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ohio center for autism and low incidence

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Ohio Center for Autism and Low Incidence

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All About the Brain, Specifically Prioritizing and the Power of Visuals

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Ohio Center for Autism and Low Incidence

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Copy of Impact of variability.docx PME3.docx

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CAST

CAST

2018

Abstract

What we know about the brain is central to the Universal Design for Learning Framework. Knowing key facts about the brain from a UDL perspective can help inform learning design to address learner variability. Find out more in this downloadable resource designed for educators.

Download & Learn More

Cite As

CAST (2018). UDL and the learning brain. Wakefield, MA: Author. Retrieved from http://www.cast.org/products-services/resources/2018/udl-learning-brain-neuroscience

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What we know about the brain is central to the Universal Design for Learning Framework. Knowing key facts about the brain from a UDL perspective can help inform learning design to address learner variability. Find out more in this downloadable resource designed for educators.

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The Myth of Average:  Todd Rose at TEDxSonomaCounty

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Different school contexts impact on the teacher and student experience of teaching and learning of Religious Education 

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Different school contexts impact on the teacher and student experience of teaching and learning of Religious Education 

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- IT capabilities
- closed mindset
- stage in career
- sensitivity to screens

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Double click on screen
Write your Table number
Add your comment
You can upload or share links
Click on screen outside of your text box when finished

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CAST.org website

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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.

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Ep 3: The Glass Half Full... Honouring Every Learner at Every Level through Universal Design for Learning

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This is a conversation about all things Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with Dr Margaret Flood. She is an expert in inclusive learning, teaching, teacher professional learning design and delivery, policy development and curriculum design. It is safe to say, Mags knows her stuff! Dr Flood is a…

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+ k - Keyboard shortcut list (this dialog)

+ t - Show Table of Contents

+ h - Show Highlights and Notes dialog

+ - Show Display settings

+ - Show Reading tools settings

+ a - Start/stop Read-aloud

space - Pause Read-aloud (while reading)

+ f - Focus search input (if one is available)

+ r - Focus the reader document

left - Previous page

right - Next page

+ pageUp - Previous chapter/section

+ pageDown - Next chapter/section

+ l - Go to the Library page

+ w - Announce current reading position or page

When text is selected within a reading:

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k - Keyboard shortcut list (this dialog) + t - Show Table of Contents + h - Show Highlights and Notes dialog + - Show Display settings + - Show Reading tools settings + a - Start/stop Read-aloud space - Pause Read-aloud (while reading) + f - Focus search input

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Try this activity as a yourselves (questions to guide conversation on slide three). Then change the context to you subject/classroom. You can change the language a bit but note each word represents a guideline so that within that guideline language to keep it UDL. Alternatively do an overview one using the Ted Rose video language (on slide in presentation)

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Summary of UDL theory and practice chapters

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Summary of UDL theory and practice chapters

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UDLchatIE 2020 Summer Book Club. Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice. Free multi media version of book available at http://udltheorypractice....

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Link to free multi-media version of book. Guidelines have been updated since (and are been updated again) but overall message the same

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Read Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice for Free in Clusive! - CAST

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Our flagship publication is now available at no cost on our flexible and customizable digital reading tool.

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Step by step UDL lesson planning from understood.org

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Step by step UDL lesson planning from understood.org

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The Myth of average

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The Myth of Average:  Todd Rose at TEDxSonomaCounty

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UDL & communicative methods in teaching language (Frederic Fovet)

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UDL & communicative methods in teaching language (Frederic Fovet)

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Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

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The Myth of Average: Todd Rose at TEDxSonomaCounty

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Exploring UDL
Analogy link

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Dr. Baked Potato: How can we scaffold complexity?

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Link to Padlet
https://padlet.com/margaret_flood/sqbfhk3169kg9uns

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Shelley Moore: Transforming Inclusive Education

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gkR6GwxZ5dCFOCK4snYxH2nJykIsrg4s/view?usp=sharing

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Cast Top Tips for developing learning outcomes

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Cast Top Tips for developing learning outcomes

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1. Home

2. Learn with Us

3. About CAST Professional Learning

CAST is renowned for its innovative professional development on Universal Design for Learning. Whether you are implementing at the individual, team, school, or district level, we offer hands-on opportunities that empower you to take control of your own learning through instructional rounds, lesson design studios, design thinking activities, and other learner-centered protocols.

