Equity and Access: The Universal Design for Learning Guidelines

Just as we design buildings to be accessible by all people, we should design accessible learning opportunities. No two learners are alike – we are as unique as our fingerprints. If anything is a constant in education, it is that we can expect variability in the students and the adults with whom we work, each with individual strengths and goals. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework through which educators can intentionally plan for a variety of ways to access, engage with, and express learning. The learning is towards rigorous and meaningful goals. This is a huge move toward high outcomes for all learners. In this post, I want to share some thoughts and resources around UDL.

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What Are Some Ways to Support Resilience?

This fall, I am committed to building my own resilience in order to support colleagues and students. I know this will need to be a focus of my coaching and leadership always, and especially given the times we are living in. Some resources I will use include Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators, mantra with visualization, and mindfulness. I want to share a few ideas in this post.

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Culturally Responsive Practice and Adult Learners

At a coaching/mentoring workshop this week, we read Constructive Learning Theory to consider principles of learning for adult learners. As I read the article, I saw a number of connections to Culturally Responsive Learning and the Brain. In the book, Zaretta Hammond writes about Cognitive Routines as processes to make learning meaningful and culturally responsive. In this blog I want to use one of the routines, Similarities and Differences, to connect Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) to adult learning.

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Cognitive Routines

In my June 17 post, I wrote about Zaretta Hammond’s Cognitive Routines as a way to support Culturally Responsive Teaching. By introducing a routine and embedding it explicitly into instruction a number of times and coaching into the routine, the process become internalized into an automatic habit; in addition, student metacognition increases as the benefits of the habit becomes evident.

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