March UDL Newsletter

Each month this newsletter will 1) highlight critical UDL practices, 2) make connections to the UDL guidelines, 3) connect you with great tools and resources, 4) share some ways schools are putting this practice into action and 5) offer additional approaches to utilize this highlighted practice.

Do you want to capture feedback, reflection, and discussion that will help your learners monitor progress towards their goal?

Try Flip! Flip's allows users to add comments to videos. You can also watch videos and edit the captions side by side. These features allow users to interject key ideas into each video.

Another way focus learners when monitoring progress toward goals is the Bottom Line approach. This Bottom Line Activity is a great strategy for brainstorming or pulling out big ideas. It can be modified for just about any activity in which you are synthesizing information.

Additionally, using listening scaffolds for teacher to student, peer to peer, or collaborative small group reflection can be a nice way to help learners monitoring progress towards a goal. This resource helps students listen for critical information during shared reflection. However, they can also be used to focus attention when reading for a particular purpose.

The last tool for this month is SMMRY because, like the scaffold shared above, SMMRY is a tool that can be used to summarize text and pull big ideas out of pages of information. To use SMMRY you simply copy and paste text, upload a PDF file, or link online articles and webpages by URL.

One of the most overlooked areas of the formative assessment cycle is guiding students to monitor their learning. And while this month we are focusing on practice 4.5, each subcomponent of the larger Timely Progress Monitoring Component pictured at the top of the newsletter is important because it helps students think more deeply about their learning, not just for the sake of monitoring progress, but to grow expert learners who are purposeful, strategic, motivated, and goal-directed.

Pictured on the right, students in this small group used a scaffold to help each other listen with a purpose. Whether used in collaborative peer groups or pairs, learners can be taught to listen and provide feedback to one another. Here are some simple steps to the process:

1. Choose one student to share their goal reflection (for 2-3 minutes). This can be a shared classroom goal or a personalized learning goal.
2. The remaining students in the group listen for a purpose.
3. One student shares their reflection while the others listen and take notes.
4. Each listening student writes in a specific column.
5. One student listens for the goal.
6. Another student listens to where the student started their learning.
7. Another student listens where the student is now.
8. Finally, each student repeats what they recorded from the learner's summary/reflection, and the student that shared can hear from their peers the progress they have made (which can be followed by strategy brainstorms or more focused planning).

This activity can also be replicated in Flip to allow for multiple means of access and is appropriate for both elementary and secondary levels. One of the first times I observed students interacting with Flip (Flipgrid at the time) was at an elementary school in Indiana. Students recorded their reflections at desks set up with study carrels for noise cancellation, like the one pictured above. In Flip, both students and teachers can leave feedback in the comments to assist the learner with goal setting or reflection. The possibilities are endless!

Finally, we know that offering predictable options and multiple means of representation is necessary. In the picture above and on the left, students are engaged in small group discussions of text. Each student has a copy of the text, but one student is using SMMRY to understand the big ideas of the text better. SMMRY is an online support available to all students, but only some choose to use it. This is an example of a resourceful student who is empowered, through reflection and guidance, to utilize the tools necessary to achieve the learning goal.

Scaffolding listening for adults can also be powerful, especially when dealing with conflict. When sharing, professionals feel valued when they feel heard. When listening with a purpose, peers can pay close attention to what the speaker is saying and the point they are trying to convey. Factual information, feelings, and values can go unnoticed without careful listening. Please take a look at this site for more details on Effective Listening. The Facts, Feelings and Values graphic above is a great way to scaffold team conversations to ensure everyone feels their voice is heard.

Jaclyn DiSibio, a special education director and member of the Ohio UDL Collaborative, led the Collaborative through an inclusive activity similar to the one mentioned above. We were put in small groups and each member took turns sharing for a few mintues. Then, the other members took turns sharing the facts they heard, the feelings, and the values. At the end of the breakout session, members left feeling valued by their peers, which leads to an inclusive and safe enviornment for learning.

Another way to capture reflection and discussion to promote systemwide learning is the bottom-line approach. The pictures below were taken at two different District Leadership Team (DLT) meetings (pictured below). The Bottom Line activity was used to identify big ideas and reflect on report card components and Special Education Profile data to determine "The bottom line" for each of the indicators and components. The overall result of the activity was a deeper engagement in data analysis (not just passing it out) through curiosity rather than judgment.

An excellent sentence stem that can be used with the bottom-line approach could be:

We learned __________, and ____________ is what we are going to do about it.

Want to learn more from the world's leaders in UDL? You can't miss the UDL IRN Summit!

Come visit us on March 14 UDL IRN Implementation SIG Networking Session from 5:00 - 6:00.

We have a BIG announcement to share with all of the UDL implementers out there!

There are also a variety of asynchronous sessions available, including:

• View From Here: How to Implement and Sustain UDL in the Real World, Presenters: Cherie Smith, Laurene Sweet, Mike Nikson, Michelle Duda, Alisa Jones

• Wall the Talk for UDL Leadership, Presenters: Ron Rogers and Colleen Kornish

***This Newsletter was created in collaboration with Lisa Arthur, a fellow UDL Consultant from SST16.

Cherie Smith began working at State Support Team Region 6 in July 2015. She has a Master of Education in Educational Leadership and the Inclusive Classroom. Most of her experience has been in special education as a supervisor and an Intervention Specialist at the secondary level. She has taught and directed students with disabilities in both Florida and Ohio.

Cherie is currently a co-chair of Universal Design for Learning Implementation and Research Network's Implementation Special Interest Group and is a member of the Ohio UDL Collaborative.

As an SST6 Consultant, she supports districts in the Ohio Implementation Process as a Regional Data Lead. She is the lead for Universal Design for Learning and a part of the Special Education team supporting districts with IDEA Internal Monitoring, Postsecondary Transition, PBIS, and College and Career Readiness.

Email: csmith@sst6.org
Website: https://www.sst6.org/UniversalDesignforLearning.aspx
Location: 1045 Dearbaugh Avenue, Wapakoneta, OH, USA
Phone: 419-739-0170
Facebook: facebook.com/SST6ohio
Twitter: @SST6