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00:00:02

Hi, everyone. I'm Alison Posey, and it's so nice to be with you all today. I am here on the east coast of the United States, just outside of Boston.

I'm seeing folks from all around the world. It's just amazing. I can't even tell you, amazing to get to all be here together.

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So I'm going to continue a little bit of what Louis was sharing. I'm going to tell you a couple stories and invite some collaboration as we continue to think about how we design for all learners. I do want to make sure, if I could just do a quick check, are you all able to see my screen? I'm not seeing my screen.

Yes. Okay. You all are amazing.

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Thank you so much. So I know Louis was sharing with you all about mindsets, and that is going to lead me to talk about one of my favourite things, which is the learning brain. And my story about how I came to Universal Design for Learning, UDL, is that I was a science teacher.

I taught high school science, for those of you who teach science, hello. And one year I had a student who I still think about. You know how you have those students who just kind of stick with you for years and years.

So I see some people already here. Another Allison from Boston. Hello.

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So I had this student who had read the entire textbook, and we had a college level textbook. He read the entire textbook in the first couple weeks of class. And at first I didn't really believe him.

And then we would talk about things and he would ask questions. And I would think, oh my goodness, he really read the textbook and he is really thinking about these deep ideas. But he never turned in assignments.

And when I got his first test, it was completely blank. And it just really bothered me because I knew he knew all of this information,

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but he wasn't showing it, right? He wasn't sharing it on the tests. And then I found out later from his parent that he was failing several of his classes.

He was very depressed and was at risk of dropping out of high school. And it just really broke my heart because I didn't know it, right? I didn't see it as his educator, as his teacher. So I decided to go back to school.

I went to graduate school as Will shared at the very beginning in an amazing programme called Mind,

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Brain, and Education, where I really tried to think about how the neuroscience could help us inform our instructional practise as teachers. And that's where I learned about universal design for learning. And I have been hooked ever since.

That has been over 14 years now. And here we are today talking about universal design for learning. So I'm going to bring some brain science.

I'm going to bring some stories. And I want to start with a question for you all. And that is, what do brains and shoes and even UDL have in common? And I'll let you take just a few moments to think about

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shoes, brains, and UDL.

Oh, my gosh. Some of you right away are saying some great things. Variety, laces, left and right, being in someone's shoes.

Oh, you all are amazing. These are great answers. They're in use.

They are different and colourful. Yes. Diversity, models, and styles.

Oh, my gosh. You all are amazing. Oh, someone said something.

Okay. Yes. These are so good.

These are so good. So now I have not met, I don't think I've met any of you. Maybe I have.

But yes, many of you are getting exactly to the point. And I'm going to guess we don't wear the same size shoe. I have a tiny shoe.

I have a little tiny size 6 in the U.S.,

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size 36 in other shoe sizes, depending on how you label your shoes. And I were to imagine, I'm the hiker, as you all remember from the intros. If we were to go hiking and I'm going to get a shoe, so we all have hiking shoes to go hiking, I wouldn't get us the same size shoe, right? I'm just going to, you know, I've never met you.

Maybe we all have a small size 36 shoe. But if you want to even put your shoe size in the chat, we might start to see there's some variability in our shoe sizes, right? Oh, we have another 36. We have a couple small feet.

Some are 43s. Yes, all different sizes, right? Here is variability

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in our shoe size. And we see the differences in our feet, right? I mean, I'm not going to ask us all to hold up our feet, but we would be able to very easily, we look around, we can see the differences in our feet.

So we design different size shoes, but it's harder to see our brains, right? They're enclosed in our skulls and we have, you know, glasses and hair and whatever, hats. We can't see our brains, but the variability is there. And I worry that often we don't recognise the variability in our brains.

And we start to make an assumption that students are going to do things in the same way at more or less the same time. And the thing is, the thing that neuroscience over and over and over again, and almost every article you find about brain science is there's variability. Each brain is as unique as our fingerprints.

And I really like this one.

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Each brain is as unique as snowflakes. As we start to come into winter here in the northern hemisphere, I'm starting to think more and more about snow.

Each brain is as unique as a snowflake. And our brains will grow and change based on how we're interacting with the environments. But so often in our schools, we design our lesson goals, our assessments, the materials we use in the same way.

And we have students doing the same thing at the same time. And it would be like

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getting the same size shoe to go on a hike, and then being surprised that it just isn't very comfortable or working for very many of us. So we know our brains are different, as different as our foot sizes.

And so this is where UDL comes in. UDL, shoes, and brains, they're all about variability.

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Many of you noted that, and actually many of you noted it in very beautiful ways.

