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The Role of Play in the Overly-Academic Classroom

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1. Create a provocation inquiry learning experience to invite students into engage with your first UoI coming back.

2. Identify a UoI where there can be an opportunity to develop a learning engagement through mathematics and language that support understanding of the unit's central idea.

3. Identify a UoI where there can be an opportunity to develop a learning engagement through the lens of the single subjects that support understanding of the unit's central idea.

4. Look for opportunities to develop literacy and numeracy through play

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Fred Rogers and children s spirituality valuing the uniqueness of others and caring for others (1)

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Designing learning environments in a primary setting

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Designing learning environments in a primary setting

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Designing learning environments in a primary setting

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Literacy and numeracy opportunities in play

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Video: The role of play in the overly-academic classroom

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Video: The role of play in the overly-academic classroom

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The Role of Play in the Overly-Academic Classroom

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Learning Through Play: The LEGO Foundation and UNICEF

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Developing policies, procedures and practices to meet student learning diversity

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Developing policies, procedures and practices to meet student learning diversity

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Developing policies, procedures and practices to meet student learning diversity

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Welcome
to ISB!

We follow the health guidelines
set by the Danish Authorities.
Please help us by staying updated.
Thank you.

Shaping and sharing a
pedagogy of play

Together with our partners from Project Zero, ISB teachers are investigating what it means to put play at the heart of education.

We are an
IB World School

ISB's playful curriculum is built upon the rigorous educational framework of the International Baccalaureate.

Camillla Uhre Fog,
Head of School

Ben Mardell,
Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Stephen Powell,
ISB parent

My deepest wish is that when students leave ISB, what they carry with them is an unwavering curiosity and lifelong love of learning. Then I will know we have succeeded.

Even though I've visited ISB dozens of times, it never gets old seeing 4-year-olds, 14-year-olds and 40-year-olds (the teachers!) experiencing the choice, wonder and delight of playful learning.

ISB gives my children the freedom to express and enjoy themselves in a fantastic learning environment. They are excited to go to school every day, and there can be no greater way to describe its strength.

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ISB - International School of Billund - IB World School in Denmark

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We follow the health guidelines set by the Danish Authorities. Please help us by staying updated. Thank you. Together with our partners from Project Zero, ISB teachers are investigating what it means to put play at the heart of education. ISB's playful curriculum is built upon the rigorous educational framework of the International Baccalaureate.

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Learning Through Play - Educational Experts - Series 2

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Learning Through Play - Educational Experts - Series 2

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Learning Through Play - Educational Experts - Series 2

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The 5 characteristics of learning through play

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The 5 characteristics of learning through play

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The 5 characteristics of learning through play

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Learning Through Play - Educational Experts - Series 1

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Learning Through Play - Educational Experts - Series 1

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Learning Through Play -  Educational Experts - Series 1

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These resources provide support and understanding about key characteristics of the Primary Year’s Programme (PYP).

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Reenvisioning the UDL Guidelines

Because the UDL Guidelines are meant to be informed by feedback from the field as well as new research, they have been updated several times in the past. We are in the process of updating the Guidelines once again in our UDL Rising to Equity initiative.

This update will focus specifically on addressing systemic barriers that result in inequitable learning opportunities and outcomes. CAST aims to develop a transparent, inclusive, and community-driven process. If you are interested in collaborating and staying updated on our progress, we invite you to complete a brief survey.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

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Language Scope and Sequence Case Studies

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Language Scope and Sequence Case Studies

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Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read Report: Sincere, Passionate, Flawed

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Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read Report: Sincere, Passionate, Flawed

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Ontario  Human  Rights  Commission Right  to  ReadReport- Sincere, Passionate, Flawed

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Learning Diversity and Inclusion Powerpoint 

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Learning Diversity and Inclusion Powerpoint 

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Learning Diversity and Inclusion@GNS (19 June 2023) (1)

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The IB guide to inclusive education: a resource for whole school development

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The IB guide to inclusive education: a resource for whole school development

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The IB guide to inclusive education- a resource for whole school development

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I look forward to our year of learning together and working together as partners to create the most enriching, fun and enjoyable learning experiences. To help me get to know you better please take a moment to complete this short survey. This information helps me to know how I can best support you but also become aware of the many strengthens you can bring to our learning community. Thank you, Kelsey

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Getting to know our learners (Special Education and Mental Health - IS 233)

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I look forward to our year of learning together and working together as partners to create the most enriching, fun and enjoyable learning experiences. To help me get to know you better please take a moment to complete this short survey.

