UDL Notebook: Reflective Journaling

My previous blog post discussed a strategy I have developed called Casual Conversation. I have found this to be an effective tool for teaching my students conversational skills and giving them a chance to practice the skills on a regular basis with a wide variety of partners. This strategy has numerous benefits, but the ostensible aim is to prepare kids for more structured, academic conversations down the road, particularly during UDL-friendly activities such as group projects and conferences with the teacher. In this post, I will discuss another strategy, Reflective Journaling, which helps me both bridge the gap between Casual Conversation and academic discussions and connect SEL skills and the Affective Domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Don’t worry, I’ll explain) to other parts of my curriculum. 

As I have discussed in my previous UDL-related blog posts, I believe that Engagement is the important first step in successful UDL implementation. For me, engagement is not about trying to entertain my students or motivate them with extrinsic rewards. On the contrary, I want the positive experiences of being in a safe, comfortable environment; having their interests and preferences taken into consideration; and being given ample opportunities to collaborate and communicate with their fellow classmates to be their own rewards. In order for my students to take full advantage of these experiences, they need to have strong SEL skills and be self-directed learners who value growing as learners and thinkers. To this end, I have developed daily journaling activities that allow my students to reflect deeply on their current skills in these areas and discuss how to improve them with classmates.

SEL Journaling

As you are likely aware, there are five SEL competencies that we humans need in order to thrive as learners, friends, employees, and family members. These are: self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Together, the five competencies make up half of the content of my daily journaling activities. The method I employ is to focus on a single competency for an entire week before moving onto the next one. On day one of a week, I introduce (or reintroduce) the competency and the first journal prompt. After being given about 10 minutes to reflect and journal on the prompt, students participate in a simple Kagan structure in order to share their thoughts with at least one other student. Finally, we share out with the whole class, except in instances where I feel the topic might be a bit sensitive. 

The daily journal prompts for a given SEL competency are inspired by the following resource from CASEL.

I make a Google Slides presentation that can be displayed on the board; this includes CASEL’s definition of the competency and the bullet-pointed examples that accompany it. I have also embedded a YouTube link to a mix of calming music to be played while the kids reflect and write. I also write myself a note in the “speaker notes” section about which Kagan structure would work well with the prompt. See the example below.

I tend to turn the aforementioned bullet-points into prompt questions whenever possible. When it comes to SEL questions, I don’t worry about whether they pertain to school directly; SEL skills are useful 24 hours a day.

I also make a student version of the weekly Slides presentation with room for the kids to type their responses into text boxes. One great thing about this activity is that the writing the kids are doing is low-stakes. I tell them to just write whatever comes to mind without worrying about spelling or grammar. This helps set the stage for more formal writing assignments that also address SEL, such as personal narratives. Here is an example of a student Slide presentation.

The Affective Domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy

The other major set of competencies I address with Reflective Journaling is The Affective Domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This is the lesser-known sibling of the famous Cognitive Domain. The Affective Domain was created by Bloom and his colleagues to measure how much value a student places on a subject or activity. This is a rather pathetic explanation, but there really isn’t space here to go into more detail. Suffice it to say that each level of the Affective Domain provides a nice platform for a week’s worth of journaling prompts about a student’s personal engagement with their learning.

Aside from the obvious differences between SEL and the Affective Domain, the formatting of the journaling activities is the same. Here is an example of an AD prompt:

Given that there are five levels of both SEL and Bloom’s Affective Domain, a week’s worth of journal entries on each level can fill an entire trimester. By that time, it is appropriate to begin revisiting the skills you worked on in the beginning of the year or tackle an entirely different domain of Engagement.

I have found that Reflective Journaling is a great way to help educate my students about these important aspects of Engagement, and the Kagan structures that follow their journaling definitely help to solidify that learning.

