Transcript
Lori:
Hello, Katie Novak, and welcome to the podcast.
Katie:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Lori:
Katie, you are someone who I think every member of Senya knows at least your name, right? Wow.
Katie:
I mean, that’s an honor.
Lori:
Well, you are truly one of those stars in this world. And I know whenever we bring up your name, people are fangirling you. Everyone’s just like, you know who Katie Novak is? Have you met her?
Katie:
Well, again, you know, I always tell people, like, my kids are like, you know, I’ll go into an airport and someone will go, are you Katie Novak? And the kids will go, are you famous? I’m like, no, I’m not. Get that out of head. I just am like, teachers love each other. It’s a small world of inclusive practice and we all know each other.
Lori:
That’s right. Well, you know, they say you should never meet your heroes. And I still have not met you in person, but I saw one of our Senya people met you in Africa at the ASA conference recently and had a picture of you. She was just so happy. So I think meeting hero that day was just what she needed and didn’t disappoint at all. So.
Katie:
Well, love to hear it.
Lori:
All right, well, we’re here to talk about universal design for learning. You’ve written 16 books on the topic.
Katie:
I have.
Lori:
Amazing. So what does that mean? What does it really mean to universally design learning?
Katie:
So the simplest explanation is simply that when you’re designing learning, you’re really thinking about what are the goals of this learning experience? And given the beautiful variability of humans, how could I design it so everyone, each person, all would have access to what they needed to be successful. And so there’s A lot of people that go around that say we’re universally designing already, and the truth is, we are not. It’s not that we’re not intending to design learning that works really well for all learners, but we have not figured out how to design something that allows everyone to be included and for everyone to have the right balance of support and challenge. And as we know, too often, we’re having to create separate programs to serve learners without realizing that programming could be embedded into more inclusive spaces.
And so the real definition of universal design for learning is that it is designed so that you could enroll any learner in that experience, and you wouldn’t have to be responsive and modify in order to meet their needs. And so it actually comes from work in architecture where the original framework of universal design was simply, if you’re going to create a building, how can you ensure that everybody, anybody, each person, regardless of their needs, would be able to get into the building? And we know that traditional buildings, you’d have to step up on a curb, you’d have to go through stairs, there were big, heavy doors you had to pull open. And those buildings were just not accessible for all people.
And so they started realizing that if we thought a little bit more about the people who were excluded, and we created access and entry points for those people, it would benefit everyone. And so the kind of birth of universal design for learning was the curb cut. So we know that some people aren’t able to get into buildings simply because they do not have what they need at that point in time to be able to get up on the curb. And so they cut curb cuts for people who are in wheelchairs. Like, that is what it was designed for. But everybody uses it, right? If you’re on a bike, if you have a stroller, if it’s a snowy day, if you’re in heels. Right. You love that curb cut.
And so we have to think about who’s excluded from learning environments with their peers, who’s excluded from opportunities to feel seen, to learn at high levels, to share what they know using their unique strengths and pathways. And how do we create curb cuts? Because what is necessary for some can be made available to everyone. So one of the things that I say all the time is that universal design for learning cannot be measured in the intention of the designers. You can’t say that something is universally designed if not everyone has access and not everyone is learning. And so that’s the most simple way to explain it.
Lori:
Yes, perfect. I was just at an airport, and I was going to get Cash from the atm. And I realized that the ATM machines are not universally designed because a person who is a wheelchair user could not access the machine. So it was just one of those observations I’ve made ever since learning about curb cuts and things like that.
Katie:
Yeah, Yeah. I was even, you know, I went with one of my teenage sons to Panera, right. To get some bagels the other day. And I walked in and it was like, you know, we’re hiring. And it said it in, like, multiple languages. And then there was a QR code that you could apply. They had paper applications that you could grab. And they had a computer right there. Like, don’t have the technology. Apply here. And, you know, hit this button if you want a manager to come out and introduce themselves. And I was like, it was so well thought out and capture so many more people because I might go in and be like, oh, you know what? Like, my son needs a job, like, maybe I’ll tell him about it. And then it gets just lost in working memory. Right.