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PYP Attributes and Attitudes What do I bring to my Grade 4 community? an activity - reflecting and sharing attitudes, attributes that define each student. WAB's Mission Statement - Analysis of WAB's Mission Statement and activity where students create their personal Mission using the WAB template.

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Todd Rose - Co-founder of Populace; professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; author of Dark Horse with Ogi Ogas and The End of Average.

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Todd Rose isn't your average Harvard professor - but not because he dropped out of high school, spent time on welfare, and had 10 different minimum wage jobs and a wife and kid before he even finished being a teenager.

Todd Rose isn't your average Harvard professor because when it comes to people, the average is a statistical myth, he argues. There is no average. Repeat: There is no average. No average professor. No average worker. No average soldier. No average Joe.

And what might just be the single most important lesson for educators: There definitely is no average student. Not one. Yet, as Rose, Ed.M.'01, Ed.D.'07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, writes in his forthcoming book, The End of Average, from the moment we're born to the moment we die, we are measured against a mythical yardstick - the average human - and it's hurting everyone. That's why with this book and through his nonprofit, the Center for Individual Opportunity, Rose is on a mission to dismantle this myth of the average and instead help the public understand the importance of the individual.

"We talk so much about the individual, " he says, "but there's such a divide between what we say we believe and what we actually do."

HOW DID WE GET HERE?
When it comes to school systems, Rose says it's no accident how we got here: Schools were designed during the industrial age by people who were "absolutely obsessed" with averages because averages worked so well in managing factories. The goal wasn't to nurture creativity and develop individuality. The system mostly accomplished what it set out to do: prepare students for standardized jobs in an industrial economy. Since then, we have continued to think that the average - a human invention - represents everyone or that any deviation from the average is what defines you. You're gifted, and you don't need as much help, for example.

During the 1950s, the United States Air Force began thinking a lot about averages. At the time, pilots were having trouble controlling their planes. As Rose explains, at first the problem was pinned on pilot error and poor training. But the real problem turned out to be the cockpit or, more specifically, the fact that the cockpit had just one design: one for the average pilot of an earlier era, the 1920s.

The Air Force concluded that Americans had gotten bigger over the past couple of decades and they simply needed to update their measurement of the average pilot. With the help of a young Harvard College graduate named Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels, they measured more than 4,000 pilots on 10 dimensions of size that seemed important for fitting into a cockpit - torso length and chest circumference, for example. The thinking was that once they redesigned the cockpit for the average pilot of the 1950s, controlling the plane would no longer be so troublesome. Most pilots, they assumed, would be within the average range on the majority of dimensions and that a good number would even be average on all 10 dimensions.

"Do you know how many really were?" Rose says. "Zero."

Even when just three dimensions of size were picked, fewer than 3.5 percent of the pilots fell within the range defined by Daniels as average. Instead, what Daniels found is that every single pilot had what Rose calls a jagged profile. One pilot with long arms may also have long legs while another may not. Not everyone who was average height (5 feet 9 inches) had the same chest circumference or head size.

Finally, the Air Force had its "aha" moment: If every pilot had a jagged profile and the cockpit was designed for the average pilot, it was actually designed for no one. Its response was bold - it banned the average and forced reluctant manufacturers to instead design "to the edges, " meaning a cockpit that would be adjustable for even the extremes - the tallest or the shortest, for those with wide or narrow chests. Manufacturers balked, but once they realized the Air Force wasn't budging, they figured it out, creating options like adjustable seats.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH EDUCATION?
Rose's "aha" moment came when he was a doctoral student at the Ed School. Based on his own struggles in school, he came to Harvard interested in understanding individuals. But, he says, "like everyone else in psychology and neuroscience, I had been trained to use group-level statistics as an undergraduate to study people." When he was a teaching fellow for Professor Judy Singer's statistics class, he remembers having a conversation with her about individuality. She told him that the statistics they were using were not meant to make claims about individuals, but rather about the population at large. Rose started seeing what she meant when he was doing his own research on kids who were struggling to read.