Writing Every Day,

Eric Lovein

UDL Notebook: It’s Casual

My previous blog post discussed the importance of classroom environment when it comes to engaging and supporting students in UDL. I provided a multitude of examples of how I have tried to enhance the vibes in my classroom this year so that it could help, “minimize threats and distractions, foster collaboration and community, and facilitate personal coping skills and strategies,” for my students. In this post, I will discuss one of my favorite new strategies for making use of this space and helping students learn the crucial communication skills they need to be successful UDL participants. I call this strategy “Casual Conversation,” which is a very literal, unimaginative name for it.

Readers of my two previous UDL blog posts are likely tired of me citing entire paragraphs from the Engagement portion of the UDL Progression Rubric in order to support my assertions, so I am going to try to refrain from doing that wherever possible. I will leave it to you to decide if you would like to review it before proceeding, but I can tell you that there are many instances throughout the rubric in which students are expected to confidently and respectfully express themselves to both their peers and their teacher. As I discussed in my previous post, I feel that a first step to properly behaving and communicating in a classroom environment is to practice doing these things in less formal settings. If a student is incapable of holding a polite, casual conversation with a friend or classmate, what hope do they have of participating in something as formal, structured, and academic as a Socratic Seminar or Literature Circle?

As parents, my wife and I are able to ensure that our children are given ample opportunities to participate in conversations with a wide variety of interlocutors around the dinner table, on car rides, at family get-togethers, and during play dates. Frequently, we either participate in these conversations directly or surreptitiously eavesdrop on them (Don’t pretend you’ve never done this, my fellow parents!). Either way, we use these opportunities to provide our kids with feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of their respective conversation skills. Intentionally or otherwise, we also model what polite conversations look like on a regular basis (I mean, I hope we do…usually). All of these considerations led me to an obvious question: How could I curate similar experiences for my students in class? Here are some things that occurred to me as I began to formulate an answer to this:

• I would want my students to practice their conversation skills with a wide variety of peers (By the way, this is actually an advantage that all teachers have over parents: the potential partner combinations are seemingly endless!). I could have each student spend a solid week partnering with every other student in the class. This would mean that, eventually, every student would have spent quality time getting to know every one of their classmates. This would certainly foster a more positive, friendly, and safe classroom environment in which kids would be comfortable working with just about anyone in their class. 

Display of weekly partners from a Google Slide presentation

• I would want there to be a focus on learning to sustain friendly conversations with peers with whom students would not usually choose to converse regularly. A big emphasis should be put on having a positive attitude when discovering who they are being partnered with and finding ways to be empathetic and kind towards even their least favorite fellow students. I would also like them to learn to find at least one connection to each of their classmates.  

• I would like to teach conversation skills explicitly but in a low-stakes environment. A quick mini-lesson (perhaps in the form of a video) on a specific skill before the casual conversations begin should do the trick. I could cycle through the same 10-15 skills every 2 or 3 weeks, and the students should be allowed to decide whether they would like to deliberately focus on the daily skill (perhaps it’s already a strength of theirs and they’d prefer to focus on something else). 

• Skills can include things like: taking turns speaking, active listening, reading facial expressions, keeping personal space, staying on topic, asking questions, and making comments.

I have found some wonderful YouTube videos on conversation skills, including this one on Active Listening.

• Partners should be allowed to sit together wherever they want; this is an opportunity for them to use the cushions, blankets, and other alternative seating discussed in my previous blog post.

• Some chill music should play quietly in the background (like in a café!).

• A daily Google Slide with the skill lesson and other suggestions can be displayed on the Smartboard while the kids chat. A reminder can be posted on the slide to start their Casual Conversations with a friendly greeting and a quick SEL-style check-in to see how their partners are feeling. A list of suggested icebreakers can also be posted, but kids should understand that the icebreakers are only there to support them if they are struggling to generate their own topics of conversation. Additionally, prompts for the kids to show appreciation to their partners and end the conversation with a friendly salutation can be included. 

Prompts remind students to greet each other, check in, show appreciation, and end the conversation with a friendly salutation. There are also some Ice Breakers borrowed from our district’s SEL Toolkit.