And it’s just thinking about, like, we don’t know who’s coming in or how they’re coming in or what access to technology they have. But we do have the ability to really predict the variability. We know that some people will not speak English. We know that some people will struggle filling out a traditional application because of fine motor skills. We know that some people, you know, are very good on technology if they’re able to translate things. Right. And so how do we design something that works for all of those different pathways? And we have to do that in classrooms. We have to do that in professional development, because it exists almost everywhere except for in our schools and ATMs, apparently.
Lori:
Yeah. And even in our schools for the recruiting process for new teachers. So I’m glad you mentioned the hiring, because that is an area that we’ve been discussing a lot with the school leadership is, are you making recruiting accessible to all individuals?
Katie:
Yep.
Lori:
Yeah. Thanks. So if the evidence base for high quality inclusive practices is so strong, why do. Why do you think some organizations struggle to transition to more inclusive spaces?
Katie:
It’s truly a systems issue a lot of the time where it’s. I don’t think that this is something where it’s like, people are like, we don’t want to do it Right. When push comes to shove, when you have really difficult conversations with people about, like, why aren’t you being more flexible? It often comes down to, I don’t really know how to be more flexible. I don’t have that skill set Or I don’t have instructional materials that will flex, or we don’t have access to that technology, or I don’t have time. And so a lot of the work that I do now is actually on multi tiered systems of support. And I like to break up that acronym into two pieces. And so when we talk about multi tiered systems of support, people think of the multi tiers.
They think of the triangle with the three different tiers, which is we want everyone to be included in really accessible, engaging, inclusive experiences with their peers, recognizing that some students will need significantly more support. And that might be small group support, that might be one one support, but essentially how do we create the systems that allow us to do that? Well, and so the systems drivers, or that system of support that comes from implementation science, which essentially there’s three different categories of drivers. You have your leadership drivers, you have your competency drivers, and then you have your implementation drivers. So your leadership drivers are like, is there a very clear vision that everybody understands about, like, what it really means to be inclusive? I’ve gone to schools where they will have substantially separate programs that they call the inclusion wing.
I’m like, that is literally an exclusion wing. I don’t know why we’re calling it an inclusion wing. And it’s like, oh, well, sometimes grade level peers go in and visit. I’m like, oh, dear goodness, we have missed the vision for inclusion, my friends. And so we need a shared vision. We need shared responsibility. So we have to build, like, culture and climate because it’s very difficult to be inclusive of really diverse students if we’re not inclusive of the educators who serve them. So I am not a special education teacher by training. I am a general education teacher. I have my license to teach English and psychology.
But if I’m going to have students in my class who have really significant support needs, I need time to collaborate, co plan and consult with a behavior analyst, with a school counselor, with the speech and language pathologist, with the special educator who has a license in meeting the needs of students who have more moderate and severe support needs. Right? And so we’re often asking people to do the impossible because we’re asking them to do it alone. And so leadership is shared responsibility. It is family and community engagement really helping to create a vision for what this looks like, how it’s going to benefit every single person in the system. It’s about resource allocation. So Staffing, scheduling for the students who need more. We simply often don’t have a schedule that allows us to do that.
So we have to pull because there’s just no time in the schedule. So it’s like, if I am going to provide these like, really specific services, you know, I need to time in the schedule to do it. And it often ends up being at the expense of like a really inclusive ELA class where you’d have access to like short, profound texts and opportunities to like, you know, collaborate with peers. And so we have to think about leadership. The competency drivers are huge, which is everything we’re doing to build collective efficacy through professional learning. And that goes so far beyond our conferences and our 3 PD days a year. It’s about instructional coaching, it’s about co planning and consult. It’s about being a part of professional learning communities. It’s observing each other, it’s lesson study, it’s etaval and feedback.
And so a lot of the times our systems weren’t built for us to do that really well. We just don’t have that embedded support. And then your implementation drivers, that’s about high quality instructional materials. It’s about access to accessible technologies, assistive technologies, augmentative communication devices, and how do you create reciprocal conversations when you’re using augmentative communication? Right? So there’s so many different tools that we need. We need really great forms of high quality assessments that are looking at academics, linguistics, behavior. And we need a culture to be able to look at data, to say, okay, let’s try this for six weeks, let’s look at data and let’s figure out, this is what we did. Did it work? If so, let’s keep doing it.