We work with organizations and stakeholders in a number of fields to find ways of improving learning opportunities in today's rapidly changing world. We regularly partner with organizations in the public and private sectors to explore challenging questions in education through our consultation and curriculum design services. Our team includes experts in human development, neuropsychology, instructional design, literacy instruction, learning analytics, technology design, accessibility, and more.

Download our Professional Learning Services Overview

Explore CAST Professional Learning

All Professional Learning Offerings

CAST's Professional Learning team trains administrators, instructional coaches, and preK-12 educators to lead large scale implementation of UDL.

We offer a range of options for professional development for postsecondary institutions, including keynotes, workshops, customized consultations, coaching, and more.

Whether you want to improve your classroom teaching or transform an entire district, our learner-centered offerings give you the hands-on, practical experience you will need to breathe new life into your work.

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We'll work with you to find ways of improving learning opportunities in today's rapidly changing world.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:

Here's a word you may not have heard before: dogfooding. It's a term that's been used for years among software developers, and it refers to the act of using your own product as a consumer in order to work out its glitches, the metaphorical equivalent of "eating your own dog food."

When a new app is created, for example, company employees will load it onto their devices and actually use it for a while to see how it operates from the user's point of view. For many companies, dogfooding is just part of their best practices, a natural step in software development before a product is launched for consumer use.

I would like to propose that we start using this term in teaching, to make dogfooding a regular part of best practices in instructional design. This is not the first time I've tried to drag things from the tech world into the teaching world: Last year, I suggested we could grow more as educators by embracing the concept of teaching in beta, where we roll out a new teaching practice before it's completely perfect, then work to improve it as we go. We can follow technology's example again by dogfooding our lessons whenever possible. This means trying our own assignments. Taking our own tests. Doing our own homework. Attempting to actually complete those big projects. By doing this, we can detect all kind of problems that we'd never notice if we just created tasks and gave them straight to students.

Here are seven ways you can improve your practice with dogfooding:

1. Set realistic expectations.

If you're anything like me, you tend to go a little too big in the "idea" stage of any project. So before you hand over an assignment to your students, try doing it first to make sure you aren't asking for too much. Joanne Marks (@joannemarks ), an elementary science teacher in Gulfport, Mississippi, assigned her students to research the life of a famous scientist and display their findings on a cereal box. After explaining the requirements and reviewing the rubric, she told them she would bring in an example the next day. "So I took it home and started doing the project," she says. "I got halfway through and I was like, oh my gosh, this is way too much for the amount of time I have allowed." She cut back on the requirements for the project and gave students a new rubric the following day. If she hadn't taken this step, Joanne would have created a mess for herself and her students. Instead, she was able to adjust the assignment right on time.

2. Write better instructions.

Suppose you have created a task that includes step-by-step directions. Because you came up with the idea and wrote the instructions yourself, there's a pretty good chance you missed something, some small part of a step that could create big confusion for students if you forget to include it. This would be the equivalent of failing to mention that the lid must be placed on the blender before you turn it on...obvious to anyone who has used a blender many times, but not so obvious to someone who hasn't. So test your directions out by attempting to follow the steps exactly as they are written, or ask another person to read them to you and check to make sure you're not filling in gaps with your own knowledge. If you want an even better test of the clarity of your instructions, have a small group of students run through them first before giving them to everyone else.

3. Troubleshoot complex activities.

When you're planning a lab, a workshop, or some other kind of hands-on, multi-step activity, dogfooding it will help you proactively solve problems with equipment and logistics. Karen Ginsburg, a grade 7-8 science teacher in Oakland, California, is spending this summer practicing a water quality unit she will do with her students in the fall. "I will go each week and collect data as if I was a student," she explains. "It will give me practice and experience being a student and learning as I go. What are the pitfalls? Where are the problems likely to surface? What am I really asking my students to do? Am I being realistic? Practicing something I am asking them to do is very informative!" Running through an activity like this can help you figure out how to move students through the various stages of the task without bottlenecking them in one particular spot, and because you'll be actually using the materials, you'll have a better sense of how to organize them for student use.