And UDL is a tool that's going to help us pick out the right size shoe, or pick out and design the lesson, the goal, the materials, the assessments, without even having to meet our students. We're going to, UDL is going to help us anticipate the variability of our learners, so that then when we meet our students, they're able to work with us. And we're able to even be more intentional in the way that

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we design to make sure their brains get what they need to do these high-level goals that we have.

And so to get at that, so thank you for engaging me and indulging me a little bit in that analogy of shoes and brains. I know it's a little silly, but that's a really helpful way that I think about, we don't always see that variability in our brains. And if we did, oh my gosh, we would design so differently, right? So I'm going to jump here into a story, and thank you all for some of the little feedback, and I'm seeing the hearts and the things flying, so I very much appreciate those reactions.

I'm going to share a story about a student that I hope will inspire you to maybe

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think about one of your own students, maybe think about your own experience in school, maybe even think about if you have children, one of your own children or neighbours or nieces or nephews. So Maya is a seven-year-old girl. She has two dogs and several cats.

She loves, loves, loves her pets. She's super sensitive. She's an amazing swimmer, and she loves to tell imaginative stories.

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And I have an image on the slide here of Maya. She has gunk all over her hands. She's very tactile.

She loves to, you know, get into the Play-Doh and muck about in the mud. And so she just, she has a lot of energy, but she hates going to school. She hates it, and she's often a little teary and quiet when she's dropped off.

And during school, the teacher often gets frustrated because she doesn't always follow directions. She's often daydreaming. Maybe she's daydreaming about those stories she's telling or her pets or her swimming.

And the teacher also will get frustrated because she'll often come over and tug on the teacher's sleeve and say, you know, what are we going to do next? What are we going to do next?

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And that, you know, gets a little exhausting when you have a lot of students and you have a lot of things going on. And she's a mover, this girl. She likes to move around even when she should sit still.

So like during reading time or direct instruction, she is moving around. Oh my gosh, and I love this comment in the chat. I may have been Maya once.

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Yes, that completely resonates with me too, right? So she's a mover. And so that's really, you know, that can be really frustrating for other students in the classroom and for the teacher. But she recently got in trouble actually for biting another student, which just, you know, is not okay, right? We have to draw lines and boundaries.

And so they had to have a meeting with the family to just learn a little more and see how we could, you know, address the situation. And the teachers learned, you know, something even more disheartening is that Maya tends to not be invited to play dates or birthday parties outside of school. She just really isn't having a whole lot of friends.

And she's internalising that she's the problem at school and not very many people like her. And so, yeah, some of you are noting, you know, that you know students like Maya. So I just invite you to imagine for a moment you're

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Maya's teacher and you're thinking about all of this.

What are some strategies that you might do to try to get into this situation? And I'll give you, some of you have already started adding ideas. So what are some ideas we can use for Maya? I love this using pets as themes, videos. Oh, I don't know what TPR are.

Many of you have you said are noting TPR. Music. Love it.

Lots of fun ideas, right? Oh, thank you. Total physical response. Oh my goodness.

Yes. And for those of you who need that, please move around now during this session. Writing poems, being a teacher herself, dance, role-playing.

Oh, these are beautiful answers. Yes. Group work.

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Oh, more TPR. I love it. Storytelling, sensory games.

This is wonderful. So keep the ideas coming. And so here are a couple ideas that these teachers did.

Again, there's no right or wrong. These are just some ideas. You can see if any resonate, any are things you do.

But they gave her incentives like stickers to use, or stickers she could get at the end of the day if her behaviour was good. She was given her own seat in the back of the room so she could move around and not distract others. They gave her a feelings journal that she could wear around her neck to write down how she was feeling to try to get her to still, if you have anger or frustration, you often have

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to do something with that energy.

So they gave her a journal to write in. And this little page shows words like mad, angry, sad, not happy. It just kind of breaks your heart.

But they were, again, trying to get her to be more productive with her feelings by taking a more productive action with the journal. They made a calm down area in the room where she could go if she needed. And there's an image of this on the slide.

It's basically a three panel poster made out of just cardboard. And it had pictures, kind of cartoon pictures of yoga moves and breathing activities and feeling words that she could use. And they gave her a visual schedule to try to help her

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know what is coming next, right? So the teachers were optimistic, and these were words that they used, that she can get better with this support, that she can get better.

And I'm just going to invite you to reflect for a moment about what resonates about this story, what you're wondering about this story, and what is UDL about this example, or what's maybe not UDL about this example. There are mayas in every class, aren't there? And many of you are noting, I don't like that she can get better. Yes.

Thank you for picking up on that. So it's hard to say a simple yes or no about UDL, right? UDL is a mindset, as Louie was sharing, and I know Marta will also talk about with you all. UDL is a mindset.