If it didn’t, let’s all come back together, let’s get the family in here, let’s communicate with the child and be like, okay, what are we missing here? What can we do differently? How can we better serve you? Right? But whenever we talk about that, people go, well, I don’t have the time for that. I don’t have the instructional materials for that. We don’t have the PD for that. I don’t have time to collaborate with my colleagues, right? And it’s the system that’s failing both teachers, students and families. It’s not that there’s individual educators who don’t want to show up and provide kids with what they need. It’s that the system has to do a better job of stepping up. So I think that the answer to the evidence base is so clear.
Why do we have this huge research to implementation gap is because historically, schools have not been designed to create systems that have allowed for really successful implementation.
Lori:
Yes. So who helps those schools or school systems design those systems? Is that you, Katie?
Katie:
I mean, I’m a part of a very large network of people who can help with strategic planning and leadership coaching. But it really comes down to the distributed leadership team. Regardless of whether or not consultants are involved, that’s who does the work. It needs to be done internally. It needs to be done representing all of the different stakeholders in the system. That even if I come in as a consultant, I’m like, okay, I want to be working with the head of school. I want to be working with, you know, department leads. I want to be working with people who are speaking on behalf of service providers. If there’s school boards involved, if there’s family liaisons, if there’s cultural liaisons, if there’s some students, it’s secondary. Like, let’s get a team together and really say, what is our instructional vision here?
Most schools have a vision or a mission, and it’s something along the lines of, we prepare everyone for the future. And then we often have, like, core values, a vision of a graduate. So it’s like, we prepare everyone for the future by making sure our kids are global citizens, critical thinkers, right? But we have to say, okay, but what does that look like instructionally? Because we are teaching and learning machines, right? That is what we do. And we have to operationalize. When I’m going into classrooms, what am I actually looking for? And it starts with an instructional vision. And if we have an instructional vision that says in every class, without exceptions, because it’s universal, students have access to grade level learning that is authentic, that is relevant, that is accessible, that results in deeper learning, right? We say things like that.
And I’m like, okay, so if I walk into every learning space, I’m going to see relevant work. I’m going to see real world work in every learning space. Like, is that what really what we’re going to say? Because I’m all for it, but there’s a lot of things we’re doing in schools that are not translating to real world. I am a professional writer. I’ll tell you what real world lighting looks like. It looks like talking. It looks like, you know, multiple drafts, it looks like assistive tech, it looks like peer review, all of these different things. Like, we don’t allow students to use the tools that I use as a writer to produce writing and we’re saying, we have this vision of we want to be relevant, we want to be real world, we want to be rigorous.
And then we take some students and we put them in different spaces and say, well, they’re not capable of rigorous, so we’re not honoring our vision in the first place. And so when we start with a vision, we then say, okay, how far are we from that vision? If were truly to do this, what would we see in terms of data? We would have 100% of families saying, yes, our kids are getting what they need to prepare them for a life ahead. We would have teachers that say, yes, I absolutely feel prepared to create a space where all kids are able to get that right set of scaffolds, the right set of challenge while they’re working towards the same goals. I feel prepared to do this.
We’d have kids that are able to communicate that, like, I belong here, I love it here, we’re not there. And so the system is not universally designed if we haven’t designed it for everybody to be successful yet. And so we have to say, well, what are the barriers? And so it starts with an instructional vision. And then that team says, okay, let’s do a really honest self assessment and let’s look at these systems, drivers, and let’s think about what we have already and what we don’t have yet. And now we have to be like, urgent and focused in our need to change something. And that’s going to require all the other drivers. We might have to adopt new curriculum, we might have to go visit different cultural organizations. We might have to change our schedule. We’re going to need a lot more professional development.
And if there’s not follow through on that, then a vision is something that is just a beautiful word salad that lives on our websites that is not realized for particularly our kids who have been the most historically excluded and marginalized from an excellent education.
Lori:
Hear, hear. All right, well, Katie, before you came on the show, I reached out to some of our Senya team and I asked for their burning questions for you. So some of them you may have already answered, but I’m going to go ahead and ask them anyway. So first one is, let’s see, as a school leader, how would you envision the UDL framework being used to better support and reach students receiving tier 2 and tier 3 services international schools? Particularly when considering how staff are allocated and how resources are managed responsibly?
