Blog Prompt: Choose one (or more) of your planned learning activities from your Blueprint and identify any barriers to student success. How can you alter or adjust your current plan to reduce those barriers?
Students to any course bring with them unique needs, abilities, and history. This diversity, if not addressed, can lead to a large proportion of students having trouble engaging fully in learning within the course. Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework created by CAST to address a diversity of student needs based on what is known about the human brain, offers guidelines to support student learning in a number of ways (CAST, n.d.). Based on these guidelines, we can design multiple options for engagement, representation, and action & expression in order to increase access, support the learning process, and support executive functioning.
One of the planned learning activities we have in our Blueprint is to read an article and a webpage about healthy food choices. Barriers to reading could include difficulty with language, literacy, or vision. To reduce these barriers, we could encourage students to use translation or text-to-speech technology if they choose. We could also offer video or podcast alternatives which cover the same content. If the course is given in person, we might investigate to find out if any student needs alternatives for large print. We could also offer the article and/or webpage in options written for multiple levels of English comprehension. Finally, we could ensure plenty of pictorial support of the text, with captioned descriptions.
Additionally, there may be misunderstandings in the students’ conceptions of healthy eating, which could impact access due to bias and distracting ideas. CAST UDL Guidelines suggest creating a supportive culture by exploring how biases can impact learning (CAST, n.d.). This could be done in a short introduction to the reading, video, or podcast, acknowledging possible preconceptions or myths about healthy eating.
Another barrier could be difficulty in transferring learning from the article, website, video, or podcast, to application in meal planning for themselves. We can support this by including explicit references and connections to this learning in future assignments. We could also survey students ahead of time to learn about the foods they like so that we can use relatable examples to help make sense of the content during instruction.
References
- CAST. (n.d.). Universal Design for learning｜Cast. Universal Design for Learning. https://www.cast.org/what-we-do/universal-design-for-learning/
Hi!
I enjoyed your blog post; I like how you intentionally differentiated what you would do to adjust your learning activity if it was taught within a classroom setting or an online setting. Your interpretation of different learning styles and how to integrate that into the adjustment of your learning activity is fascinating because I believe adding extra videos and even podcasts into your learning activity would make it more inclusive and engaging for the learners.