Week 12: Reflection
Christina Kirby
November 11, 2016
Friday’s class was such a pleasure learning about Jenna's work with a local K-8 school for her dissertation, examining UDL use amongst ELA teachers. In her prior work, she realized that many teachers equated UDL with access, and did not consider the other components of UDL for deep learning. She thus designed a coaching program focusing on these aspects of UDL, that go further than access and address expression, self-regulation and executive functioning.
One class that Jenna show cased in her presentation was Mrs. Edwards class of fourth graders. She wanted her students to improve their ability to “read like writers” and “write like writers.” In addition, she wanted new tools to encourage reluctant writers with new means of expression. In one unit when the class was working on writing, the students were struggling in “showing and not telling” amongst the various emotional states of the characters. Jenna and Mrs. Edwards decided to use Bookbuilder as a means of engaging students in writing their own alternative ending/short story. Much to their delight, the “coach” character within the book was used to great success to promote metacognition amongst the students. Through this means, they were able to iterate how they were “showing” the emotions, and sometimes even the settings, verses stating them outright. Mrs. Edwards was incredibly pleased to see the engagement, motivation, and self-evaluation amongst the students, who created great writing using the online book tool.
Jenna and Mrs. Edwards were able to incorporate further UDL guidelines that moved past merely making the tools accessible. Specifically, they tackled guidelines 6.4 (enhance capacity for self-monitoring) with the coach feature in the Bookbuilder. Specifically, they were able to monitor their own writing and critique their ability as authors. Furthermore, guideline 9 was addressed (provide options for self-regulation) by increasing motivation of reluctant writers and incorporate reflection components.
During our workshop, I was thinking that Bookbuilder was an incredible platform for ELL students. I have taught very basic level English in foreign counties, like Brazil and Colombia. Many of my introductory students struggled with reading because they would stop once they did not recognize any new vocabulary. The component that allows for translation into Spanish or dictionary definitions would be very helpful for these students. In addition, paring the text with speech could help with pronunciation for this population since this is a very difficult component of the English language. If the resources are available in the future, I think I could incorporate this into the classroom to help with both reading and writing in my ELL students.