"There would be what the research says these kids should be like, " Rose says, "and then the reality of their individuality that hits you in the face if you spend even a few minutes with them."

Rose approached his mentor, Professor Kurt Fischer, one of the leading pioneers in the science of the individual and the brain, to talk about this dilemma - the reality of individual kids and what the research says - and why we think this way.

"Rather than giving me a generic answer about people being too messy or complex, he just said that the root of the problem is our belief in averages - that somehow averages will tell us what we need to know about individuals, " Rose says. "He really pushed me to accept that understanding individuals means really explaining individuality and variability rather than ignoring it or explaining it away."

In the context of schools, Rose says that while most of us will never need to worry about the flexibility of a fighter plane, we do need to worry about what he calls "the cockpits of our economy" - classrooms. We're spending more on education and getting not-so-great results, but instead of looking at design and fit the way the Air Force did, we blame bad teachers. We blame lazy students. We even blame parents.

"But how much of this problem is just bad design?" Rose says. Students are grouped in grades based on chronological age. Curriculum and textbooks are written to be "age appropriate." Most standardized assessments, like the SAT or IQ test, are designed based on a comparison to a hypothetical average student. Walk into an elementary school classroom and even the literal design of the room is for the "average" kid: one size desk, one size chair, one size table.

But just as there isn't one size pilot, there isn't one size student or one way to learn. "Human beings don't line up perfectly. There is no average learner, " Rose says. Every student has a jagged learning profile, too.

"They have strengths and weaknesses. They all do, " Rose says. "Even geniuses do."

The danger in not understanding and appreciating this, Rose says, is that we will continue not reaching all students. Fischer once told Rose that today's schools basically fail about 80 percent of students. A student who struggles to read may be talented in physics, but that talent gets lost because math requires reading textbooks and worksheets. A gifted student may get bored and only do the minimal amount of work, which was designed for the average student. As a result, some students fall behind or act out. Others get ignored or eventually drop out. As Rose pointed out in a TedX talk on the topic, of the 1.2 million high-schoolers in the United States who drop out every year, about 4 percent, or 50,000, are known to be gifted. And even if a student "gets through, " Rose says, he or she may never reach full potential.

Thinking back on his own education, Rose says that poor working memory was something he struggled with and teachers didn't recognize. As he wrote in his first book, Square Peg, "By not understanding how much people vary in their working memory, teachers force kids constantly to jump through needless hoops, much as if they were obliging their students to ride unicycles between classes. Were that the case, a kid who was a budding genius at math but hopelessly uncoordinated might never be able to get to his class and show what he could do."

Unfortunately, Rose says, "if we ignore jaggedness, we end up treating people in one-dimensional terms" - the struggling student, the good tester. "If we want to know your intelligence, for example, we give you an IQ test that is supposed to tap a range of abilities, but then we merge that into a single score." Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110 - the exact same number. One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite jaggedness. "If we just want to rank them then we could say the students are more or less the same in intelligence because they have the same aggregate scores. But if we wanted to really understand who they are as individuals enough to nurture their potential, we can't ignore the jaggedness - it is the essential information for providing them with an optimal environment and matching them with optimal strategies for success."

In order to do this, Rose says that rather than forcing students to fit to the environment, we need to have the environment fit each student, just as the Air Force was only successful when it stopped making pilots fit into to a one-size-fits-all cockpit. Rather than getting mad at a student with poor working memory who constantly forgets to write down homework assignments, a teacher could easily help that kid by verbalizing assignments and writing them down on the white board. Rather than making all students in a grade fill out the same worksheets, assignments could be customized.

BASED ON EXPERIENCE
This issue of "fit" is exactly what helped Rose go from being that struggling student, the "troublemaker" with a 0.9 GPA in high school, to a Harvard professor with a doctorate.

"It wasn't that a switch just got turned on one day, " he says. He wrote in Square Peg, "I know there was no single intervention that turned my life around. No heart-to-heart talk with a great teacher. No perfectly tailored drug that helped me sit still and concentrate."