Katie:
So I never want to talk about Tier 2 or Tier 3 without talking about Tier 1, because most of the time there’s an over identification for kids who need additional support because the foundation for Tier one is not yet meeting the needs of all learners. And too often the data that’s meant to be used to say, what conditions do we need to change in Tier 1 is often used to say, look, they don’t belong in tier one. And that is not in any way aligned to what it means to be a part of a multi tiered system. If we’re truly talking about students are making Progress In Tier 1, they’re fully included, and then data has indicated that they need additional support. Tier 2 support should be supplemental, which means a schedule ensures that kids can get it without being pulled out.
It’s evidence based, meaning it’s standardized. So if we’re going to say, if a student meets this entry criteria for needing reading intervention, this is what they get four times a week, 30 minutes a day. It happens during this intervention block. This is the flow of instruction. These are the high quality instructional materials we’re using. This is how we’re going to be measuring progress and this is how often we’re going to communicate progress to, you know, the teachers who are in the Tier one environment, families, all of that. And so the UDL lens, once we set that up, if we’re able to standardize, we start thinking about, okay, what are the practices that are absolutely non negotiable and then how do we explode those verbs to think a little bit differently about access?
So for instance, a lot of the times people will say, well, you know, the tier two program we’re using, you know, let’s just call it like a reading ally or something. You know it. Orton, Gillingham, Wilson. Right. It’s very scripted. Everyone has to do it the same. I’m like, does that program say that everyone has to sit down or stand up? No, of course it doesn’t. Okay, so one thing you can do right away is in that environment, you’re like, I want you to be comfortable in here. We’re going to be going through some of these activities. So, you know, is it better for you to stand? Is it better for you to find a comfortable seat? Would you rather sit at a desk? Okay, wonderful. Then it says, you know, students have to, you know, warm up and practice letter sounds. Okay.
Does it say they have to do it in a group and put everybody in the spot? Or could you say you’re going to practice? You can either practice in an iPad, you can come over here in a group, or you can choose to do it in an echo, whisper phone. Then we start to work on. Now we’re going to practice writing. Do you want to do it with a whiteboard? Do you want to do it with a slant board? Do you need to use augmentative communication to do it? Anything can be designed for everyone. If you think about what is the non negotiable verb and then how do I make sure that there’s multiple ways to do that? So, you know, when we’re talking about writing, right. The writing curriculum after grade one does not say, you know, form uppercase and lowercase letters. Right.
Using a writing utensil. It’s all about, like, what do you need to do to produce writing? And, you know, I think that oftentimes we can make things universally accessible with very little need for modification if we just think through that lens of what is another way that we could do this. And so just as we want tier one to be universally designed for everyone, we want anyone who meets the Criteria for tier 2 to have access to an environment that is also universally designed in that there’s multiple tasks and formats to work towards that evidence base.
Lori:
Awesome. Okay, well, let’s flow back to tier one then. We had a question about universal screeners and progress monitoring and the flow between tier one and Tier two. I’m not really sure of the question there, but I think what this person is asking is possibly, are there recommended universal screeners and progress monitoring tools to help support that?
Katie:
Yes, absolutely. I can share with you for the episode notes. You know, there are some, like, really good, some really good resources here in the United States where they look at the evidence base for different screeners and different progress monitoring tools. And there’s practice guides about, like, what we know works. They’re called like the what works Clearinghouse. Right. What do we know works for reading intervention in elementary. In a meta analysis of all the studies.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
What do we know works? If you’re doing math intervention, what do we know works with attendance, with behavior, and it will actually go through and it will tell you which of these tools are valid and reliable and what type of evidence they have. And so there’s four types of evidence. Type 1 or Tier 1 evidence. I hate that they use the word tiers because it gets confusing with multi tiers. So just let’s call it type one is going to be your experimental studies. So true. Control group, treatment group, random assignment. They’re not all that common in education because there is the ethics issue that we deal with that a lot of the times our studies are more like type 2, which are quasi experimental, or type 3, which is correlational.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
We didn’t do this last year, we did it this year. If we look at the same students and their growth last year and this year, we did notice there was more growth this year, like correlational study. But your type 1 is not only experimental, but there’s statistically significant positive outcomes, there’s no negative outcomes, and it’s been done with at least 350 students.
Lori:
Oh.
