Friday, February 10, 2012

UDL

For a recent lesson, we were asked to go through a lesson plan we had completed earlier using a checklist of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles.  I completed this self-review on a lesson plan involving triangle congruence.  Here are the links to

All-in-all, I think the lesson plan addressed some key points of UDL principles.  Most of what I viewed as "features" involved the collaborative aspects of the lesson and the multiple representations that students are asked to produce to show their understanding.  The main barrier that I found useful in thinking about improving the lesson plan was building in more options for student responses, or at least making it explicit in my instructions that different methods of responding were acceptable.  For example, one of the activities students are asked to complete is to write instructions for using some geometry software, and then provide those instructions to students who haven't used the software to help them solidify their own understanding of it.  In going through the UDL checklist, I realized that this would be a great place for students to use a screencast instead of writing out instructions; it would probably be more fun and interesting for everyone involved.

I made the mistake of trying to fill in something for each sub-point in the checklist, and it got me kind of frustrated.  Trying to fit all of these principles into the writing of a lesson plan would mean that lesson plans would be too detailed to complete very often, and too complicated to be really useful.  For many of the principles, my response was, "Well, I didn't write that into the lesson plan, because that's just part of how I teach."  I think this checklist might be better used in evaluating a lesson through observation, or for something like the STAIR project, where the lesson is all contained in one presentation. However, the points are all very important considerations to keep in mind when planning lessons, and will help me make my lessons more accessible in the future.

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