Instead, he adds in his new book, The End of Average, "I gradually realized that if I could just figure out how to improve the fit between my environment and myself, I might be able to turn my life around."

Fit, he believes, is the birthright of every person.

"Right now because we believe in the myth of average, we believe that opportunity means providing equal access to standardized educational experiences, " he says. "However, since we know that nobody is actually average, it is obvious that equal access to standardized experiences is not nearly enough to provide equal opportunity. To me, if you accept the reality of individuality, then it means that we have to rethink how we define equal opportunity in education and beyond."

Equal opportunity, then, requires equal fit between individuals and their educational environments.

"Anything less is inherently and profoundly unequal, " Rose says. "I believe that we should set a much higher bar for ourselves in the 21st century. If we are going to be a country that cares about equal opportunity, then we must strive to ensure that equal fit is the birthright of every single child in this country. But right now in education we do not take this idea seriously, in part because until recently we didn't have the science or technology to do it. But we do now. So if you accept the idea of equal fit, then it means something radical for the future of education - it means we cannot accept a system based on averages; it means we cannot accept standardized curricular materials, or simplistic one-dimensional assessments, or fixed amounts of time for learning or one pathway to academic success."

And now, he says, is the perfect time to focus on individual learning. Using the technology we have on hand, educators can easily create learning environments that are flexible. Language translation programs, for example, can help students - at any school - better sound out puzzling words as they read.

Professor Howard Gardner, one of Rose's first professors at the Ed School, says, "Todd's focus on what we know about the individual student and how we can mobilize pedagogical and curricular resources to meet the particular student is of fundamental importance. We are fortunate enough to live at the first time in human history [when] such individualized teaching and learning is not restricted to a tiny wealthy elite but can be distributed far more widely, if not universally."

Rose says we have already seen how technology has helped scientists around the world understand the individual, leading to major breakthroughs in everything from cancer research to the treatment of diabetes.

"And this only happened after scientists broke through a mental barrier, " Rose says, "after they recognized this one all-important fact: that you can't understand individuals using group averages" because there is no average cancer, no average cell, no average genome.

So how do we, as a country entrenched in an education system that distributes standardized tests and groups students based on chronological age rather than rate of learning, break through its mental barriers and start to embrace - and demand - the science of the individual?

Well, if you're Todd Rose, you start by turning to Hollywood.

"People in places like Hollywood, they're used to thinking differently or being told they're not good enough," Rose says. "If you want to have a public that understands this new science and this new way of thinking about individuality, then it will require more than just the dissemination of information through usual channels. Instead, you have to get these ideas to permeate the culture - to change the way that people think about themselves and the people around them. To do that, I believe that you need to engage the storytellers in Hollywood because they are in the business of creating culture and changing social norms whether people realize it or not."

Walter Haas, a founding director at Rose's nonprofit, specializes in digital marketing and has worked on projects for Levi Strauss and Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. He says getting the message to people is a first - and critical - step.

"Once you understand the world through the lens of the science of the individual, you can't see it in any other way, " he says. "Our goal is to simply allow more people to have that same moment of realization. We do not have the resources, frankly, or the patience to engage in a traditional policy lobbying effort. Instead, we plan to share this science-based idea in an accessible manner to stimulate ground-level demand for institutional reform."

It's the same approach, Rose says, that the Harvard Alcohol Project took in the 1980s, when it teamed up with every major movie studio and television network to help launch a new term into society that resulted in demand from the public: the designated driver. With the help of Hollywood, over the course of just four years, more than 160 popular movies and shows like Cheers and L.A. Law added designated drivers into scenes and drunk driving prevention into dialogue. PSAs flooded the market. The term "designated driver" even officially appeared in Webster's Dictionary in 1991.

"It is such a terrific example of what is possible if you combine a good idea with a clever approach to getting it to the public, "Rose says, noting that he is starting to team up with Hollywood in the same way.

His nonprofit is also creating partnerships with non-Hollywood groups that can also make a difference, like Teach For America, which places young teachers in high-needs schools, as well as influential companies that create tests for schools. They also plan on creating a free flexible digital textbook that will allow teachers to customize learning for each student.

