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00:00:02

Hi everyone, so Louis Lord Nelson here. I am from the States and I am typically in the East Coast time zone, but today I find myself in Vienna and so my body is going through that little shift of time. So it's great to see all of you and the variety of places that you're logging in from and some of you have completed long, long days in the classroom.

Others of you are in the midst of a holiday and you took this time and others are just you're at whenever you're here. So thank you. Thank you for being here.

00:00:40

We really appreciate this. So Allison and Marta and I have put together this webinar to help you identify a way you can connect with the UDL framework and just some way that you can move forward. Now I was paying attention to the chat and could see that many of you are not so familiar with universal design for learning and then some of you are very familiar.

So this is a fun example of variability, but I want to be sure to explain that this word variability is really key in UDL. It's a vocabulary term. We all know what vocabulary is in lessons, but this one's really important because variability goes beyond the fact that we all learn differently.

00:01:36

This is something that we know. What variability says is that we all learn differently and that's based on context. What's going on around you and what's going on within you directly affects how you perceive, how you are learning.

And because of that, Marta and Allison and I worked to create a webinar that would honour the variability of this group. And so one of the ways that we hope to activate and connect with you is obviously through the chat and Will's done a great job of getting us started there. You've already experienced a poll, so that's a different way.

00:02:20

And then the little frog represents a game that you'll have an opportunity to engage with a little later if you so choose. And so you see the words flexible means, and that just means that we are doing our best within this environment to help you engage with the information, interact with the information in a lot of different ways, in a way that just feels comfortable for you. And then also it's because you might be otherwise occupied.

For all I know, some of you have logged in while you're on a train or riding in a car or hopefully you're not watching while you're driving or you just have the sound on or you're washing dishes or whatever it is, and you aren't going to necessarily participate actively like typing in the chat. It's fine. That is fine.

00:03:09

A big key part of UDL is saying that learners need to engage with the learning in the ways that are best for them within that moment because that's context. I also want to say for those of you who are brand, brand, brand new to UDL and you're like, I just don't even know universal design for learning. I'm going to name two other frameworks that are out there that I'm assuming if you're in education you've probably heard of.

One of them is Bloom's Taxonomy and or Maslow's Hierarchy. So just put a yes or a no in the chat if you've heard of one or both of those. So Bloom's Taxonomy or and or Maslow's.

00:03:54

Okay, they're all flowing in. Okay, just got a couple of no's. In both of those examples, and even for those of you who said no, a framework is something that just helps you centre your thinking around a topic and there's always a goal there.

So like Maslow's Hierarchy is a framework to help us understand the needs of an individual as they kind of go through life. That's the one that starts with you need health and safety and food and just the basics of living, right, and getting all the way to the height of relationships and such. Bloom's Taxonomy is where there was a determined kind of system, I don't want to say levelling, of kind of types of learning that help engage our learners' brains more and more and more.

But a framework doesn't tell you exactly what steps to take. Okay, that is not what a framework is. And UDL is the same thing.

00:04:59

UDL provides you with a lot of information and then you as the educator, you as the designer, the term that we use, are making choices based on what's in that framework. Okay, so I'll just leave it there, but that gives you a taste. We're talking about a framework, all right.

So as Allison and Marta and I share our sections, we're going to start with what our origin story is, kind of how we came into UDL, and that'll help us set the basis for our topic. And then we're all going to talk about from educators' point of view, we hear a lot of, yeah, but for maybe reasons why UDL, I don't know, people have a reaction that maybe it wouldn't work for them, or they want to make these changes, but, okay, so we're coming in from that point of view. All right, so I am going to be talking about the UDL mindsets, as Will said, which, you know, that's definitely a higher level, but it's a way for you to think about what you're already doing to get you prepared to go into that framework more deeply.

00:06:18

All right, so here we go. Back in 2007, I was hired as an executive director of a disability organisation, and when I walked into the office on the first day, there was a bookshelf full of these books, Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age. There were like 60 copies, and I thought, hmm, if there are 60 copies of a book, I probably should read it.

It's probably important, don't you think? Well, that was my introduction, and I was hooked immediately, and the reason being that this book, which is now out of print, actually, because UDL has gone through several iterations, but what this did was it really emphasised why we need to shift our teaching, and it's because of how the brain learns. The brain is always learning, always, always, always learning, but in this book, CAST was doing the best job they knew how to at that moment to communicate why we needed to change how we were teaching. Also, on this screen, you can see an arrow going to a multicoloured box, green and purple and blue.

00:07:37

Well, that's an image of what we call the UDL guidelines. I don't have all the words in there on purpose, but this book came out even before CAST had those guidelines created, so when I came into the world of UDL, we didn't have those guidelines yet, but we were working to help educators adopt an understanding of, again, how the brain works when learning and better ways that we could connect our learners to learning. Well, as I learned more and more about universal design for learning and as this framework, sorry, as this graphic organiser came out, I felt that people were kind of detaching themselves from that original piece of knowledge, and so that's what drove me to work toward what I call the UDL gears, but before we dive into that, what I'd like for you to do is think about two different sunsets, so two different days.