4. Get your timing right.

One common issue for teachers in the early years of their careers is timing. It takes experience to be able to accurately predict how long a learning experience is going to take, and even veteran teachers can find themselves running out of time or finishing a lesson way faster than expected. When you dogfood an activity, you can get a much clearer sense for how long it will take. I wish I had done this for a lesson I did with my pre-service teachers: To show them different possibilities for student grouping, I gave them envelopes containing tiny pieces of card stock (about the size of dimes) which I wanted them to arrange in different configurations. The idea was fine, but about five minutes into the lesson, I realized there were just too many pieces - doing each part of the exercise took way too long. If I had taken some time the night before to actually run through the exercise, I would have realized this quickly and simplified it. Because I hadn't done that, I had to experience it the hard way, watching my students try diligently to do as I had asked, and wasting precious instructional time on something that should have taken just a few minutes to get the point across.

5. Create models.

Dogfooding an assignment allows you to build a prototype of a finished product, which can work wonders for helping students understand what's expected of them. This is especially important with larger projects, when students will be spending days or weeks putting together the pieces of some final presentation or artifact, or when the product you have in mind is something students have never really seen. So if, for example, you would like students to write and perform satirical skits in which they parody some significant event in history, go ahead and create one yourself first. Not only will this help you better appreciate the scope of what you're asking students to do, it will give them a much clearer target to aim for.

6. Revisit the mind of a beginner.

If you assign the kind of work to students that you yourself have been doing for years, it already makes perfect sense to you. That means you might have a hard time explaining it clearly to someone who is coming to it for the first time. Addressing this problem requires a slightly different kind of dogfooding - finding some way to approach your assignment the way a beginner would. This was the challenge for Sarah Brown Wessling (@SarahBWessling), a high school English teacher and the 2010 National Teacher of the Year. Early in her career, she had tasked her students with doing a literary analysis of The Great Gatsby, but one student just wasn't getting it. After several one-on-one sessions with the student, including think-alouds and looking at student models, Sarah still wasn't able to make the task clear, and the student never quite got it. "I had been asking her to do something that I could already do," Sarah says. "I had already read The Great Gatsby. I had written papers on it. I had analyzed it. It was not hard for me. And because I couldn't struggle along with her, I couldn't help her."

Determined to do a better job the following year, Sarah took a week after school let out for the summer and headed straight for the closest university library. "I didn't pull out books on how to teach literary analysis," she says. "Instead, I had the assignment sheet that I'd given my students, and I grabbed a book that was hard for me, a book I hadn't read - I grabbed some Proust. I sat down with two notebooks. In one notebook I did the assignment that I'd given my students. In the other notebook, I wrote down everything my brain did as I did that assignment." By the end of that week, Sarah had discovered a clearer approach to tackling literary analysis with her students, and was better able to explain it the following year.

7. Tweak your design.

I can't count the number of times I have gone to fill out a form - as a student and just in regular life - and didn't have enough room for something I had to write. I really wish more people would try completing their own forms. And who makes more "forms" than teachers? We create worksheets, tests, even online forms that may very well need some editing in their design. Attempting to complete them yourself is a simple form of dogfooding that can immediately show you when you have asked for a paragraph but only offer an inch of writing space, when you have set lines way too close together, or when you have provided way more space than is needed for an entry, which can make students question the quality of their response. It's just a little thing, this spacing issue, but little things can add up. Once you build this into your practice, you'll get better at spacing things right the first time around.

Although adding dogfooding to your planning process will take extra time, consider the alternative: If you don't troubleshoot an assignment before giving it to students, you could be setting yourself up for hours of frustration as you attempt to re-teach concepts, provide time for students to re-do assignments, explain requirements to parents via phone or email, make adjustments to your schedule for activities that were timed wrong, or even deal with discipline issues that result from students just not getting what they're supposed to do. Eating your own dogfood is time well spent, a simple way to take your practice one step closer to perfection.

Yum. ♥

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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Dogfooding: How Often Do You Do Your Own Assignments?

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It's time to add dogfooding -- the practice of using your own product as a consumer in order to find and fix the bugs -- to our own teaching practice.

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The Myth of average

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The Myth of Average:  Todd Rose at TEDxSonomaCounty

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UDL Critique

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By Nancy Bailey

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a part of the new Every Student Succeeds Act. It promotes what is heralded as a new way to reach students with diverse needs. It sounds new agey.
Some Background
But what does this miracle program have that those of us who worked in special education for years don't? You may, like me, scratch your head at first.