As you can see, a strategy that seemed almost comically simple when I first conceived of  it ended up being far more complex and nuanced than I could have imagined, but it is not an exaggeration to say that it was an obvious success from the moment we first tried it. I was shocked at how quickly my kids embraced Casual Conversation, and their feedback was immediately positive. They now get quite frustrated with me when I do not manage to fit it into our schedule, and this is probably the most meaningful way in which it contributes to the larger goal of improved engagement: It is something my kids look forward to every day, and we all need more of that in our lives!

Writing Every Day,

Eric Lovein

UDL Notebook: Café Vibes

My previous blog post provided a brief overview of UDL and discussed why Engagement is the logical first step in developing a UDL classroom. Using the UDL Progression Rubric, I described the characteristics of a successful UDL student, and I briefly mentioned the fact that I have tried to make my classroom a more enjoyable, relaxing place to learn. In this post, I will elaborate on how I have done that and what I still hope to improve about my students’ learning environment in the near future.

The first thing you should know is that, before this school year, my classroom was an incredibly underwhelming place to visit. I’ve always been a, “It’s not about where we are learning but what we are learning,” kind of guy. If I’m honest with myself, I simply didn’t have a lot of confidence in my decorating skills, nor was I overly-motivated to improve them. After reading through the Progression Rubric’s descriptions and examples of what it means for a student to be truly engaged in the UDL sense, I realized that my classroom needed a major facelift. Using several  of the Engagement standards as a guide, I tried to envision what a classroom that could minimize threats and distractions (7.3), foster collaboration and community (8.3), and facilitate personal coping skills and strategies (9.2) would look like. The below graphic shows the Emerging, Proficient, and Progressing Toward Expert Practice levels of each of the three standards I have deemed most relevant to my classroom environment. Unlike with some rubrics, each of these levels is worth a gander. Even the Emerging level descriptions have some great suggestions for getting started.

After absorbing the information in these standards, I settled on the idea of creating a café vibe. The rabbit-hole thinking that led me to this decision went something like this: 

1. I eventually want my students to become self-knowing, self-sufficient, self-disciplined, self-guided, and self-motivated learners. This seems like a pretty ambitious goal.

2. To the extent that my own children at home possess these capacities, I feel like they developed a lot of them outside of the classroom. Visits to parks, gardens, museums, beaches, restaurants, libraries, forests, and theaters have provided my wife and me with ample opportunities to teach our kids to explore their curiosities and interests, advocate for themselves and take chances, and learn to act responsibly in a variety of social contexts.

3. While I cannot take my 30 students to these sorts of places on a regular basis, perhaps I can, to some extent, replicate the most important aspects of these experiences for them while they are at school. 

4. By “the most important aspects,” I mean the parts where they are: directly taught how to get the most out of each experience while allowing others to do the same, being given ample opportunities to practice these skills, and consistently reflecting on their successes and failures.

5. Building on the theme of social contexts, here are some of my initial ideas:

1. I could have a recurring activity called “In the Restaurant” in which I teach a mini-lesson on restaurant etiquette, table manners, or appropriate topics for discussion while eating. The kids could then eat lunch in my classroom at tables done up to look like restaurant tables. Students could then be instructed to practice any skills that have been taught in said mini-lessons, perhaps with parent volunteers acting as hosts/hostesses and waiters/waitresses.

2. Similarly we could have an SEL-related activity called “In the Café.” Kids could sit in comfortable spaces around the room, sipping beverages (perhaps served up by parent volunteers), and having casual conversations with predesignated partners after a mini-lesson on conversation skills. Note: A version of this idea has evolved into an activity called “Casual Conversations”—much more on this later (mostly in my next blog post). 

6. The thinking behind UDL originated in architecture—the idea being that the built environment should work for everyone. Therefore, it is incumbent upon me to make my classroom as comfortable and functional as possible. This should include flexible seating and spaces to accommodate a wide range of activities, discussions, and projects. I am picturing something like the shared work area of a hipster tech company designed to allow people and ideas to flow freely while some cool music plays quietly in the background. Words like “cozy,” “chill,” “warm,” “welcoming,” “fun,” and “stimulating” all spring to mind.