00:08:39

I don't care how far apart they are, but two different sunsets. Just take a minute. I didn't give you a minute, but I'm pretty sure you came up with two sunsets.

All right, now here's my question. Did the two sunsets look identical? Put in the chat yes or no. Did they look identical? Lots of no's.

Flow it in. Never. All right, so it's good.

I'm actually glad to hear that and see that. All right, we've got a few yeses. That's okay.

00:09:24

That's okay, but what we're talking about here is when the sun sets, right, it's because the earth has turned. It's rotated, and we know there's the axis, and that moves around a little bit, but every single day, the sun sets. The same process happens.

The sun goes down, but it looks different, and usually, usually, so some of you are saying yes, and in an odd way, maybe it could happen. Maybe it could happen, but we know that weather and geography really make this change and be different each time, so if you're looking out in the ocean, there's clouds, right? If you're in the mountains, maybe there's fog, maybe there's not. If you're looking across a meadow, you're going to have the breezes.

00:10:20

I mean, all these different things, right, but here's the other part. A sunset looks different because of how you're interacting in that moment. Let me give you an example.

Maybe you're hanging out with somebody on that at that first sunset, and you're just deeply in love. You're just, and you're just feeling so good in the moment. It affects how that sunset looks.

00:10:48

Maybe the next time you see the sunset, and it could potentially kind of be similar, but you're just, you're by yourself, and you're starving. You're just so hungry. You're so hungry.

That's going to affect how that sunset looks to you, so that's context. Now, remember when I talked about variability in the beginning? Yeah, we all learn differently because learning is dramatically, dramatically affected by the context, so I like to use the sunset as an example as to why when you're using this framework, and again, I don't have all the words on this screen. It just can get a little overwhelming when you see the framework with all the words, but how you use the information that's on this piece of paper will change each time.

00:11:45

Let's pretend you decide to use the exact same things that are on this piece of paper in two different classes. It's going to be different. It's going to be different because the context has changed.

Time has moved forward. The students have changed the way they're interacting. I'm just getting you into the flow of it, so I'm hoping that you're all coming along with me.

00:12:07

All right, so because of this, and because of my desire to really hit this point home, I spent time going through the literature, and universal design for learning has been adopted so many places around the world, so like I saw there was at least one person from Singapore, so I spent five years coming over to Singapore and working with the Ministry of Education. It happened to be in the Special Education Division at that time, but then I know that the General Education Division, they've also been talking about this, so anyway, so whether I've been in Singapore, or Uganda, or Canada, or of course in the U.S., or in Mexico, or Malawi, or Cambodia,

00:12:50

all of these different places are now talking about UDL, and there are lots of people publishing, writing about UDL, so I looked in as many places as I could, and what I found was that people talked about mindsets, the way we think, the skills that educators use when they're applying it, and then their practises, and the way I view this is these are all like gears, so on your screen on the left, there's a there's a gif, and it's gears like the inside of a watch, but you have little tines that fit together in a gear, and that's what keeps the simple machine working. Well, if one of those tines is missing, the machine still works, but not as effectively, and not as efficiently, and that's the way I think about the mindsets, the skills, and the practises, along with the guidelines, that when we have all of these different things in place, it's gonna flow really a lot better.

00:13:56

All right, so I see a number of people that aren't able to see the presentation at the moment. I'm going to continue moving forward, because I know this is being recorded, so hopefully when you all receive the recording, you'll be able to go back to this point and time in here, which there may be 10 minutes in. All right, so and then also I'll be putting some information in the chat, so for those of you who can't see really well, you'll be able to interact with this next part.

00:14:30

Okay, so I've got two different ways for you to learn about the mindsets. I've got a game that you can play, and then I also have an individual paper, PDF, that you'll be able to access. Now, here's the deal.

I'm also going to ask you to think about four different questions as you either play the game, or you just want to read the mindsets, because some people are like, I don't want to play a game. That's fine, that's fine. Flexible means, I want to have, give you different opportunities.

So I want you to think about if educators in your past, did you feel like they used these mindsets, and then what did they do that demonstrated that

00:15:12

to you? How did that mindset-driven action benefit you, and then which mindsets drive your actions? So I, like I said, I'm going to be putting into the chat links to let you access the game and or the PDF. Also, if you can see the screen, you can also use the QR code that's there if you'd like, or type in those links. So here we go.

I'm going to drop the information into the chat right now.

00:15:47

I'm going to give you 10 minutes to explore these, either one of those resources. In addition, you can also go out to just plain the Gears, both, well, I think the PDF gives you access to the Gears.