Katie:
So a lot of these things are saying that they’re evidence based, but they might not even meet the criteria for like a tier 3 evidence based, meaning it was done with like 11 kids. It wasn’t quasi experimental, but companies can essentially say it’s evidence based.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
And so what the what Works Clearinghouse had tried to do is to share what is the tier of evidence. So, you know, it doesn’t mean that your tier one tools are stronger necessarily or have better outcomes than the tier 3 tools. But tier 1 is experimental. Tier 2 is quasi experimental, 350 or more. Tier 3 is correlational. And you can sometimes have very low numbers, right? 12 kids. And we’re looking at these things internationally. So I will share with you a link that you can share for people who are interested in looking. But I would say any of the evidence based tools or programs that evidence based only holds if you can match the methodology, which means you actually have to go back and find the original study.
And so, for instance, if I’m going to tell you a very ridiculous story, but it works, I promise you, it works as it relates to interventions, right? Anything that we’re doing right, even in tier one, we’re going to start introducing math discourse. We’re going to start focusing on teacher success criteria, right? There are studies that tell us like, that can get us two years of growth, right? John Hattie’s Visible Learning does a great job at kind of organizing a lot of that research. So we’re like, okay, we’re going to do this thing because we. It says it works. So my, one of my best friends was selling, you know, face lotion, right? And so she wanted me to buy this serum.
And she’s like, Katie, 100% of people in the clinical study had like skin that looked younger after they used this serum for eight weeks, right? And so I was like, ooh, I want that, right? That’s evidence based. Just like people say, I want universal design for learning. I want tier 2 intervention, I want universal screeners. We know that there’s evidence that these things work. So I buy It. It’s expensive. I truly do use it every day for eight weeks. On my honor, I use it, I finish the serum, and she’s like, so, did it work? And I was like, literally no. What do you mean literally no? I’m like, my skin looks literally exactly the same. Exactly the same. Like, I don’t. It was fine. Like, I have nothing negative to say about it. It did not make a difference at all.
And she’s like, well, how did you use it? And I’m like, that’s the most ridiculous question I’ve ever heard. What do you mean, how did I use it? Like, I put lotion on my face. She’s like, katie, how did you use it? And I was like, well, how was I supposed to use it? She’s like, well, on the little bottle, it says that first you have to wash your face in the morning, then you have to use toner, then you have to use your regular serum, then you use this special serum, and then you put on lotion. And I was like, oh, how did you use it? And I was like, well, I didn’t quite recognize that was the methodology. And so I wash my face at night to get off my makeup. I don’t wash it again in the morning.
I don’t own toner, I don’t own my own serum. And like, my habits are like, I get up, I go for a run. So I put on sunscreen, I run, I come home, I rinse, I put on serum. And she was like, oh, my gosh, Katie, you can’t say it doesn’t work. And so I always tell that story when we’re talking about evidence based practices, because people are like, I tried udl, it didn’t work. I tried teacher clarity, it didn’t work. We adopted that universal screener. It didn’t work. Tier 2 doesn’t work. And it’s like, we don’t often have the time or take the time to go back and say, what was the methodology exactly? What were the ingredients that they had? What were the resources? How much time did they spend? How much training did teachers get beforehand?
Because it will unpack that in a methodology. And then we need to say, can we actually do this with integrity? If so, then we know what to expect in terms of growth, and we can monitor for that. If we can’t, we cannot expect the same growth. And then we have to standardize the adaptation of the methodology. So it’s a really thoughtful, planful process that I think that many people rush through without having all of the pieces in place. And so they end up spending a bunch of money, like I did, thinking that they’re using it correctly, being frustrated with a product. It’s not the product. It was user implementation barriers, for sure.
Lori:
I think the important question in all of this is, did you buy another bottle?
Katie:
No, I did not. I did not. I.
Lori:
You know what?
Katie:
I decided at that point I was gonna try something new. And because buying the new bottle was not just buying the new bottle, it would have been like buying five more things.
Lori:
Exactly.
Katie:
Which wasn’t in the cards. But the same is honestly true for teacher. We, like people, like, we adopted that curriculum. And I’m like, okay, what’s your plan for giving teachers PD before they implement the Tier 1 curriculum? And they’re like, we’re just, you know, we got two hours before the first day of school. I’m like, oh, my gosh, give me a paper bag to breathe into. Because that is not setting up teachers for success. One of my favorite stories is, you know, and I, there’s amazing high quality instructional materials. Like, we know people who are in the curriculum world. Like, things are getting so much more engaging, so much more flexible, so much more inclusive. Like, we are on the right path.