7. I want my kids talking to each other (and me!) constantly in a wide variety of structures and contexts. These should include, but not be limited to: Kagan structures, Literature Circles, Philosophical Chairs, Socratic Seminars, Casual Conversations, group projects, and student/teacher conferences. Some of these structures will require tables (Kagan team activities and group projects), while many others will require open floor space and cushions, pillows, blankets and other flexible seating options. This will be particularly important if I expect my students to, “construct their own groups and create their own group norms, responsibilities, etc. and students often seek out and work with diverse partners.”

I am still a bit self-conscious about my room’s appearance, mostly because I have no confidence in my design sense, but there is no denying that it looks a heck of a lot better than it has at any time in the last dozen years (not a high bar to clear). Here are some of the positive changes I have made on a budget (See the accompanying photos for visual proof):

• I ripped down my decades-old “fadeless” paper and replaced it with spanking new brick and wood designs that evoke a reclaimed space in DTLA.

• I bought fake plants of various shapes and sizes and used them to green up my classroom environment.

• I repurposed my cubby holes to serve as yoga studio-style storage spaces for my kids’ cushions and blankets—used for sitting comfortably on the floor during old-school read alouds, Casual Conversations, and collaborative learning.

• I bought/requisitioned a variety of chairs and stools that kids can use in the aforementioned contexts. 

• I replaced my old, faded, sad-looking informational posters with fresh ones. I have always prioritized information when it comes to wall decor, and I think UDL makes this more important than ever; if I want my kids working independently or on group projects based on personal interests, I still need them to work within the meta-cognitive guidelines I have set forth. For instance, If I am teaching you how to Report Information by Comparing and Contrasting in Social Studies by writing about a self-selected topic, I am still going to expect you to use the resources around my classroom on things like Double Bubble Maps, Sourcing, Contextualization, and Corroboration (See below photos for examples).

Fresh paper, college signs and Kagan mats, fresh informational posters 

Large open space for bringing kids to carpet or allowing them to stretch out while having Casual Conversations or participating in Kagan structures, cubbies with cushions and blankets, plants for touches of green

Here are some further ideas for my classroom upgrade that I hope to incorporate in the near future:

• Continue to add more cozy seating options, including a sofa if possible. Coffee and side tables would also be cool.

• Add a rack or shelving in my sink area where each student can keep a mug for beverages.

The UDL Progression Rubric has certainly convinced me that enhancing my classroom environment is a key to improving student engagement. In my next post, I will discuss one of my early engagement successes: Casual Conversation.

Writing Every Day,

Eric Lovein

UDL Notebook: Engagement First

Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend a two-day district training on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) presented by the wonderful Nicole Tucker-Smith. I came away convinced that I needed to immediately begin implementing UDL in my classroom. If you are not familiar with UDL, its basic premise is that all students can learn and be successful if classrooms and lessons are designed to meet their individual needs. The principles of UDL originated in architecture. The staircase/ramp pictured below is a perfect example; anyone, regardless of their preference or ability, can use it to reach the top. 

You can think of UDL as comprehensive differentiation that meets the needs of all students in three core areas: Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression. As you can see in the graphic below, Engagement is the “Why?” of student learning; here we are concerned with motivation, affect, agency, interest and SEL skills. Representation involves what methods and materials are being used for and by the student to learn the required content; if the objective is for the student to learn how to add mixed numbers using the standard algorithm, the means (or path) to this objective can be varied (realia, videos, white boards, etc.). Finally, Action & Expression concerns the assessment of the student’s learning. If the objective is for the student to demonstrate knowledge of the causes of the American Revolution, the way they demonstrate this knowledge (the product) can be varied (presentation, video, essay, skit, test, news article, etc.).

Obviously, designing your classroom learning environment and lessons to accommodate the unique needs of each student sounds like a daunting task, and I will not try to make an argument to the contrary. I will, however, propose a method for slowly rolling out UDL in your classroom over a series of years, which I hope you will find logical and reasonable. For a variety of reasons, I feel it makes sense to, initially, only tackle one of the aforementioned core areas each year, beginning with engagement in year one.

