#327 – Universal Design for Learning: Engagement

#327 — Universal Design for Learning: Engagement

AVID Open Access
10 min

Keywords
students, learning, section, udl, offer, options, design, tools, learners, engagement, provide, designing, digital, support, autonomy, reflection, collaboration, focus, feedback, explore

Paul Beckermann  0:01  

Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckermann.

Transition Music  0:06  

Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? So, what’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann  0:16  

The topic of today’s podcast is Universal Design for Learning: Engagement. Last week, I took a big picture look at the release of the new Universal Design for Learning, or UDL Guidelines, version 3.0. Today, I’m starting a series of episodes where I’ll take a deeper dive into the three main sections of those guidelines. Even with this more limited focus, I won’t be able to touch on all the great ideas in the document, but I hope that what I do present will give you some actionable strategies for getting started on your own UDL journey, and maybe pique your interest enough that you’ll head on over to the CAST website and explore the guidelines more deeply on your own.

Today’s focus is on the first column of the UDL Graphic Organizer: Design Multiple Means of Engagement. The title calls out three key parts of this section. Design. This calls attention to the fact that achieving these goals requires attention to how we design learning. The words “Multiple Means” highlights a focus on providing options for our learners. We should not engage students in just one way. We should provide multiple means for them to engage. And the last part is the key focus area, “Engagement.” As learning designers, we must consider how students will engage in the learning. In my exploration of the engagement section, I’ll break down each of the three sub-components, explain how that component impacts instructional design, and provide you with some digital tools and strategies that you can use to achieve the goals in that section.

Transition Music  1:52  

Let’s, let’s count it. Let’s count it. Let’s count it down.

Paul Beckermann  1:55  

Number one, the first section addresses access to the learning and calls on us as educators to design options that welcome interests and identities. The introduction to this section states that creating a learning environment that welcomes learners’ whole selves is a critical step in ensuring learners are able to address and engage with the learning process. To do this, we need to allow students choice and autonomy in the learning experience, while making sure that we optimize relevance, value, and authenticity. These do go hand-in-hand, since one size will never fit all interests in our classrooms. Each student is unique. By providing choice and autonomy in the learning process, students can find connections that matter to them. This component also calls out the need for joy and play in the learning process. I love that. You know, for students to fully engage learning needs to provide some degree of joy, and play is one of the options of getting there. Finally, we need to address biases, threats, and distractions, so the learning space feels safe to all learners and emboldens them to take risks and try new things. While there are many ways to address this area of design, let me offer a couple ideas to help you get started. The first option is to consider using a choice board. Choice boards work great when designing blended learning experiences that offer a blend of offline and online activities for students to choose from. It’s important that all the activities on the choice board align to the learning targets, but by offering a choice board, you can give students a greater degree of choice and autonomy. They get to pick the learning activities that resonate the most with them, making the learning more personalized and motivating. The second option I’d offer is to design learning as a project-based learning experience. If you’re new to project-based learning, I’d recommend checking out the website, PBLworks.org, to learn more. Essentially, a project-based learning experience asks students to identify and solve a problem relevant to a learning target. Because students have a great degree of involvement in choosing the path that they will take to address that learning outcome, they have a great degree of choice and autonomy, which can really increase their level of interest in the process and allow them a pathway that resonates with them personally.

Number two, the second section focuses on supporting effort and persistence for students as they engage in the learning. This is so important because we want our students to develop grit and work through the challenges that they face in life, and because our students may not be ready to do this on their own, we need to consider how we can provide them some support in the process. The introduction to this section states to sustain effort and persistence, effective learning designs consider options for creating goals that are meaningful and purposeful, offering scaffolds and supports in service of challenging goals, fostering collaboration and belonging, and offering ongoing, action-oriented feedback. A couple aspects of this section really stand out for me. The first is the focus on community and collaboration. I love this because the more we foster connection amongst our students, the more apt they will be to support each other. This can be done using any of your favorite community building activities, and it’s also done by how you design the learning experiences themselves. If you can set up the learning activity to require collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning, you will be building this community aspect into the learning experience. Another part that resonates a lot with me is to offer action-oriented feedback. Feedback is critical if we want students to learn from their trials and efforts, and there are a few conditions to keep in mind in order to make that feedback action-oriented. First, make sure it’s frequent, timely, and specific. And second, make sure it is substantive and informative, rather than comparative or competitive. You want students to look at their own performance and how it can be improved, rather than how they’re compared to their classmates. While this section focuses mostly on the human element of learning, technology can be effectively integrated in a couple ways. First, when designing the collaborative learning experience, consider having students create together, using some form of technology. Many digital creation tools allow for collaboration with multiple students working on the same document or creation at once. If students are sharing a device, be sure that they’re required to take turns being the driver at the keyboard or at the tablet, and also build in requirements for all members to be providing input at some point in the process. Second, you may want to explore some of the new AI tools that can provide students with feedback on their work. MagicSchool and SchoolAI both offer student-facing tools where you can customize a student AI-feedback experience. These tools are still in their infancy, but they offer great potential in the area of feedback. I’d pay attention to these as things move forward.

And number three, the third section, targets the area of executive function and calls for designing options for maximizing emotional capacity. This involves helping students recognize emotions, manage thoughts and behaviors and empathize with others. The idea from this section that seems most actionable to me is to promote individual and collective reflection opportunities. Not all students will have the skills to do this on their own, so it can be very important for teachers to intentionally design reflection opportunities, and because students learn and reflect in different ways, it’s also important to offer choice and options here, as well. While this type of reflection can and should offer offline options, there are a few digital options you might want to consider, as well. The first is to use a survey tool, something like Google or Microsoft Forms. This probably works best for individual self-reflection, but you could consider having groups complete a survey collaboratively, if you want. If it’s a collaborative survey, you might consider including spaces in the form for each member to offer feedback individually, while also having an area for a group entry. This can help to get to both individual and collective reflection while giving you, the teacher, valuable insights and data. Another way you could use tech is to design printed or digital graphic organizers that allow students to represent how they’re feeling in a variety of ways. For younger learners, I could see using an image of a mountain for each skill area, and then having students move their personal climber up the side of the mountain as they grow and develop their skill. It’s a very visual representation of how they’re growing. For older students, it might be a more stripped down form of a scale where they place themselves on a continuum. If it’s digital, there might be options for sharing thoughts and feelings using a variety of media, such as text, audio, video, links, and more. Digital tools can provide lots of options in that area.

As I mentioned earlier, while this is a bit of a deeper dive into designing multiple means of engagement, it’s not a comprehensive list of ideas. I encourage you to review the UDL Guidelines on the CAST website and explore the Engagement section for yourself. As you do, consider the tools and strategies that you already have in your teacher toolkit and reimagine ways that those tools and strategies might offer multiple means of engagement for access, support, and the development of executive function skills.

To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, visit AvidOpenAccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to review our podcast episodes from UDL experts like Dr. Sam Johnston and Christine Fox from CAST, as well as renowned author and consultant, Dr. Katie Novak. And, of course, be sure to join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening. Take care and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.