UDL + Lessons for EDU 372 - Thomas Zak by Thomas Zak

AI Lesson Plan #1 for EDU 372 (5th grade)

thomaszak1 — 2025-02-20 17:37:13 UTC

This lesson centers around the three branches of government in the US and seeks to get students to understand both the similarities and differences between all three branches of government. To do this, the lesson plan has students completing a Venn diagram to visually compare and contrast each branch. In terms of whether the lesson meets any of UDL’s guidelines, the Venn diagram activity meets the UDL goal of “organizing information and resources”. This is because both the teacher- and student-led portions of the activity feature people using a visual template to organize information and highlight patterns that appear across all three different branches of government. The subsection for the UDL consideration of “Organize information and resources” (from Design Multiple Means of Action & Expression) lists “Use graphic organizers and templates for data collection and organizing information & Use prompts for categorizing, systematizing, and discovering themes and patterns”, which this lesson plan does. Also, in using a Venn diagram as the catch-all for student knowledge in this lesson, the lesson plan is successfully utilizing the literacy strategy of using a graphic organizer to help students learn. I would use this strategy because it made the information accessible by making it visually appealing and necessitating collaboration between peers to come to a finished product that was more informationally expansive than it would have been had students worked on it individually.

AI Lesson Plan #2 for EDU 372 (6th grade)

thomaszak1 — 2025-02-20 17:39:13 UTC

This lesson plan for sixth grade revolves around teaching students the history of the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763, though it is more broadly teaching students how to relate geographic boundaries to history and how to recognize the consequences of instigating these boundaries. The lesson does meet UDL guidelines, but only somewhat, since it could stand to undergo some significant improvements to make it more accessible. In a video from Week 1 titled “When You Design for Everyone, EVERYONE Benefits from the Design”, it was explained that by creating dropped curbs, an architect made infrastructure that was more accessible for both people in wheelchairs and pushing baby strollers. The video explains that, “Universal design is built on the core belief that we should design environments to be useable by all people, without the need for adaptation or specialized design”. When it comes to Universal Design for Learning, this lesson is taking a step in the right direction by giving students a variety of accessible ways to display their learning. By having them draw on a map and then write about the history of the map drawing, the lesson is opening the door for multiple types of students to excel at this assignment. Both artistic students who learn better when they draw, and students who learn better when they write are given a chance to display their proficiency. But this lesson plan could still be improved by giving better accessibility to students who are neither good at drawing nor writing; students who fall under this umbrella could have a spoken component added onto the assignment as part of their exit ticket. For example, instead of doing a typical exit ticket written in short answer form, students who are better at speaking than writing or drawing could do bullet point notes on their exit ticket and audibly explain their end-of-day understanding to the teacher before they leave class. To make this lesson more accessible, I would introduce the literacy strategy of reciprocal teaching to the lesson plan, to give the students who excel at speaking an opportunity to thrive. To do so, I would implement the exit ticket change I explained above. Instead of having students answer their exit ticket questions in full sentences, I would have them do bullet point responses and then speak to explain their thinking behind their responses to me before they leave class for the day. I would do this to make learning more accessible to students who learn better when they talk, as opposed to when they write or draw. By reciprocating some of the information that the teacher gave to them throughout the class, the students form an example of reciprocal teaching.

AI Lesson Plan #3 for EDU 372 (7th grade)

thomaszak1 — 2025-02-20 17:41:26 UTC

Forming two strong sides of debate around the Trail of Tears, one side from the perspective of the Jackson Administration, and one side from the perspective of the Cherokee Nation is the goal and topic of this lesson plan. In having students work in teams to construct arguments and organize evidence to defend their assigned stances, students engage in peer interaction and collaboration. The IRIS Module about the Universal Design for Learning cites “creating opportunities for peer interaction and collaboration” as a key piece of implementing UDL, meaning that this lesson plan meets UDL guidelines for designing multiple means of engagement. Since the entire lesson plan is built around a debate, I believe it does a great job of using a content area literacy strategy to better students’ learning. I would have no problem using this strategy since in-class debates make history more accessible to students, and they do so by putting the class on an equal footing by having them all argue about a topic that they may not have even known about prior to class. This way, everyone is on the same level, while simultaneously all being sufficiently challenged.