And what we end up with a lot of is there was this group of teachers I was working with, and they’re like, we have to use this math program with fidelity. I was like, oh, I’m very familiar with the math program. So first of all, how long is your Math block? Like, 43 minutes. And I was like, timeout. I’m out. That’s a 70 minute math program. And they’re like, huh? I was like, so you can’t teach it with fidelity? And they’re like, we have to. I’m like, I don’t know how to break this to you or your colleagues. You can’t. And that’s not me being deficit based. You cannot replicate 70 minutes of great instruction in, like, half the time. Something has to be cut. Like, it’s like, you’re going to cut corners. The question is, where are you going to cut corners?
And like, it was such an interesting conversation. But then we’ll go and say that curriculum didn’t work. It’s like, oh, if you can’t provide the time for pd, if you don’t have enough instructional time, then work with the curriculum developers and try to figure out an adaptation and ask for other schools and districts who have been in a similar position. And what evidence do you have that if we had to do this differently, that this would still be effective because those questions need to be asked.
Lori:
They do. And you’ve mentioned teacher overwhelm quite a bit. And one of the questions that came up multiple times from our team was how do we support teachers without overwhelming them? Or how do we go from this theory where we, or not theory, but the actual professional development, we give them to actual implementation. So there’s kind of two questions in there. But yeah, overwhelm and implementation.
Katie:
I mean, overwhelm is just something that like we can’t keep asking people to do more and more without taking things away.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
There’s this really great book that I just read. I was actually inspired by another consultant that I met at the AISA conference. I have to give you her name because I want to give her a shout out because she did a session where she talked about the book and I loved her just description of the book so much that I had to go out and buy it. And it was just so, so well done. Goodness gracious. Lauren Jones. It was amazing. Lauren Jones. And she talked about like this book subtract and it’s saying that we always try to make things better by adding things. And it’s like Jenga, that eventually it all is gonna fall down and that we have to really think about. If we’re asking someone to do something different, what are we asking them not to do?
What is that replacing? And so I think it’s really important that number one, we realize that implementation for many things is a marathon. It’s not a small sprint that teachers are going to need time for trial and error. And I think that oftentimes it’s so, so well intentioned. But I think we’re asking people to get good at too many things all at once as opposed to, we recognize that we don’t have a skill set in all these places yet. But this is what we’re going to focus on for the next three or four months. And those of you who are doing this really well, we want to elevate and celebrate that, you know, have you model, open up your classrooms.
And for those of you who need more support, we want to make sure that our coaches are available, that we’re giving you non evaluative feedback. I think that we really have to be more focused on like this is what we know we need to change. This is how we know it. When we look at outcomes data, when we look at perception data, what kids and families are saying, we know that this is something that we need to improve. And so this is what we’re going to focus on. So all of the PD that we’re doing, right, all of your PLC conversations, right. We want to be really focused on changing this practice. And if you’re going to be doing this, let’s talk about the things that you’re not going to be doing.
And a lot of the times when I talk about universal design for learning, especially when I talk about exploding the verbs, people are wildly like, oh, my gosh, that is so much less work than I thought it was. And it still takes some time, but, like, sometimes it’s just having the time to say, okay, so, you know, you’re asking students, you’re handing out a lot of printed text. Printed text is not universally designed. Fact. There is no inclusive classroom where you can put down a printed text in front of every kid and say, read this silently and have everybody learn from it. We know that right now we can make whatever’s on that text far more accessible simply by making it digital, because that allows it to be enlarged, it allows it to be translated, right?
We can make it more accessible by having it read aloud. And so for me, in my classroom, whenever I handed out something that was a printed text, a short story, a poem, assignment guidelines, I would just create the routine to say, all right, everyone, first of all, I’m going to hand out this text, and this is what we’re going to be doing today. You can access it on your iPad, you can access it on your Chromebook, you can access it in hard copy. I want you to work together, and I’ve had to build the routines to create these relationships, and you have to model these things. I want you to work together to kind of go through it. What do you notice about this? What do you wonder about it? What am I actually asking you to do in this assignment?