And there are lots of people who have done translations of these for me, lots of colleagues around the world. So before I get going on that, I just want to let you know. So I have the Gears in Japanese and Turkish, friends from Germany, friends from Belgium, Malawi, Japan, oh, I said Japan already, Algeria, Uganda, Cambodia, Korea, and Chile have all done translations for me.

So you'll be able to find these also in languages. So let me go back over

00:16:33

here. I'm going to go ahead and start the timer.

So for 10 minutes, I'd love for you to dig in. You see the Gears image on the web page I sent above, not the slides, unfortunately. Let's see.

Well, I'm going to start the timer. Sorry, Lou, I was just saying, because there was someone who couldn't quite see the Gears, and I was just sending them to the page on your website where you can see the Gears really clearly. Oh, okay.

Lovely. Thank you. All right.

00:17:04

I'm posting this once again. I'm going to darken my screen, the video of me and my sound, just so you can have time. But feel free to chat me up, and I'll respond.

00:17:19

All right. As the clock continues to count down, I just want to express that you'll always have access to this game. You can go back into this webinar and find this game again.

So for those of you who are thinking, oh, my frog went to the wrong lily pad, it's really okay. It's a low, it's not a high stress game. And then also you have access to the PDF, which lists all of them out for you.

So wonderful. Okay. And that's the lovely end of that.

Okay. So the link again, I'll just put that in the chat, and then I'm going to move forward. Okay.

So really quickly,

00:18:03

what I want to do is the yeah, buts. So for example, one of those mindsets is I have high expectations for every learner. And then like in a second, I like the yeah, but they don't do the work.

But one of the things we think about in UDL, that framework, those words that I told you about that are in the guidelines, one of the options would help you think about how do I engage them a little differently? And so here's an example of an AI super prompt. So some of you have not used AI at all, and that is okay. The super prompt is just, it's kind of a big prompt that allows you to personalise things.

And I've given you an example here, not going to read through it because just in a minute, you're going to have the ability to look at an example of the

00:18:52

super prompt filled in. And oh, I forgot to go back and switch this slide because it says I'm teaching Greek literature to my grade 10 learners. We're in Gloucester, Shire.

It shouldn't say English, it should say England. But this is an example of how you can use, as you've learned about UDL and the guidelines a little bit better, more specifics about UDL to help you design. So I just want to give you one minute.

I know it's going to sound really short, but I'm putting into the chat a link to that same page, and you're going to open up what's called a sample from Claude.

00:19:31

This lets you see how AI could help you think about other ways to encourage your students to engage with the learning a little bit better, okay? And why do we do this? Well, it's because we want to help them find relevance in what's being taught. If they're being taught about Greek literature, it might not be so effective for them.

So this says two minutes. I'm just going to give you about a minute to look at that information. So go ahead, go out there, open up that sample,

00:20:02

and see what kind of responses AI gave me.

All right. As I promised, I just want you to have access to that document so later on you could look at that too and think about other ways that you could, how AI, sorry, can help you think of other ways to connect with your learners. For those of you who are having a small screen issue, the stuff in the green box, that's okay.

00:20:33

It just gets into more of the kind of hairy details. You're going to learn more about that stuff from Allison and from Marta. So have no fear.

We will help you go through this. All right. And last but not least, another example.

I believe that every learner should learn alongside their peers, but my school has separate classrooms for students with disabilities. So if you are working from a place of the mind sets, even if you know nothing about what's inside of those guidelines, if you're working from those mind sets, you're going to be flowing through and connecting better with the ways of lesson planning, of setting up your environment, the ways that you teach, so that you'll make things more accessible for all learners. This takes time, it takes effort,

00:21:26

and you just have to kind of start doing some investigation of your own mind sets.

Now the other thing I want to point out is we don't wait until our students are ready. I've worked in schools where it was full inclusion. I've worked in schools where it was separate, like in this example.

We do not ever want to have a readiness model where we're preparing students to come in.

00:21:53

That's not the job. The job is to shift the environment, the way that we're teaching, the way we design our environments.

That's what UDL is all about. It's about helping us discover ways that we can change how we're teaching and the way we design our environments. So like I said, I'm like starting this game off for you, and Allison and Marta are going to keep moving this forward for you.

So as I close out, choose one of these questions that you would like to respond to in the chat. What's one mindset shift that resonated most with you today and why? Which of these

00:22:30

mindsets feel most natural to you already, which feels like the biggest stretch, or what surprised you most? So I'm going to go ahead and close out as you are bringing in your ideas in the chat. So as I said, thank you very much.

I really appreciate this. I would love to meet all of you someday, but if not, you have access to my website now. You feel free to go through there and look

00:22:56

at whatever you would like.

I'm going to go ahead, close down my camera, and close down my share so that Allison can come in. Thank you so very much.