Class # 8: Learning Disabilities, the Writing Process and the Universal Design for Learning

Tonight was broken up into 3 sections. During the first section of class we broke into groups to watch segments of a series of videos entitle “Misunderstood Minds.” This series looks at the lives of different students with learning difficulties or disabilities and how each family worked together with experts to identify and cope with their learning difficulty. Each group viewed 3 videos from this series and then discussed the segments and summarized our findings in some sort of document. Our group chose to do ours in PowerPoint. I worked with Anna, Setz and Dallas and we viewed chapter 1, 4 and 5. The introduction to the videos talked about how one in five students find learning an exhausting and frustrating struggle. Too often these students are mistakenly called "lazy" or "stupid" by their teachers and peers but in actuality may be suffering from a learning disability. Each student thinks and learns differently so we as teachers need strategies to meet the needs of all our students. If not, continuing to label these students as "lazy" or "stupid" will have a devastating impact on our students self esteem, academic achievement and future. The following are the video segments that my group viewed and a summary of the child’s story depicted. Chapter 1- Nathan’s Story who has a phonemic awareness learning disability. Chapter 4 - Lauren’s Story who has attention difficulties in all areas. Chapter 5 – Sarah’s Story who has expressive language deficiency. Below is a link to the Power Point presentation my group created summarizing our findings. Click here for our Misunderstood Minds PowerPoint on Chapters 1, 4 & 5 Tonight we also looked at the writing task analysis. This task, just like the reading task broken down last week, is extremely complicated! As you can see from the concept map shown below created by our instructor, this can be a very daunting task for some. I think it is important for us as educators to step back and study such tasks reading and writing to better recognize and appreciate the complexity of these tasks for some of our students. Writing Task Analysis Concept Map:

At the end of the class we watched an awesome video on the Universal Design for Learning. If you have not viewed this video, I highly suggested you take the time to view it now!! I really enjoyed this video because I was able to make a connection between this class and another class I am taking presently,Assessment for Learning. I emailed the link to my instructor as soon as class was over! This video helped to solidify what I have been learning in both this class and assessment for learning.

Now more than ever we need to be cognizant of the highly diverse students in front of and the need for our curriculum and instruction to be designed to meet such diversity. We need to minimize barriers and maximize learning for all students, not just the majority! Each person brings their own background, strengths, needs and interests so the curriculum needs to provide genuine learning opportunities for every student. One size does not fit all!! As seen from the cartoon above, we need to move away from the traditional “one size fits all” approach to teaching. The Universal Design for Learning framework provides all students the opportunities to shape their own thinking and learning. By encorporating this framework into our practice we will start to see the following shift happening in our classrooms!