Much harm has been done to public schools, special education, and the teaching profession with high-stakes testing.

Most of us understand that such testing was meant to shut down public schools.

Insisting that every child, even those with the most challenging medical disabilities, reach the same standards, has meant that teachers, good teachers, would fail. Schools would close. Special education would cease.
Promising the Universe
Claiming that everyone could reach the same standards was a lie. Almost everyone knew it, but it went on anyway because corporate powers and corrupt politicians were permitted to make such claims all in the name of privatizing education.

So here comes UDL which promises assessment geared to the individual needs of the student whatever those needs might be.

Suddenly, everyone is on board for diversity-the extreme opposite of the agenda used to decimate public education, special education, and the teaching profession!

Even people like Jeb Bush are suddenly excited for differentiated or "customized" learning. One wonders how many third graders had to flunk the FCAT before Jeb figured out that students learn differently.

Teachers who work with students who have a variety of special needs, who could never have been fully prepared for such a wealth of differences, are now supposed to rejoice that UDL has arrived.
Breaking it Down
Never mind if it's confusing. To read about UDL and its brain studies can be a challenge for the best of us. It's mystifying.
Sprinkled throughout the newly reauthorized version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are references to an instructional strategy that supporters think has enormous potential for reaching learners with diverse needs. A universally designed lesson, for example, might include audiovisual components, illustrations, traditional lectures, enlarged print, or glossaries so that students can have easy access to unfamiliar terms. Universal design for learning also encourages students to use a variety of techniques, such as group projects, multimedia presentations, drawings, or music. Within the Every Student Succeeds Act, the latest update of the ESEA, Congress said that states should adhere to principles of universal design for learning as they develop student assessments. The law also calls for states to create plans for comprehensive literacy instruction and to incorporate universal design for learning principles in those plans.
Education Week says,

Enormous potential? Haven't special educators always searched for multiple ways to reach learners?

In fact, wasn't that the point of special education? An Individual Educational Plan sealed the deal.

And we've always searched for literacy programs that work. It's been the quest of good teachers everywhere to search for effective reading curriculum.

The only thing that UDL has that is different from what special and general educators do is online modules that are geared to individual students at their level.
What Goes Around, Comes Around...Only Privatized Online

That's the real difference. UDL is competency-based education or personalized learning.

So, after years of standardization, computer modules geared to individual needs sounds like something special. Online assessment at the child's pace sounds nice too.

To get to this point, it is important that the UDL promoters make sure the buyers understand that it is more than computer instruction. They realize parents might not like their kids having all-day screen time.

But when one strips away all the universal, individually diverse, flexibility talk, the only thing different between UDL and special education is sticking kids online for instruction for personalized learning. Unfortunately, learning by machine is not really so personalized.

What is different is teachers are not teachers. The classroom is different too. The computer takes over.

Those from groups like Teach for America and Relay Graduate School of Education are at this moment learning how to plug kids in. They will be facilitators making sure the computer is working and that students sit in their chairs straight.
Reference
It all makes sense now. It's the universal design for privatization, and it's created by corporate America to replace democratic public schools.
If you want to learn about how we came to this point of losing our public schools, check out my new book.
Samuels, Christina A. "ESSA Spotlights Strategy to Reach Diverse Learners." Education Week. February 23, 2016.

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Universal Design for Learning or Microcosm for Destruction?

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By Nancy Bailey Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a part of the new Every Student Succeeds Act. It promotes what is heralded as a new way to reach students with diverse needs. It sounds new agey. Some Background But what does this miracle program have that those of us who worked in special education for years don't?

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Chapter 3 of UDL: Theory and practice

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Introduction

Experience and common sense suggest that all individuals are unique and learn in ways that are, to varying degrees, particular to them. And in the past quarter century, science has elucidated the great variability of the human capacity to learn. Yet our educational system is designed around the idea that most people learn the same way and that a "fair" education is an identical one. These ideas influence every aspect of our educational system. To understand why we need to move away from these underlying assumptions, we turn to the latest findings on the learning brain.

From one perspective, human brains are remarkably similar. But to neuroscientists, this similarity is an illusion-an artifact of inspecting them from afar. Up close, individual brains are remarkable distinctive in their anatomy, chemistry, and physiology. Like each person's fingerprints, every brain is unique. Yet some of the differences are systematic and predictable. Scientists often seek to uncover these systematic differences by comparing the brains of individuals from different groups, such as people of different genders, ages, cultures, native languages, or degrees of expertise.