Eventually, he says, "I want CEOs to say, 'What's our plan for this?' I want schools to say, 'Wow! We need to get our act together. This is the new thing.'"

The bottom line, Rose says, is that we all need to ask ourselves who we are supposed to be as a country.

"I'm incredibly grateful, even though it wasn't easy, that I got a second chance, " he says. "We need all of the potential we can possibly get. We need innovation and creativity. That's where all of the jobs are. I keep thinking, this letting go of the average and instead focusing on the individual is just in our best interest."

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Todd Rose isn't your average Harvard professor - but not because he dropped out of high school, spent time on welfare, and had 10 different minimum wage jobs and a wife and kid before he even finished being a teenager.

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CAST is a multifaceted organization with a singular ambition: Bust the barriers to learning that millions of people experience every day. We do this by helping educators and organizations apply insights from the learning sciences and leading-edge practices to educational design and implementation.

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Find out more about CAST. We're busting barriers to learning, until learning has no limits®.

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One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion

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One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion (Audible Audio Edition): Shelley Moore, Shelley Moore, Leyton Schellert - foreword, Portage & Main Press: Amazon.ca: Books

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· What strikes us as noteworthy about this scene?
· Our current education model was defined by the Committee of Ten over a century ago.  What skills and character traits did they want young adults to have for 20th Century assembly line jobs?
·  What skills and character traits are essential for students for career and citizenship in the 21st century?
·  Do we critique our assignments on the basis of which essential skills they’re developing?
·  How can we assess student progress on essential skills?  
·  What micro-innovations could we try to accelerate student development of essential skills?

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Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it.

The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average-like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings-reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly-and scientifically-wrong.

In The End of Average , Rose, a rising star in the new field of the science of the individual, shows that no one is average . Not you. Not your kids. Not your employees. This isn't hollow sloganeering-it's a mathematical fact with enormous practical consequences.

But while we know people learn and develop in distinctive ways, these unique patterns of behaviors are lost in our schools and businesses, which have been designed around the mythical "average person". This average-size-fits-all model ignores our differences and fails at recognizing talent. It's time to change it.

Weaving science, history, and his personal experiences as a high school dropout, Rose offers a powerful alternative to understanding individuals through averages: the three principles of individuality. The jaggedness principle (talent is always jagged), the context principle (traits are a myth), and the pathways principle (we all walk the road less traveled) help us understand our true uniqueness - and that of others - and how to take full advantage of individuality to gain an edge in life.

Listen to this powerful manifesto in the ranks of Drive , Quiet , and Mindset - and you won't see averages or talent in the same way again.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

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The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

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The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness (Audible Audio Edition): Todd Rose, Fred Sanders, HarperAudio: Amazon.ca: Books

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Why, what, how to create more accessible and equitable learning environments.

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The Myth of Average:  Todd Rose at TEDxSonomaCounty

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IB document: Meeting student diversity in the classroom 

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IB document: Meeting student diversity in the classroom 

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Meeting Student Learning Diversity in the Classroom

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IB Document: Learning diversity and inclusion 

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IB Document: Learning diversity and inclusion 

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Learning diversity and inclusion in IB programmes

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What is Five Moore Minutes? Inspired by a little bowling video...Five Moore Minutes is a website with videos dedicated to empowering schools and classrooms to support ALL Learners! Created by Shelley Moore, this website is designed with teachers in mind.

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WHAT IS ‘HOW WE DO SCHOOL’ An initiative of the Lien Foundation, How We Do School is a series of short films that explores how schools in British Columbia an…

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Article: Ensuring that instruction is inclusive for diverse learning

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Article: Ensuring that instruction is inclusive for diverse learning

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Using ideas from Universal Design for Learning with all students can make classrooms more welcoming for those with learning disabilities.

©Shutterstock/Monkey Business Images

Humans have a tendency to fall into patterns of behavior. For teachers, that means that if we're not careful, we begin to teach things the same way every year. This is comfortable for us, but it can result in a rigid curriculum that may not work for all students-and traditional classrooms are curriculum-centered already, not easily adapted to the differing needs of individual students. Instead, students are required to adapt to the curriculum.