And it's a mindset that frames barriers in the environment, not in the student. So just the fact that it was phrased as like Maya has the problem, right? She did turn out to have ADHD when she was tested. Many of you are not surprised to hear that.

But

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the framing of Maya being the problem is not UDL, right? With UDL, we start thinking about where are barriers in the environment that we can reduce? Because Maya brings variability to the classroom, right? All this variability. We can anticipate variability in emotion, variability in attention, variability in our movement, right? And the energy that we have. And from day to day, from moment to moment, it's going to differ.

So we know there's going to be this variability. So instead of thinking about what can we do to help Maya, UDL is going to shift it, right? UDL is going to shift it to think about how can we change the classroom? How can we change the environment, right? And so a lot of the strategies we might use are still the same, but we're not going to think about those in terms of, oh, we'll give them to a student once a problem happens. We instead with UDL think about we know there's going to be this variability.

How can we design from the beginning, maybe with flexible seating, maybe with visual schedules, maybe with having quiet spaces or movement spaces

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in the room, maybe opportunities to self-reflect on how we did during a day. And we don't just make these options for one student, but we open them up for any student to be able to use as they need, right, in the environment. And yes, and we want to make sure that we're being respectful of each other as we're doing some of these different things.

So as I might need to move a little and stretch, I also don't want to disrupt my neighbour who might be needing more quiet time, right? So when we have classrooms that are designed for variability and students aren't always doing the same thing at the same time, we'll need to establish some cultural norms,

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right, to make sure that we're able to continue to do the learning, but recognise that we're going to do them in slightly different ways. So yes, we're shifting the perspective, very well shared in the chat, from one student to thinking about the design of the environment. And I know many of you aren't going to want to do the options I suggested.

And with UDL, you don't have to do all these things. Sometimes, and a lot of times, just one option is enough, right? Just a plus one, we sometimes call it. But what's UDL about classrooms and lessons is this approach of thinking about the design for flexibility from the beginning to get to the goals of the lesson.

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And I will tell you the secret about UDL is in the goals. And so goals, goals, goals will drive the different decisions that you end up making, right? And so we can start to use UDL to spark ideas, to help us design for variability in our classrooms, in the materials we're using, in the methods we're using. And so UDL, you never want to do all of these things, but you can do a plus one.

And so if you have a class of over 30, right, you might think of one thing, where is your biggest pinch point? Where is the thing that's most challenging? If you have a class that's a lot of energy, maybe the thing you go after is flexible spaces for movement, right? So this is

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again where UDL isn't going to be one thing, but it's going to be reducing barriers depending on your context. And I know Louie talked a little bit about how important that context is. So we hope these guidelines, and again, we don't want these, the goal right now is not for you to read all of these UDL guidelines, but again, just to see that this is the graphic organiser that's used in UDL to help spark ideas for what we might do in our classrooms, to help reduce barriers and support that variability of learners.

And I'll give you an example, another example here in a moment, but sometimes this UDL approach may seem like it's not too different from what we are already doing, right? We already add an option for students. We do that already. But after

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years and years of applying universal design for learning with educators around the world, I've actually found that this unlearning, we actually have to unlearn some of our tried and true practises in order to truly apply UDL.

So my colleague Katie Novak and I developed this unlearning cycle. We actually wrote a whole book about it because we had so much, we ended up having so much thinking about the process used to apply UDL into your context. And I hope it's, we just hope it's a helpful tool, again, to give us a common language and common process to think about the different ways that we take our tried and true practises, those things we always do as educators, and those things that we always do as educators, and just reflect on how we might shift the design slightly, right? Just maybe a plus one in order to, again, get to those high expectations and goals.

And so, yes, to truly apply UDL, we often have to unlearn some of those

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tried and true practises. So you might think about, oh, yes, I know, I don't actually want you all to read all the words in the cycle. That's beyond the scope of this webinar.

And I've actually put all the steps in the bullets. So the bullets are saying what's in the cycle. So you don't have to worry about trying to read those tiny things.

I've given you two representations of the information. I'm going to say it. It's in the bullets.

And it's, yeah, you can, you know, definitely check out the unlearning cycle and other times if you want it. But here they are, here are the steps.

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So the first thing you want to do is think of one of your tried and true practises.

Maybe it's how you assign homework, or how you do reading stations, or how you call on students. So I thought we could just do a really simple example today and think about how, I'll just think about my own practise, how I call on students. Often I will say something out loud, verbally, and students can raise their hand, and then I call on them, and they say the answer.

So that's my tried and true. Then I want to think about the goal of that tried and true practise. What am I actually trying to do in that moment? Yes, it's to get students to participate.