AI Lesson Plan #4 for EDU 372 (8th grade)

thomaszak1 — 2025-02-20 17:43:21 UTC

In this lesson plan, students analyze how music has been used as a medium to enact civic change and address societal problems. This lesson plan is designed to increase students’ awareness of past civic issues and acknowledge that different mediums of messaging can be more impactful and far-reaching than others. One of UDL’s principles is engagement, which is discussed in the Week 1 video titled “Seeing UDL in Action in the Classroom”. The video explains that this principle is satisfied when, “teachers help students engage with learning by giving them choices and autonomy, and by incorporating their interests”. Given that music is and always has been a huge point of interest for students, having a lesson plan where students not only get to listen to music, but also analyze it for the power that it holds is incredible. The latter portion of the lesson plan involves the students making their own musical creation that brings attention to a current issue in their nation, with their choices for the project being a musical PSA, a protest song, or a spoken piece with relevant music in the background. Recording their own announcements or music pieces is a valuable literacy strategy to employ with students, and this project helps with accessibility since it gives students multiple avenues to expression. I would favor this strategy since students’ choices of what to do for the project are so varied; students are not limited to a singular format of audio recording, thus making the project’s end goals more accessible and achievable as a result.

AI Lesson Plan #5 for EDU 372 (9th grade)

thomaszak1 — 2025-02-20 17:45:04 UTC

There is not a one-size-fits-all approach to government for the plethora of different nations across the globe, and getting students to understand that each government is unique is one goal that many social studies classes have as a top priority. This lesson sets out to get students talking about these differences to understand them by means of a fishbowl discussion activity in which four different groups discuss the differences between the governments of the US, the UK, China, and Sweden, across three different rounds. Each person represents a specific government/group inside the fishbowl, meaning that each group only has to read about their government to prepare for the discussion. This way, every other group gets to learn about the other three groups’ governments by listening to the discussion, as opposed to having to do three additional sections of reading on the three other governments. This satisfies one portion of the section on “Designing Multiple Means of Representation” from the IRIS Module about the Universal Design for Learning. The portion I’m referring to reads that teachers should “present alternatives to text-based information (e.g., images, videos, interactive media, simulations)”, which this lesson plan does by giving students a fishbowl discussion to participate in instead of having more text-based reading. The fishbowl discussion that the lesson plan revolves around is the chosen content area literacy strategy for this lesson, and I believe that if it were to be executed in a real-life social studies class, the teacher would find the lesson to be successful. I would utilize this strategy myself because by having the students read and speak to a select quarter of information instead of every piece of it, I would be increasing the accessibility toward the information by giving students more time to meaningfully take it in. While on the back end of the lesson, the teacher is increasing the accessibility toward the other three remaining quarters of information by having students speak in and listen to a discussion in which other groups’ information is compared against the information each group began with. Similar to the front end of the lesson, observing and participating in this discussion presents students with another opportunity to meaningfully take in the information, albeit in a different way than when they began with it.

AI Lesson Plan #6 for EDU 372 (11th grade)

thomaszak1 — 2025-02-20 17:47:02 UTC

This lesson plan outlines instructions on how to help students understand political, cultural, economic, and regional connections to geography by having them complete a jigsaw activity. Given a vast array of resources such as physical and political world maps, satellite images, photographs, and visuals of economic data statistics, students are put into home groups of four and numbered off 1-4. Depending on which number they got, students meet up with their same-numbered peers; these groups of same-numbered students will be the “expert” groups that hone in on one topic in particular to teach to their home groups at the end of the expert study session. By the close of the expert study session, students go back to their original home groups and each student takes turns explaining their specific topic to their peers. This lesson plan meets the UDL guidelines from the subsection of “Highlight and explore patterns, critical features, big ideas, and relationships”, which is beneath the Design Multiple Means of Representation section of the guidelines. More specifically, by having expert groups analyze and then teach their peers with world maps, satellite images, photographs, and visuals of economic statistics, this lesson plan aligns itself with the guidelines’ instructions to have students “Highlight or emphasize key elements in text, graphics, diagrams, or formulas”. The jigsaw activity is an extremely useful literacy strategy, and I would use this strategy in a heartbeat to try to make learning more accessible to my class. Jigsaw activities make learning more accessible in the same way that the previous fishbowl lesson plan made learning more accessible. By divvying up the information so each individual student must only read up on one section of information and then get to have the remaining sections explained to them in discussion with their peers, the information is made a lot less difficult to grasp. Since the work is divided up, and the information is acquired in a variety of ways, learning is made more accessible.