So you can either work alone with the hard copy, you can work alone with the digital. If I was co teaching, or if I had, like, para support, for instance, it might be like, okay, you’re going to circulate. I’ll pull a small group. If you want to unpack it with me. If I had a text that they were reading, one of the options was always readers theater, where I would find the kids who were very interested and willing to. To read aloud. Some of them would do accents because they were in community theater. And I would say, okay, you know, we’re gonna go through this short story. You can read it by yourself. You can read it on your device. You can come over with me in A small group.
And I could specially design instruction, do some explicit chunking of it. And if you want a reader’s theater experience, you know, Laurie is gonna read it out loud. And today Lon is gonna be fast fingers. And there was somebody who would just pull up visuals as were reading. So we’re doing like an excerpt from Lord of the Flies. Someone says, tiki torch. They pull up an image of a tiki torch, right? And they’re running their own reader’s theater. I’m providing explicit instruction. There’s some kids working alone, right? And that’s. You could put almost anyone in the room. And it’s like, well, the student doesn’t speak in English yet. Oh, no problem. It’s digital. Just Translate it for L1 and have them sit while they’re reading the translation with the readers theater group, because there’s tons of visuals. Okay, cool.
There’s a kid who’s like, you know, has some significant support needs, and, you know, they’re not traditionally verbal. Okay, awesome. Well, they can either work with groups because we have an amazing community in here of inclusive of people, or they can come over with me. And I’m going to be specially designing instruction based on an education plan. But ultimately, it’s up for the child today. So let’s figure out, working with families, how this child communicates consent, and ask them, which one do you prefer today? Like, it’s. It’s inherent in the design. And so once I have that routine, it’s not more work. But if you’re telling me that everyone needs to read 10 novels a year in Heart at the same time that I’m learning about this, you need to say, oh, no, you don’t have to go through all those novels anymore.
Because there’s like. That’s the hard thing is that people are trying to stack, stack, stack, and they don’t realize it’s the routines that are really powerful. So I would say if teachers are overwhelmed, do not focus on lesson planning, focus on routines, focus on verbs. If you’re not teaching foundational reading, your job is just to make sure that kids are gleaning something from a text. You have to make it accessible. You have to make it multimodal. You have to make it social. Right? If you’re talking about producing writing, there’s lots of ways to brainstorm, talking, drawing pictures, finding pictures, looking at exemplars. There’s lots of ways to organize storyboard communication devices. Outline.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
Graphic organizer. There’s lots of ways to draft voice to text. You know, moving eyes to find it. Like all of these things, if you have the right technology, if you understand teacher clarity, if you have opportunities to work together where teachers can come in, my colleagues and say, okay, I can see what a barrier is here. You’re going to have a hard time meeting Katie’s needs because of that printed text. I have some routines for you. Right. We have to be open to those conversations or we’re never going to be able to create a system where teachers feel prepared to do this. Because you can’t just design a new lesson every single day. Every single day. Every single day. Single day.
Lori:
Perfect. Well, we’ve talked about reading and writing and I promise to make this short. But there was one more question I was interested in. He said, how can we coach or consult an elementary teacher through a UDL lesson design process who has a student three years above grade level in math?
Katie:
I mean, there’s universal design for learning is for all, including learners who are twice exceptional, highly capable, who need acceleration. There’s a number of different ways to think about this. As I’m making notes to myself so that you can put in your show notes. One of my colleagues is certified as a gifted educator and we wrote a blog about the needs of students who are twice exceptional, highly capable, and how all of the work on really trying to increase outcomes for students who need more challenge is completely aligned with universal design for learning in the first place. And so, you know, when you’re providing more options and choices, there’s going to be inherently more options to explore things. Right? Because we don’t want to give kids more work.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
We want them to be included in work that allows them novelty and, you know, to really enhance their understanding. And there’s a couple of different ways to do this. You know, one way is as we’re thinking about rubrics, AI can be an incredible tool for generating rubrics. I think it’s one of the best things it does because like the, the brilliance is the prompting. This is the standard I’m teaching. This is the success criteria. Co created with students. Create a holistic or analytic rubric, right. That outlines, you know, all the different levels of student growth, starting from developing, moving towards, approaching, moving towards mastery.
Lori:
Right.
Katie:
I want really asset based language, like all of that prompting can be really powerful. But I like to nudge the rubrics to say mastery is full credit, period, end of story. Most rubrics you have to get exceeding to get full credit, which is bananas. Do not tell me I’ve done Everything. Exactly. I was supposed to and got a 75% like, what are you we doing? For goodness sake, I want to take over the rubric world. But if you prompt a rubric to say, I like a three point rubric, I like the highest score to be mastery for success criteria. And then I say, and create an additional pathway for exceeding expectations. And so I just did one last night in a workshop where were essentially talking about the water cycle, right?