It's to get students to know the right answer. So we want to get really clear on the goal. So let's just say my goal for a class,

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for calling on students, is to try to get students to participate.

I really want students to participate in class. I'm going to make that my goal. Then we can start to anticipate some of the variability.

Some students are going to love to share verbally. They're going to raise their hand a lot, even if they don't know the answer, right? Other students might process information a little bit slower and not raise their hand as quickly. Some students might not ever really want to participate verbally for whatever reason, and that's where we get at variability, right? So we think of our tried and true technique.

We really identify the goal of what we're doing, and then we

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recognise there's going to be this variability, right? The different ways. Some of you love to participate in the chat. Some of you maybe didn't.

Again, you're thinking about the goal. So then, this is where we get to UDL. UDL, we can get those UDL guidelines out, and we can start thinking about ways that we can design for engagement.

Maybe we have students turn and talk. Then we have more students participating at a time, and I'm getting, you know, a little more participation. Maybe we could zoom into the UDL guidelines on action and expression and think even more about, I mean, maybe students could write their ideas on a piece of paper, and they don't even have to say it verbally.

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Maybe they could have a little chalkboard that they could write together with a partner, right? Then I'm getting more at participation because I'm allowing more than one way for students to participate, and maybe they still can raise their hand. I just could provide one other way for them to participate. We'll still hold those high expectations for all learners and give them some agency to get to make a choice in how they participate.

So this is a little more aligned to UDL, where you know the goal, you anticipate the variability that you know we're all going to have, especially when you have 30 plus more students, right? You know you're going to have that variability, and then you start with that engagement. What might be one little thing we could do to make this thing a little more flexible, but really get at that high-level goal?

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And I'm telling you, it can feel a little scary because sometimes we have done these things, like the way I did class participation was how I had done it for years. And so to start shifting, it felt different for me, and it felt different for the students.

But what I started to observe in terms of student participation changed my approach, right? It made me know this is worth doing. So keep grounding in what you're observing in your students. Are you getting the outcomes you want? Are you getting more of the learning that you want? Was I getting more of the participation I want? Then that's the data you use to help really be reflective about your instructional practises

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and that design.

So we promised that we would give you a yeah but moment, and one of the yeah buts that I hear a lot of times when I'm sharing about UDL is that it sounds like it might take a lot more time to design this way. And honestly, the answer is yes. It will take more time.

Most of the time it takes a little more time to design and add an option in on the front end. Like it would take me a little more time to order all the different shoe sizes instead of just saying, you know, I want all of this one size shoe. It's going to take a little more time on the front end.

But what we

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found again, and this is why I'm still in this work over 15 years later, is that when it's planned, the lesson moves and more students have what they need from the very beginning. And yes, I'm seeing there that, oh there was a question I thought in the, and I am seeing here some students still, you still, there's no guarantee with UDL that you're going to get every student all the time. I wish I had a magic tool for that, but I've found with UDL and this approach again kind of using that unlearning cycle of thinking about the tried and true practise, the true goal of it, anticipating the variability, and then really going after that engagement and some flexibility is that we do start to reach a little more of the students, right? And that's worth it.

It's totally worth it. It starts to get contagious. So I know that it is time to bring my colleague Marta on, but I do want to give you a chance to just reflect for a moment on what we shared today, what you, you know,

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what you let me share with you today.

So maybe, maybe you want to think about one way you could design for variability. We talked about that story of Maya and some ideas to just, again, get the classroom, get your materials ready for the variability of students. Maybe you want to think about one of your tried and true teaching practises.

Like I thought about student participation and the way I do that. Maybe you want to think about one of your teaching practises, or maybe you just want to go back and think about shoes and brains and variability and and something with that maybe resonated. So I'll give you a moment to just choose one of

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the following to respond to.

What's a way you could design or think about a teaching practise or something that resonated? And I love this comment in the chat. It takes time, but the rewards are worth it. That's just so beautifully shared.

Thank you for noting that. I can't wait to see your, your ideas in the chat here. Oh, I'm glad that the participation idea resonated.

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Yes, and you can think outside of the box. Sometimes it's just a little plus one. Yes, we want to walk far in the shoes.

That is beautiful. Yes. It takes time and then it does turn into a routine.

Variety. Yes, using the songs and poems and different ways to express. I agree.

Turn and talks are so powerful. You all, thank you so much for your time today. I'm just so honoured to get to share a little story, share my story about UDL, share a story about a student in a real classroom here in the Boston area.

And thank you all so much for your time. I'm going to,

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I'm so, so happy to introduce my colleague, Marta. Hello.

And I will turn it over to you. You all have a great time with her and thank you so much for all your time. I appreciate you each.