What they find is fascinating. Consider the brain scan in the image below.

In an experiment looking for physiological differences, researchers explored how the brains of individuals diagnosed with autism differ from those not diagnosed with autism. They asked both groups to engage in exactly the same task-an intelligence measure called the Raven's Progressive Matrices-while measuring their brain activity via scanning technologies such as FMRIs and PET scans. They found little difference between the two groups in most areas of the brain, but there was one area (an area of complex visual perception highlighted in yellow in Figure 3.1) where the individuals with autism differed quite consistently from the comparison group.

How can we interpret this difference? Many people might assume that the highlighted area would represent some kind of damage or dysfunction among individuals with autism. But the findings actually show something quite different. On this type of task, individuals with autism generally show superior performance. The scientists were not looking for sources of dis-ability but rather vari-ability. They were looking for what is different about the brains of individuals with autism who have enhanced abilities.

The brains of individuals with autism do show some systematic patterns that differ from the brains of those not identified as autistic. Whether that variation is a liability or a benefit depends entirely on the task being performed. On the Raven's Progressive Matrices, individuals with autism tend to perform better. On a different measure of intelligence-for instance, one that relies primarily on language-individuals with autism usually underperform when compared with others.

Dig Deeper
Autism: enhanced or diminished abilities?
Several recent studies have shown differences in people with and without autism with regard to brain activity during tasks, including finding that "autistics" have enhanced perceptual abilities in certain domains including when engaged in visual search, visual discrimination, and embedded figure detection. They also show stronger physiological engagement of the visual system.

In general, however, studies that show differences between brains of people with and without autism attribute negative outcomes to the differences. For example, Spencer and colleagues (2011) showed differences in the neural response to facial expression of emotion between unaffected siblings of individuals with autism and neurotypical controls with no family history of autism. They used fMRI to examine response to happy versus neutral faces. They found significant reduction within brain areas implicated in empathy and face processing in the sibling group as opposed to the control group. Though the groups did not have differences in their response time or accuracy behaviorally (i.e., not on the neuroscience task), the authors interpreted the differences they did find in the sibling group as negative since there was a familial link to autism.

For more information and to read these studies, see Souliéres, I., Dawson, M., Samson, F. Barbeau, E. B., Sahyoun, C. P., Strangman, G. E., Zeffiro, T. A., & Mottron, L. Enhanced visual processing contributes to matrix reasoning in autism (2009), Samson, Mottron, Soulières, & Zeffiro, Enhanced visual functioning in autism: An ALE meta-analysis (2011), and Spencer, M. D., Holt, R. J., Chura, L.R., Suckling, J., Calder, A. J., Bullmore, E. T., Baron-Cohen, S., A novel functional brain imaging endophenotype of autism: the neural response to facial expression of emotion (2011).

Another interesting aspect of this study is the research team itself. One of the authors, Michelle Dawson, is herself autistic. Her colleague for the past seven years, neuroscientist Laurent Mottron, recently wrote a fascinating article in the influential journal Nature titled, "Changing Perceptions: the Power of Autism." In addition to describing their research, Mottron explains the benefits that his colleague Michelle Dawson brings to their scientific investigations. He writes:

"Dawson's keen viewpoint also keeps the lab focused on the most important aspect of science: data. She has a bottom-up heuristic, in which ideas come from the available facts, and from them only. As a result, her models never over-reach, and are almost infallibly accurate, but she does need a very large amount of data to draw conclusions. By contrast, I have a top-down approach: I grasp and manipulate general ideas from fewer sources, and, after expressing them in a model, go back to facts supporting or falsifying this model. Combining the two types of brains in the same research group is amazingly productive."

Both the science and the scientists in this research point to the pervasiveness and the power of variability.

In this chapter we explore what is systematic and important about variability for teachers and learners. Learners are highly variable, but that variation is not chaotic. Of course, each learner is unique; but learners share common, predictable patterns of variability that are very useful to consider when designing learning environments.

Reflect

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Experience and common sense suggest that all individuals are unique and learn in ways that are, to varying degrees, particular to them. And in the past quarter century, science has elucidated the great variability of the human capacity to learn.

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UDL and the learning brain

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Straight from the source Instructions