This UDL Progression Rubric is designed to help teachers monitor their own progress towards “Expert Practice” and is a great way to get a clear picture of what a well-designed UDL classroom could look like. My fear is that a skeptical teacher could read through the various descriptions of how students would operate in such a classroom and determine that “we just don’t have the kinds of kids who can do these things.” Initially, I shared this concern, but I soon realized that, if our kids lack the skills and competencies to be UDL students, then teaching them these skills and competencies should be job one. I began referring to the prerequisites they would need as a “meta-curriculum.” In other words, to as great an extent as possible, I should try to weave them into everything I do all day.

It is clear that the architects of UDL view Engagement as the first, crucial step towards UDL success. This makes perfect sense, given that students who feel they are in a safe, welcoming environment in which their own interests and abilities are taken into consideration are much more likely to be ready and motivated to learn. In my view, a teacher who is reaching “Expert Practice” levels in Engagement has already gone a long way towards preparing students to be successful in the areas of Representation and Action & Expression. In the rest of this post, I will describe what I perceive to be the ideal UDL student and classroom environment and lay out some strategies I have begun to use with my own students to set them up for success. Future blog posts will explore these strategies in deeper detail.

In the “Recruiting Interest” section of the Engagement progression rubric, you will see terms like “make choices or suggest alternatives,” “authentic,” “self-monitor and reflect,” and “self-advocate.” All of these terms paint a picture of a student who is confident, assertive, motivated, and self-aware in terms of both their personal interests and social-emotional needs. One of Dr. Hammond’s goals involves increasing students’ self-efficacy, which dovetails perfectly with the above description. Of course, a student who is designing their own projects and assignments and monitoring their learning environment for distractions and threats is taking a great deal of ownership of their learning and likely experiencing a strong sense of agency.

The “Sustaining Effort and Persistence” section talks about students creating their own personal goals, selecting their own content and assessments, and collaborating “to add to the multiple options offered to challenge themselves and identify appropriate resources that connect to their interests and passions.” These goals imply a similar need for the skills and competencies mentioned above. Additionally, the teacher is expected to, “Create a classroom culture where students work together to define goals, create strategies, provide feedback to each other and push each other with mastery-oriented feedback while building integrative thinking,” and empower students, “to use mastery-oriented feedback independently to self-reflect, self-direct, and pursue personal growth in areas of challenge.” When I first read these descriptions (along with those in the Recruiting Interest section), I realized that all five of the SEL competencies (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social-Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision-Making) were going to be crucial to cultivating such classroom cultures and students.

Speaking of SEL skills, the third and final section of the area of Engagement is called “Self-Regulation,” which is just another term for self-management, but this area requires even more than that. Here, students are expected to be willing and able to support their, “own self-talk and support one another's positive attitudes toward learning.” These goals require both self-efficacy and relationship skills. Further, students should, “self-reflect, accurately interpret their feelings, and use appropriate coping strategies and skills to foster learning for themselves and their classmates.” SEL, SEL, SEL. 

It is an oversimplification to say that the Engagement portion of the UDL is simply SEL by another name. While SEL skills clearly play a major role, there is also a strong academic bent to this area which includes a student’s ability to identify their own preferred learning styles, settings, strengths, weaknesses, and interests. In addition, the student should be able to create their own learning plans, self-assessments, rubrics, and projects. There is also a collaborative aspect to Engagement, which clearly benefits from social awareness and relationship skills but also requires the ability to have academic discussions.

This year, I have tasked myself with experimenting with various ideas for improving my classroom Engagement. So far, these ideas have included making my classroom a more relaxing and enjoyable place to learn and teaching my students to engage in casual conversations. I have also tied Engagement to my ELA instruction by giving my kids regular opportunities to reflect on their SEL competencies and academic skills through journaling and Kagan structures, reading novels and Wonders stories that address SEL skills, and writing personal narratives that involve their experiences with the aforementioned competencies and skills. Over the course of the next few months, I will delve deeper into each of these areas and report on any future ideas with which I begin experimenting.

