than reactive) thinking.

Time with family and friends, and the consideration of new goals (resolutions) for a new year can also be springboards for bigger-picture thinking — about our work, our society, and the world we are developing for future generations. I’ve been doing just that, and would like to share my ponderings with you…

We are in the privileged position of helping to shape young lives, and that means that alongside providing our young learners with relevant tools, processes, and strategies to engage in new learning, we need to support them to develop the wisdom to use these well. (This might be thought of by some as an old-fashioned word, but the time for its renaissance has arrived).

In New Zealand we are fortunate to have a curriculum that allows for values (deeply-held beliefs) to be woven through school experiences. Students come to understand the social importance of enacting responsibility alongside rights; of practising manaakitanga and whanaungatanga. They are supported to take ownership as they authentically apply these principles and values. This learning comes through their exposure to experiences and ideas — some directed towards them; some sought by them; some that they have come across unexpectedly — formally and informally.

Once upon a time, we educators deliberately designed specific opportunities for our tamariki to discover, to grow understanding, and to form their identities, around such values. We ‘wove spells’ of teacher-directed planning to keep our children within safe (though perhaps stifling) boundaries that kept us and them comfortable. But in this new, exciting, beckoning, expanding digital learning environment where we encourage student agency and foster independent and collaborative exploration of terra incognito (unknown territories) via the internet, we also need to acknowledge that, in the words of the early maps, ‘Here be dragons’. We have a responsibility to furnish our young people with awareness of possible pitfalls. We need to help them to predict, recognise, and avoid the modern-day monsters of the information highway, so that they can bypass the highway robbers of false information, potential time-wasting purposeless screen time, and the dangerous quagmire of negative social media.

We need to find ways to help our akonga/learners to make the best of digital aspects of their lives, whilst independently and automatically:

  • recognising the signs of ‘fake news’/ false websites/ biased information/viral emails etc
  • bursting out of the social media and search engine filter bubbles that only give them more of what they have already experienced, and trap them in a limited digital world
  • breaking free of the tyranny of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and applying their personal filter as to what is worth spending their time attending to
  • finding joy, satisfaction, and balance in real and digital/virtual world activities
  • keeping the human experience in focus rather than automated/robotic ‘convenience’
  • becoming wise enough to work towards a collective better world, whilst nurturing their own needs and aspirations

… and of course, we don’t have a magic wand to do all this. But we do have each other.

So — let’s pull together, modelling how to use our traditional and digital networks safely and effectively, in the best ways that we can learn how, and weave those positive spells. If you’re not sure where to start, why not contact CORE Education? We’ve been doing some thinking….

Safer Internet Day:

You can join in a discussion about internet safety on the Virtual Learning Network (VLN). Safer Internet Day is 7th February 2017.

A few resources:

read more
Posted in
Māori pronunciation

He rerekē tēnei, i tēnā — Each has its own uniqueness

Posted on by

Māori pronunciation
Recently, I have had a lot of discussion with my colleague Te Mako Orzecki about te reo Māori and particularly about the pronunciation of our names.

We both agree on the importance of correct pronunciation, and, as former kaiako, we can think of several occasions when students’ names were mispronounced. I remember how students felt when their names were mispronounced and the disappointing and upsetting reaction from them. On the other hand, a fond memory I have is when a former colleague of mine came to me at the start of the year with her class list and asked me how to pronounce names correctly. A wee bit of preparation can lead to a positive start to a classroom relationship, and we know how important this is.

At times, Te Mako and I have been a bit slack correcting pronunciation, but we have been staunch lately, and this has been well-received with apologies and the desire to be correct.

In our discussions, we have talked about our names and experiences and wanted to share them to highlight the importance of pronunciation and the meaning behind names. I was interested to hear about the experiences and kōrero behind Te Mako’s name.

 

Te Mako and I would like to continue to gather ideas on te reo Māori and kaupapa Māori ideas to support whānau, learners, and staff. If you have any questions or stories to share please leave a comment below, or tweet us: @anaruwhite or @OrzeckiT, or use the hashtags #correctPronunciation and #tereo.

He rauemi

read more
Posted in