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Many educators noted concerns about how the time to create lessons to meet the individual needs of all their students would be prohibitive-in terms of the amount of resources, time for planning and time to execute in a class period. As I reviewed these concerns, I realized that they must of have been thinking of Differentiated Instruction rather than UDL. SOLUTION: More PD and exemplars are needed to fully illustrate how providing a buffet of resources rather than individualized plates for each student is how UDL will happen successfully.
Let's start with a video!
https://youtu.be/iY9PecIWcWE
Katie Novak talks about how providing UDL is like providing students with a buffet!
Some teachers were concerned that
Many educators voiced concerns about having everyone "be on board." They recognize that this will be hard work, but it will be harder if not everyone believes in the work and continues with what they have always done.
Solution: Leadership at Normandin is dedicated to establish a UDL culture. We are working towards providing a number of opportunities for staff to receive PD and support through modeling, coaching and constant messaging. We are in the process of saturating our school with a UDL culture (and this is just year one). It is catching on, and our voluntary PDs are very well attended! I think a barrier that some teachers have to engaging in the work is that they haven't experienced a UDL success yet. Once they do, they will also start to believe and may begin to engage in the more of the work. Selecting one of the guidelines to focus on to start with might be a good place to start.
As mentioned before, many times to various questions, educators simply stated they needed to understand UDL more. They couldn't yet see how it would work in their content, or in their resource room, or in their co-teach class. Luckily, we are currently engaging in PD to address all of the those areas!
Solution: We will continue to commit to more PD and provide support whenever possible. We all continue (including me) to become more fluent in the UDL mindset.
Many educators recognize that in order to provide students with the ability to have choices in their materials, in their assessments and in their classroom in general, teachers can see that we need time to consider barriers and the resources to address them.
Solution: We are identifying low tech ways that some of these things can be addressed (creating anchor charts, providing more copy paper to have resources available, purchased classroom libraries and looking at our supply ordering to maximize resources for teaching tools) but have also been investing in technology for students (going one-to-one with Chromebooks for next year, and identifying a varitey of online tools and platforms to provide students with a varitey of ways to demonstrate their learning) as well as investing in teacher technology (short-throw projectors for as many classrooms as we can afford to outfit).
We are also looking at our PLC time and how we can better use it to provide support around lesson planning, strategy trouble-shooting and other types of support.
Teachers realized that one of the biggest barriers to implementing UDL is their lack of knowledge and experience and simply asked for patience and time from admin. Teachers asked for support through modelling, continued PD, and coaching.
Solution: Leadership has asked that teachers start small and begin to start planning UDL strategies by choosing one area of the guidelines and building from there. We've also tried to message to them that if they try a strategy and it doesn't go well, we will celebrate that they are engaging in the work and support them to be better. So many teachers fear receiving a negative evaluation and worry about trying new strategies. This is a barrier the admin team is working on constantly.
This was a very good exercise to better learn about staff needs through their perceived barriers. It will help in targeting future PD to help our staff better understand how to deliver UDL guidelines. I learned that barriers exist in the following forms: