UDL Conference
David Rose
1:00-2:15pm
Sugar Maple Ballroom
Davis Center
Let’s begin. We’re going to be passing around a microphone for questions. I want this to be a more discussion-oriented session. Are there any comments and questions that you have? I’m going to write them down to get them together a bit. Let’s hear any comments or questions that you have.
Female Student: I was very curious about a lot of the programs that you showed us in terms of cost. Are they available to everyone? Can my son use them online? Do school systems have to subscribe to them?
Female Student: I’m Cindy. I just have a comment on the scholastic program. Someone with Asperger syndrome will be caught up when she reads “diving deeper.” That’s something to think about when you look at the captioning issue.
Professor: That’s a great comment. They’ll take it literally.
Female Student: I haven’t quite formulated it in my mind, but I was thinking about how neuroscience connects with the changes from the adolescent brain to the adult brain, particularly in terms of engagement. Does UDL need to adapt to the adolescent brain? I’m a special educator in a middle school. How does UDL need to adapt to middle school aged kids, as opposed to college-aged adult learners?
Female Student: You had commented on brain development and the strategic planning part of the brain that can develop at different rates or ages. Understanding this, how does it impact our assessment of reading development?
Professor: You’re concerned with the maturational issue.
Female Student: Yes, because kids struggle with reading, and then in turn we say that they have a learning disability.
Female Student: I’m Rachel, and I’m a recent graduate of the neuroscience program here at UVM. I’m curious about all of these fun activities that are technology savvy. What happens when the middle school teacher isn’t comfortable with the technology? People have to be properly trained in order to employ these tools.
Female Student: I’m Jodie. If a student feels threatened when they’re called to read, can it be reversed? Is there a time when they will feel it as a challenge, as opposed to a threat?
Female Student: I’m Maria. My question is simple. What’s the difference, in your mind, between the UDI model and the UDL model?
Female Student: I’m Suzie. In the greater Burlington area, people have been trying to encourage the school district to hire more teachers of color. We have 3% of teachers of color, and 25% children of color. I’m wondering about stress and threat level and it’s association with this fact.
Female Student: I’m Haley, from UVM. Can the hippocampus grow back?
Female Student: I’m Mary-Beth. You talked about effective ways to communicate information to individuals, but you didn’t touch on ways for those individuals to communicate with educators and other students. I do a lot of work around effective communication practice, and I worry about the loss of tone and body language when you incorporate technology into communication.
Female Student: I’m Jean. Going back to the threat/challenge issue, is there a way to assess where a student is when she divides something between a threat and a challenge?
Male Student: I’m wondering if you’ve come up with ways for preparing faculty to understand invisible disabilities. They’re sometimes met with resistance, because of student performance. For those of us who aren’t neuroscientists, how can we get the message across to teachers without the brain scans and the language?
Professor: I think that’s enough to get us started. I’m expecting you to interrupt and ask questions. I want to go with some of the problems first, like cost and professional development. These are two typical barriers.
The things that I showed and that Skip will show range from no cost to very expensive. The example I gave isn’t sold to individuals, but it’s sold to schools. The school buys a site license. It’s pricy; it’s meant to replace the school library. That’d be horrible to say, but it’s meant to be comprehensive way that a wide variety of students can build their research, writing, and organizing skills. I should know the price, but I don’t. The book builder and things like that are free. There’s a ton of them now, and they’re quite amazing. The project that we’re doing with Google will be free.
I don’t know where the pricing is going. Scholastic has taken a comprehensive high-end approach. Read 180 is a big elephant thing that is very popular; there are thousands of schools on it now. It’s very expensive. It’s 25,000 dollars for a site license. They don’t sell to teachers, but to superintendents, who want to have a district-wide solution. All the publishers are in disarray about how they’re going to work in this digital world. They’re not sure how to go about doing this. I don’t think that, ultimately, everything free will work.
The project we’re doing with Google is potentially very different. There are these little books, which are interesting as pedagogies. Google’s going to have their own version of e-books coming out soon. It’s the equivalent of the kindle, but you read it on your laptop or phone. They’ll charge something, but I don’t know what they’ll charge. We’re proposing to them, and are working on, sending some examples of pedagogies that go with books. We’d make a bunch of examples, and would encourage thousands of teachers using them. We’d have a book, but it’s not good by itself. It’s an inert thing, but you can wrap around it all sorts of things that can make it strongly educative. Teachers need to do that, rather than authors. Somebody who knows about pedagogy needs to do this.
Here’s an example of something that I think would be really cool. Imagine that Google puts out all of these digital books. What are the pedagogy things that we can do to that? We’ve made a highlighter that allows you to look at the book and highlight and annotate it. You’ll be able to highlight and and write something about it, like “this is a complex sentence.” That’s no big deal. The big deal is showing where this can go. Suppose that you’re teaching your kids to find the main point. They have digital books, and they go in and highlight. With an ordinary highlighter, you’d spend a lot of time trying to find out if they understand it. This is a lot of trouble for you, and the kids get the feedback too late. With the digital highlighter tool, it’ll grab the whole book, and then you’ll be able to see instantly where your students highlighted.
You, as a teacher, can first highlight it yourself. You read the book and highlight it. The kid comes along, reads the book, and then is asked to highlight the main points. The kid can compare her highlights to the teacher’s highlights. That’s not the big deal. The big deal is that, because we’re on the web, we can have the whole class highlight a chapter. Imagine that you’re doing a science unit, and you want your students to highlight the main points. Everybody highlights, and the more kids who highlight a sentence, the brighter that sentence looks. This will make it a good guide for me as a reader. If my highlights aren’t there, and every student highlights a certain sentence, then that shows me that I may be off-target.
That’s just a little widget. If books are digital, you can literally have a teacher highlight a book for kids, or you can have all of the kids highlight it. You can highlight everything that’s a pro in red, or a con in blue. It allows you to grab things from the text and make sense of it.
With Google, we’re going to make a bunch of these applications that will be useful to teachers. We’ll essentially say, to Google, to let teachers make more things like this that would help. Let’s say you’re reading Brave New World, and one teacher’s already made a pedagogy app for it. She may sell it for a buck, or give it away to her friends. It’d be cool if teachers could make money making and selling apps that made Brave New World a much more instructive book. You’ll get the book, and you’ll get Cynthia’s annotations of it. It’s a better book with that application, not because you’re changing the book, but because you’re changing the pedagogy. That, I think, would be a cool future. It’s valued because the teachers can make the pedagogy. So far, this is pretty interesting.
Schmitt, the CEO, asked, “isn’t there some way that teachers can be stars on the Internet?” You see people make stupid little game apps, but we’re going to be making pedagogy apps. Hopefully somebody will know somebody in Idaho who’s a fabulous teacher, who wants to make an app. The way in which all of this works will change. I think it’ll be great if the book’s content were essentially free. Who cares? Content’s nothing. I think it’d be cool if people paid a lot for the pedagogy, for the things that the teacher did to make it really instructive. Any book is fine, but you’ll want the app that Cynthia made.
I think everybody’s going to want our highlighter and heat map. The redder something looks, the more kids think it’s important. A lot of you like to buy used books instead of new books, because you can see what other people think of as important.
Female Student: I had a visceral response, and it wasn’t the same. In response to the highlighting tool, I worry that when we get into how cool the tool is, everything turns backwards, and we talk to teachers, and decide to teach a lesson a certain way. It’s not that way. I don’t want to have a teacher or work with a teacher who wants to use the app, but I want to work with the teacher who’s goal-driven. I think that every time we talk about a digital school, we should talk about the other ways we can meet our education goals.
Professor: There are some things that are better-done without any technology. The ability to quickly share and see what everybody did is one of the ways in which this technology works. You can’t go around the class and look at everyone’s highlighter, but I think that the highlighter tool is a good use of technology for this reason.
Female Student: When we’re not in a digital divide.
Professor: The issue of, “we shouldn’t have a digital divide” is an issue of major concern. I don’t want everybody to have a poor education because we’re not aggressively making sure that everyone has an equal education. I don’t want equal and poor education. We need to demonstrate that it’s too powerful to not do it. One of the reservations, of course, is the cost. I think we have to look at the expenses of not doing it right. Those are huge! The social, long-term cost for under-educating our students are gigantic. I think that the cost of building gated communities are the cost of great inequities. You’re paying a lot of money to protect yourself because we have such inequity in our culture.
We just did an article on how to do UDL without technology. It’s important to be able to do it without the technology. The kids in poor communities need to have a good education. Those kids are not being prepared for their future. That’s a gigantic divide. I love your argument. We don’t want to say, “it’s okay to not have good tools in poor classrooms.” We need to know that it’s not okay. I love to use the UDL disability argument, to say that it’s not okay and it’s illegal. Even in a poor community, the federal government has to provide UDL, or else people can sue. Right now, poor people can’t sue, but people with disabilities can.
Female Student: At the same time, you don’t want someone to say, “I can’t do UDL until I have computers first.”
Professor: I absolutely agree. I don’t want them to not do it, but I don’t want them to sacrifice the quality of education either.
Male Student: Maybe the flip side of her original comment is to think about the tool that you’re describing from the flip side. As a teacher, you get immediate feedback from who’s getting your point and who’s not. The other benefit of the tool is that there’s an online environment with asynchronous education going on.
Professor: The great thing is that the highlighter tool is free, and the stuff on the web is free. I could tell my students to go to the US Constitution site, and have them show me which things are pro-colonies. It’s free, and the tool is free because it’s open source. I can get immediate feedback from what the kids did, and what the kids didn’t do. I get immediate feedback.
In education, we don’t do well at having a self-improving cycle of teaching. We don’t know what works. I don’t. I still teach poorly in my own classes. We know, within minutes, whether the kids got our point with the highlighting tool. The key is to say that the lesson did or didn’t work. You have a self-improving thing that you can fix quickly, and you can say it or do it another way. We don’t get that in education. When I give a lecture, people go away and I’m not sure for a year whether it was effective or not. People will do ratings, but that’s not rating whether my students have learned anything. With the highlighting tool, I was able to tell, in a minute, when I wasn’t clear. The hard part is to remind teacher that the highlighting tool is self-evaluative, rather than to think “that kid was pretty dumb.” As we’re building these kinds of environments, we need to think of them as self-improving.
In the NSF environment, there are two evaluations. First, on the students and how they’re doing. Second, on the curriculum. The key is to grade the curriculum and the lesson.
Female Student: When Charlie introduced you this morning, he told you about a book that you had written.
Professor: It’s just a chapter of a book. It has poverty in the title. It’s edited by Susan Newmann. She wrote a book on poverty and education, and I wrote a chapter in it.
I want to get back to talking about the barriers. One barrier is cost. It is a barrier because, even though some of the things that we do are free, they’re not all free. I don’t think that all free is a good long-term solution. I think that teachers should be highly valued and rewarded well, and that they’ll get better stuff. I don’t like the idea that education is a give-away, and that entertainment is expensive. I don’t come down on the side of free. I’d love it if there were some teachers out there that were famous and rich, because they made the best piece of pedagogy. It’s online, easy to get, and everybody gets it and pays the two bucks. There are phone apps where people get about 8000 dollars in a week because people are buying their apps for a dollar.
The things that I think will be ultimately successful will be to build teacher development directly into the student materials. Things like a teachers edition in a traditional textbook are never there when they’re needed. They’re not very useful. Similarly, if you have something that is professional development that happens after school or in the summer or in a separate program, it’s never there when you need it. When we do our research, we find out that if you had supports for the kids that are strong and good, it helps the teacher too, and it reminds the teacher of how pedagogy works.
I think making the tools and scaffolds available to kids and teachers at all times has been more powerful than anything else that we’ve done. We have started to put mentors in for teachers when the teacher doesn’t know what to do or where to go with a lesson. You need a much longer apprenticeship. Good teaching is hard to do, and the idea that you can have something happen in the summer and that you’ll be great at it when you have 25 kids won’t happen for many people. We need much more supportive environments where people can learn, and we need tools which are much more helpful and supportive for the students.
I fell apart earlier, and I can’t think when things are going wrong. I wanted a “help” button to help me out earlier today. Teachers are in that category as well, not just about the technology, but with regards to certain students, too. My daughter’s in medical school, and I love the medical school apprenticeship. She’ll have gone to school for four years, and will need to have three more years of being with someone who’s really good at medicine, before anybody allows her to practice. She should be incredibly well-trained.
Male Student: I’m not trying to make you feel better, but having trouble with the computer didn’t make any difference. If your slides had worked 100%, I don’t think that the real impact for me would’ve been much greater. It’s a reminder to me that traditional teaching makes the real impact, because of the quality of the material.
Professor: The most powerful lecture I give, the one that people write me about later, is when I’m talking about affect. When I’m talking about affect, I do the brain stuff, and then I say, “I am incredibly stressed out before every lecture. I’m incredibly nervous. I go to the same restaurant, and they start cooking my cheeseburger special, because I do what kids with autism do. I ritualize things when I’m anxious. I need to ritualize the hour before class, because I’m too anxious. I can’t be thinking about what I’m going to eat or have a conversation with anybody. I need to be in my ritual mode, and it takes me a while to get into class.” I talk about the things that I try to do to manage that anxiety. The reason I do it is because I want them to know that I’m nervous, and that I’m intentionally doing things to try to manage that. I can’t make it go away; that anxiety is a symptom of my nervous system working.
I’m very worried about the things that are going to go well. We should be teaching kids that there are things that you can do. It’s not bad to be anxious, and you’re not a bad teacher because you’re anxious. I want people to know that I do these things, and I talk about what I do to manage my own anxiety for about an hour. What is my plan for being anxious is what gets me to learn. I need a plan, because I’m going to be anxious.
Changing your anxiety is really hard. Saying, “I’m not going to be anxious” doesn’t do it. When people say, “don’t be anxious,” that has never helped anyone in the universe. Giving people more resources doesn’t remove anxiety. As educators, it’s better to say, “you’re going to be anxious as a teacher.” A lot of people are anxious as teachers. You need to know the things that people do to manage their anxiety.
I read this great book by Bill Russell, the legendary center for the Boston Celtics. He was incredibly anxious before games; he would throw up before all the games. I try to tell my students that being anxious is what made him great, and that being anxious is okay to feel. I wish we spent more time with kids teaching them how to manage their anxiety rather than having them memorize the state capitals.
Male Student: I like what you said. I’m curious. I would seem to me that, in gauging students, you want a certain amount of anxiety and curiosity as a motivating factor. If there’s not some expectation or challenge or concern, it seems like learning would be difficult.
Professor: That’s right. A new set of words came to me. We want kids to be in a state of challenge all the time. Boredom is worse than other kids of stress, because you have the stress that boredom causes, and you’re not learning anything. Stress is a challenger. The phrase I want to teach you is, “education is about presenting desirable difficulties.” We need to pose challenges to kids; it’s the only way they’ll learn. UDL is about removing the undesirable difficulties, and the things that are not relevant to what we’re teaching that some kids find as barriers.
We had a moment where it gave her a sense of what UDL is, which is not reducing challenge. Many people think that UDL is about making learning easier, and that’s not what it is. The problem is that we confuse a bunch of challenges together, and some kids aren’t challenged. They’re surmounting undesirable difficulties, but we want the desirable difficulties. With UDL, we want to remove as many of the undesirable difficulties as we can so that we can elevate the desirable difficulties. UDL is about learning. If you don’t have challenges, then you won’t have learning. UDL requires that some things are very hard. If I never have to teach a class, I never learn to manage my anxiety. Kids need hard things, but they don’t need hard things in boxes that they can’t open. Inside, there should be wonderfully challenging, long-term desirable difficulties.
I have another phrase that I want to tell you that I learned down in Washington. You know about separating the means from the ends. Knowing what your goal is is critical in education. You may have multiple means to get there. It’s separating the means from the ends. It says that everybody needs to get to the top of the path. They told me their language and how the new set that’s coming out is going to be tight on goals, and lose on means. Rather than saying, “you have to do it this way,” they’re saying, “be right on goals. You must accomplish this, but you have a wide variety of ways to get there.” UDL is about setting high goals, and giving lots of ways to meet those goals.
Is there a way to assess the threat/challenge distinction? Can you tell when a kid is under threat or challenged? I think that good teachers are good at assessing this. Teaching is emotional work. In reality, the powerful thing a good teacher does is emotional work; they’re able to recognize, in their kids, the difference between challenging or threatening works. A good psychiatrist, when they hear their patient talk, mirrors her patient. When psychologists are under too much pressure, like where a holocaust has happened, the psychologists become exhausted, and then can’t be effective. I think that good teachers are doing emotional work, which is why you feel burned out and tired after class. The emotional work is very draining.
Male Student: When you talk about the lecture that you got the most positive feedback for, it’s one in which you’re talking about your emotional self. This is probably why it’s powerful enough for people to comment on it.
Professor: I always want to say to teachers, “choose something you’re not good at, and let your students watch you learn.” Have your kids see you learn. Have your students write down something so that you can remember it for the next class.
Is there a way to assess? Our faces are like radiators. Some people are very good at reading them, and actors and actresses are good at making their faces be a radiator of emotion.
My mother was a great teacher. She had worked at the LD center at Curry College. I don’t think she know a diphthong from a phoneme, but she knew when to change what she was doing with a kid. She also knew how to identify what was good about her students. A lot of schooling seems bent on finding out what’s wrong with kids, but my mother found the good things in kids. She wouldn’t stop until she’d find something that her students were good at, and she’d make every student practice that every day.
Female Student: When you’re talking about tools for education, a lot of what we were talking about were online resources and ways to better communicate information to students. The other side to communication is their ability to communicate back. When we talk about technological tools for communication, we eliminate about 93% of effective communication. How does this get addressed?
Professor: I think that the body is a fabulous communicating instrument. The face is a fabulous communicative tool. Even in sign language, the face is a key part of conveying meaning. I like that the new media are richer in the ability to narrate those channels. Text is the most eviscerated, and there’s such few things to use to carry the prosody and things that are rich with information, both orally and visually. I would never want technology to replace face-to-face communication. It’s interesting; I have all sorts of technology I could use, and I still teach face-to-face in a classroom. I didn’t talk about this today, but I videotape everything, and people take notes on everything. There’s at least three ways to get everything that’s said in my class, without coming to class. I think it’s interesting that I show up and that the students do. I could make the video tape at home, and send it to everybody. Every piece of information would be there, but we hate to do that. We still go to see movies at a theater because the social contagion is very important. You’ve all showed up live here, and we could’ve put this on video. The human connection carries way more information, including how we’re all doing as a group. I don’t think that’s going away soon. I don’t think we’re replace that, Phoenix University aside.
What about the technology frightened teacher? This is very common. If you have a 60-year-old teacher, and you’re trying to get her to use technology effectively, I’d ask for pictures of their grandchildren. You go through affect; you go through what’s important. You’ll put those pictures in, and you’ll show them how to send pictures of each other every day. With kids, you find out what’s important to them. With teachers, then send them home and have them learn to communicate with their grand children over the summer with a computer. I think that you’ll make more progress that way.
The typical ways that we reverse threats are deconditioning the processes. It’s a very slow process, and that’s why you go through things like anxiety management. When you’re anxious about flying in an airplane, you take baby steps to get over the anxiety. Kids who are terrified of their classrooms will still have anxiety issues when she’s in a new classroom. The more immediate thing to do is to go straight to the kid, and say, “I bet this makes you anxious. Let’s talk about what you can do when this happens.” This would be the same for adults as well. Adults are much more in control of these things than kids.
I wish we could spend more time in school having kids manage their own brains. This is what we do throughout our lives, and we seem to be resistant to wanting to do that. We’ll want to give them information, which is easy to get when you need it. You need to know what you’re good at, and what you’re bad at, and how to make a better mix in your life of those things. You’ll need to know how to manage. These are fabulous learning devices, but each one requires its own tricks. You need to know your nervous system, and you need to know how to manage it. I wish that we spent most of our time doing that. The assessment needs to be providing information to curriculum developers, and information to the kids to tell them what’s working for them. This is why I like the highlighting tool, because it provides you with immediate feedback.
I think it’s important to have a grip on who you are and where you’re going in the future.
We have to stop. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to get to all of the questions. Thank you.
[Applause.]
[End of class.]