As a special education teacher, part of my job was helping students who had a diagnosed learning disability access the general education curriculum, so I frequently found myself co-teaching with a math or English teacher. When students with learning differences are placed in the general education classroom, they often receive accommodations and services. However, when those accommodations are paired with-and constrained by-a traditional, rigid curriculum, the result can be the opposite of inclusion, in my experience.

Teachers in this situation may become frustrated because trying to accommodate each child individually creates a lot of stress and often an unmanageable workload. Another issue I saw at the middle school level is that despite teachers' best efforts, students with learning differences often feel singled out, and as they get older they may reject accommodations in order to fit in-even though that means forgoing supports that could help meet their learning needs.

The majority of students need something different, but how can you design a curriculum that works for all students-and for the teacher?

In working together, the general education teacher and I would work out ways to flex and adapt our teaching styles to fit our students' needs. As a team, we modified our instruction based on what worked and what didn't. We used what we learned to design instruction that could change based on students' needs.

All of this work was based on the well-known, flexible model called Universal Design for Learning, which can be used in any classroom to make instruction more accessible.

3 Ways to Implement Universal Design for Learning

1. Teach content in many ways: In a traditional classroom, planning for the lesson is done with the "typical" student in mind. Often, there is one way for all students to learn the material, such as a lecture or a slide presentation.

Instead, try to plan the lesson with all students in mind. Survey students to find out what they already know and questions they have about the new topic. Use that information to scaffold instruction and make lessons more relevant to students. You can also vary the methods that you use to deliver the direct instruction portion of your lesson-try showing a demonstration or video clip for one lesson, and have students participate in stations or listen to a podcast for another.

If possible, use more than one modality within a lesson, and think about supports that students may need for learning. If students are moving around the room, have clearly defined procedures and a goal at each learning center. If they're listening to you or a podcast, it may be helpful to provide an outline where they can add notes or sketch visuals while they listen. If they're reading texts, you can allow them to partner read or use technology to adjust the font and text size.

2. Provide choices to sustain student engagement: Allow students to choose an activity. For guided practice, they could decide whether to answer questions independently and receive feedback, play a game, do a role play, or practice in a group. To demonstrate their understanding of a concept, they could decide whether to create a poster or construct a model, write a paper, make a video or podcast, or do a presentation. Making choices allows them to relate to the content in a way that sparks their interest.

Teachers can often offer students other choices in the classroom, beyond instruction. For example, you may be able to provide flexible seating, allowing students to choose a quiet area of the classroom to finish up an assignment on their own, or to sit at tables for group work, or to grab a seat at a computer to watch a video, print a new worksheet, or read a digital textbook.

3. Provide accommodations for all students: Instead of providing accommodations only to students with an IEP or a 504 plan, think about accommodations that such students frequently need and make them available to all students.

For example, if you often have students who need a copy of the notes, using a site like Blackboard or Google Classroom to post each slide presentation and assignment makes it easier for everyone to access those materials. Students who are absent, lose their copy, or have trouble taking notes can use the online notes and documents. Having documents available online also makes it easier for parents, special education teachers, and paraeducators to help students without making extra work for the teacher.

Another example would be teaching students to use a free text reader like the Read and Write extension for Google Chrome or a voice-to-text tool like those available in Google Documents. Students may choose not to use them, but they're a good option for students who happen to retain information better when they hear it or who have a disability that interferes with writing.

Universal Design for Learning allows instruction to become student-centered by creating a more welcoming and flexible classroom environment and a curriculum that is more accessible to all students. Flexible instruction should lead the student to be more personally accountable for their learning: Instead of the teacher expecting all students to learn in one way, the student sets their own goals for how they will learn the required material.

The student becomes an expert not just on the content but on how they learn. Once the content has faded from their memory, this is the skill that will allow them to acquire the knowledge necessary for whatever endeavor they decide to pursue.

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Ensuring That Instruction Is Inclusive for Diverse Learners

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Using ideas from Universal Design for Learning with all students can make classrooms more welcoming for those with learning disabilities.