If the curriculum standard says, you know, understand, explain and develop a model of the water cycle, we exploded the word you know. Okay, so explain. How do you explain? Right? You can explain by drawing words, you can explain by gesturing. You can explain in a stop motion video, right? Like, let’s think of a couple ways that students could explain. And let’s think of a couple ways they could make models. Working alone, working with partners, Diorama, digital AI. Right? And so we go and do all these things and then we’re like, okay, so what is mastery? And I want to pull up the rubric because it’s so cool how in an instant were able to move from what is mastery? To what would it look like to exceed those expectations.
And I think the same is true of really trying to unpack what are the math standards, recognizing that a student might also in addition need some tier 2 accelerated math. So when we’re talking about additional supports, like we might say, if we have any students who have lagging skills and like number fluency and they’re two grade levels behind, this is what we do for intervention. If we have any student that’s two grades above, this is what we do for enrichment. There’s entry criteria as well for those additional supports for students who need them. But it would be in addition to, and not instead of. So you might have a student who is doing, you know, some legitimate algebra, right? Algebra one, algebra two. But there’s also like really significant value in open ended math tasks that are like low floor and high ceiling.
What I don’t want that kid do is sitting there like completing worksheets with times tables when the kid is capable of doing algebra. But there’s standards and there’s curriculum that is like, explain how multiplication works, right? You’re going to get the most delicious product from a kid who is thinking about mathematics multiple years ahead. Okay, so this is the rubric. I’m just going to read you what they added in an instant. Okay. So the original rubric, Mastery was the model clearly and accurately includes all major stages, evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection Runoff, infiltration, and correctly shows the role of sun and gravity, right? So that’s mastery. And so we think about what are all the ways kids could learn that, right? What are all the different ways they could share what they know? Knowing some kids are going to need picture cards, word banks.
Some kids are going to want to work in small groups, right. Some kids might need a model that they’re going to replicate. But then the more complex was, the model also integrates advanced concepts, transpiration, groundwater storage, human impacts, and shows all the interconnections between subsystems like atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere.
Lori:
Right?
Katie:
And so I was saying, if I had a kid who they haven’t started yet, and I walk over and they’re like, you know, I want you to think about what you’re ready for today. Always start with the developing. So, you know, the developing is like, you know, understands what those words mean, creates a basic model, Right? And then you get into starting to explain that model. Right? But I might go, as you’re thinking about that, do you know that humans have ruined the water cycle? If I just drop that nugget to the right kid and they’re like, what? I’m like, we’ve ruined it. It’s going to be like, wall E. Look up a thing for wall, right? I can get every kid in the class going, well, I want to know more about human impact.
And so I think that sometimes there’s this belief that like, kids won’t do the challenging thing. Put any kid in front of a video game, they’re going to keep going, they want it to get more challenging, but it’s so incrementally challenging that it’s like productive struggle. It’s not unproductive struggle. And if we can step back and say, like, how do you want to learn more about human impact? Okay, Those of you who want to try for it today, and there’s no pressure because some of you aren’t in that place. And there’s days that I’m like, nope, I’m going to take it easy. But I think when we prompt a rubric to say, what is the extension? What is more complex? What is a novel task that still aligned to the same standard?
And when we open up, students have to answer these questions, but they do not have to write it in the spaces on this worksheet, right? Allow a kid to make this really awesome YouTube video that can go make them millions of dollars because it gets so many hits. And I think that oftentimes it’s just feeling like, we don’t even have permission to do things like that. Feeling like integrity means robotic and not like honoring the design process, honoring the verbs, and lifting up creativity.
Lori:
Katie, we have so many other questions, but we’re also out of time, so.
Katie:
I could just talk about this for days and days.
Lori:
I love it, honestly. I swear to have like a 10 part series of Katie Novak. But thank you so much for your time today. I have learned so much and I know our audience has. And we will keep reading your books and looking through the materials you give us on the resource page and just appreciate you.
Katie:
Amazing. I’ll send you all those things so you can add them.
Lori:
Perfect. Thanks, Katie.