Writing Every Day,

Eric Lovein

The Mega Task Demand: Metacognition...Oh, We are Thinking About Thinking, I Think…

 By Heather Pfrunder, M.A.Ed.   SDC Teacher and Education Specialist

September 20, 2021

It’s a mantra in my SDC classroom where I am verbally redirecting students on how to work attentively: “looking eyes, listening ears, eyes on paper, moving pencil on paper, thinking about your work,...no, try first then I can help you”...and repeat. And repeat.  I should auto-record myself, make a playlist, and hit the numbered response.  Ew, that last thought was not so stellar. But hey, in my humanness, it snuck in there.  And if you have ever taught students with metacognition challenges maybe you, too, have winced over such a thought.  So, I must ask myself: Am I really teaching thinking about thinking?  When I started this article, I was pretty sure the answer was, “Yes!  Graphic organizers and I are friends!” I can do amazing things with BoardMaker!” [For my Gen Ed teacher friends, this is a program where you create learning tools with picture icons matched with words for visual learners]. But here’s the thing about writing, you really have to research and self-reflect.  So, I’ve come face-to-face with this large mental image of a K-W-L chart.  So let’s break it down:

What we know is that metacognition in its simplest form is simply an “awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes”  (thank you Merriam-Webster).  For students with sensory processing issues, I find that often they want to focus on their own little inner worlds to find that slice of happiness, bringing them back to the uncomfortable reality of learning challenges can feel like stopping a tsunami from the shoreline.  

What we want to know is how to make this relevant for our a-typical students. 

What I learned is:

 1.) “Assign explicit instruction that addresses not just what you are learning, but how you are learning.” 

However, applying it to a lesson for an a-typical learner, often this means a visual model, a check-list of expectations, and repeat practice. Which is great (and essential for many of our visual learners with cognitive delays), but it may not be self-reflective. Instead what we often find is cognitively passive behaviors: “I counted the dots (TouchMath) and wrote the answer, I earned my tokens (my class reward system), got my i-Pad time (SDC earned time with a favorite item - the i-Pad)…”  So often it feels like a compliance check -- not actual thinking about thinking.  Learning this way is gradual, but for our non-verbal learners visual checklists of looking between the cue and the task is not merely to complete the task, but to “regulate performance and verify accuracy” through “self-monitoring” and to “signal task completion.” (Richie, G. 2005). So to be effective metacognition tools our lists cannot just be generalities, but more specific with careful thought about the actual thought process required to learn a task.

This is one of my more general in-task directions for functional skills.  

Relevant, but not specific to meta-cognition.

2.) “They must be taught the concept and its language explicitly.”

This, I believe, is the golden ticket.  If it is connected to previous skills and taught over time

we can get students thinking about what they understood or didn’t.  Not just a simple exit ticket,

but “What did I understand?” and “What doesn’t make sense?”  

Examples of this:

• “I answered the question by finding the key words in the question and underlining my text evidence”

• “I decoded while reading”

• “I recognized story sequence”

• “I counted all”

• “I regrouped”

Yup, those “I Can…” statements attached to those state standards.  However, we explicitly reflect “I did” or “I did NOT” understand.  Now we have active participants in the meta-cognition process.

When I go back into my previous check lists, they are still pretty relevant for functional skills.  However, I am looking forward to continuing on looking at objectives and having my students exit by answering self-reflection learning questions (for that last token on their token boards).  And rather than reinvent the wheel, I am going to initially have my students reference the anchor charts at my centers to reflect on their learning. 

This is a how-to process visual, but not totally self-reflective. 

I will have to add a process to this.

This is great for setting expectations, but not specific meta-cognition.

This is much better for explicitly teaching the learning process!

This anchor chart has the thinking process and the self-reflection embedded into it.

 I am looking to really celebrate learning!  And just maybe, it will be my students saying,  “looking eyes, listening ears, eyes on paper, moving pencil on paper, thinking about my work, try it first…”

********************************

Join me in upcoming blog posts where I put these strategies into place and share resources!

References:

Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved 9/20/2021 from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

Richie, G. (2005). Two Interventions that enhance the metacognition of students with disabilities: Cognitive Cue Cards and Correspondence Training.  Retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ914572.pdf