Universal Design for Learning

     I was very excited to learn about Universal Design for Learning. I feel a connection to this because my sister is a self-contained Sped teacher. She had a librarian at her school (who is actually a Sam Houston Library Science Grad) who went above and beyond to create a library for my sister’s students who have more profound disabilities. She procured resources and created lessons so that all the students were able to participate in meaningful library lessons. From talking with my sister, I could see how important and impactful it was to her students and her to have these students, who might be overlooked or marginalized, be given the treatment of any other student. I think the principles and guidelines outlined in the UDL are crucial to providing ALL students with the most effective library lessons and experiences. 

I am currently a kindergarten teacher at a school with a high ESL population. I have also previously taught PreK at a Title I school. I have students come from a wide range of backgrounds with a wide range of abilities. I feel like these teaching abilities have given me a good framework to build upon for my library.  Some of the guidelines that I am currently using are providing options for perceptions by giving alternatives for visual learners (giving visuals for my ESL students or my low students who can not read yet), providing options for language by clarifying vocabulary and symbols (again giving context to my ESL learners or students with underdeveloped vocabulary), clarifying syntax and structure (giving sentence stems for speaking and writing), providing options for comprehension by activate or supplying background knowledge. I also provide options for physical action by giving students different ways to respond to questions. Because my school has such a high number of ESL learners we are very intentional in our planning. We make sure to have differentiation built into our plans for whole group, small group and interventions that we provide for students.

 There were also some principles and guidelines that I can start now incorporating into my current classroom. I think that I can be better about giving students more options for expression and communication, such as using multiple media for communication or composition. I think I can also be better about having students use their executive functions by having them be more aware and monitor themselves and their work/understanding. I also think that I can start incorporating means of engagement into the classroom. I give my students some autonomy over their work but I could follow more of the principles of recruiting interest. The last piece is areas where I feel like I need to learn more about them to better implement them into my classroom. I feel like I do well with providing some forms of alternatives for visual information but more of the specialized alternatives I don’t know nearly enough about. Those options that are more specifically geared towards disabilities are where I would need to research and learn more about what technology and resources are out there and how they can be incorporated into student learning. That also goes along with providing multiple means of action and expression. There are tools to help students learn the new information being presented but there are also different tools to allow students to show or extend their learning. I feel strongly about letting students be creative in how they show their knowledge but I see that I am lacking in giving students tools beyond their creativity. 

    After looking through the guidelines and principles of UDL I feel like the area that I would really want to explore more of is technology/resources to offer students to give them alternatives for processing the information and then being able to show their understanding afterwards. I looked online first for some resources and more of a breakdown of what technologies are out there to help students. One site I found was Reading Rockets. They discuss a wide range of assistive technology available to students. They talked about what kinds of disabilities may need this technology, and what it can do to help students. They also discussed some of the options for each type of technology as well as tips to evaluate if it’s the right fit for the child. Another great site that I found was SeeWriteHear. I found this site very helpful because it broke down the different alternative formats with lots of other commonly asked questions to support my learning-like which fonts are best for large print and are enlargement and are large print the same? Since this is an area that I’m not as familiar with, just having these definitions and explanations really helped me better understand what these more common alternatives are and what the nuances to them are. Another resource I plan to utilize is the librarian I mentioned earlier in my writing. Courtney is a librarian in my district so I know that she will be a great mentor as I move forward with my librarian career. I know that she has successfully implemented a UDL library for her students. I know from my sister that she had to overcome many different obstacles to be able to bring this to her students so I know she would be invaluable to learn from and help assist me in bringing these principles to life for my future students.