This is the first time that I’m using a speech to text device – it’s amazing.

In the lecture today I really appreciated the sharing of my cohort I didn’t realize the extensive effort that it takes for students who have disabilities to need to advocate for themselves so much and that exhaustion factor really makes me want to try to implement the UDL framework in my lessons.

Image: Universal Design for Learning

Even though UDL has been talked about in many of our other classes it was good to hear about it again because I haven’t actually taken a deep dive into it, and I do feel like it’s really important so I’m glad that we learned about it again today.

In my undergrad I took a neuroscience class, it was called motor learning, but it really addressed the neuroscience of learning in general. In that class my professor how to Swatch 3 short videos -no more than two minutes each, and at the beginning of every 8:30 AM lecture we had a test on the content of the video. Many of my classmates hated that because they didn’t watch the videos, but I loved it because I did watch the videos and I got a mark every single time and it was incredible scaffolding for learning. I think that I would like to do that for some of my PHE classes. In many of the classes that I observe and teach there are a lot of international students. It’s quite clear that they don’t understand the directions even when the directions are clear and concise. So I think making short videos prior to the class for the students to watch where they can use closed captions and replay the video if they want to they could learn the skill of the sport if that’s what we’re doing that day and come to class knowing what’s going on and feel a lot more confident.

I also appreciated what was shared in class by one of my cohort members about the curb-cut effect. This means that when you use the universal design for learning for a certain population of students, to help them learn, you actually also help a large population of students that you didn’t necessarily target with those accommodations. So in a PHE setting I think that if I use the UDL framework for the purpose of helping international students, I think it would actually help a lot of people who aren’t confident with their sports skills.

I’m getting excited about this. I’m glad that I learned today about the universal design for learning and had firsthand impact input from my classmates that made the learning so real. I was also grateful for another classmate’s input on how important it is to access the help that’s available as a teacher and to know that the school counselors actually nerd out on learning accommodations, so they are super happy to help. So, that sums up my takeaways from the lecture today and I’m feeling grateful for that lesson and all my classmates that shared!