UDL

We Got This: Tools for Teams and Teachers

Posted on by Kathy Collier

This year, a team of teachers at my site read the book We Got This. Equity Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be, by Cornelius Minor. I highly recommend the text, in order to become a more reflective teacher, to center student voices, and to ensure that classroom practices and curriculum work for students. It is a rich source of planning and reflection tools. In this post, I want to share a few of the tools that we have used and found to be extremely useful.

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Beliefs and Expectations

Posted on by Kathy Collier

Yesterday I finished reading Unlearning: Changing Your Beliefs and Your Classroom with UDL, by Allison Posey and Katie Novak. I highly recommend this book! The book gave me many take-aways and ideas to reinforce my understanding of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In today’s post, I want to focus on expectations and beliefs, as I think these are the key to changing the way we do school…. and key to creating more socially just, inclusive school systems.

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Equity and Access: The Universal Design for Learning Guidelines

Posted on by Kathy Collier

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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Seven High Quality Instructional Practices

Posted on by Kathy Collier

John Hatie’s meta-analysis provides a summary of the most impactful instructional practices. The State Implementation and Scaling-up of Evidence-based Practices (SISEP) developed a tool to support the training of and operationalizing of seven of Hattie’s top instructional practices. The tool, Observation Tool for Instructional Supports and Systems (OTISS), provides a summary of these seven practices. In this post, I want to summarize the practices. Please recognize that, in using the practices, the key is to define what each component means in observable terms, to coach into the practices, and to use the tool as an assessment of the effectiveness of the coaching.

The seven high quality instructional practices used in the OTISS tool are:

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