Story 2: Centerville 3rd Grade

11/6/2017

Our next story comes from 3rd grade teacher, Martha Sanchez. She has been experimenting with Universal Design for Learning for several years now. Her and her team have worked tirelessly at Centerville to connect the guidelines with providing environmental options for within classrooms. Martha understands how to implement UDL across instructional contexts and how to use her UDL design lens in some pretty fantastic ways. She also capitalizes on flexible classroom strategies as they impact student academic progress within standards. Here is her story!

One of the ways that I have implemented UDL, is by always thinking about the barriers to whatever concept I am teaching. Then I start to think about the concrete to symbolic spectrum and start planning my lesson(s). I have used checkpoint 1.1 to display information on my anchor charts and other materials in a flexible format, such as size/font of text, good quality images, etc. I have used checkpoint 1.2-3 to offer different representation of concepts such as realia, images, video, and music. I also have found success in using checkpoint 3.3 to provide multiple entry points to a lesson, such as images and short films to teach some reading strategies and skills. I have also found much success in checkpoint 5.2 by providing tools such as text-to-speech (Seesaw), sentence starters, story webs, math manipulatives when needed. This has helped my students become more confident in their communication of their learning. Another checkpoint I have used is 6.3 by providing students with checklist, such as what to do when they are done, what our answers to word problems need to have, what their short responses in ELA need to have, and our classroom’s non-negotiables, that was created together. I also try my best to provide a safe and supportive classroom environment on a daily basis, checkpoint 7.3. I think that when students feel safe, especially safe to make mistakes, they gain a better interest in their learning. I can go on and on about how much UDL has impacted my teaching and my classroom. At this point I am still learning more and more about UDL. I am excited to be on this journey because it has had such a positive impact on my students.

Describing characters using evidence from the text. Some students used Seesaw to listen to a recording of the story. They used different color sticky notes to represent the two main characters and highlighted evidence in different color.

I cut out pictures of a comic fable to teach what a fable was, but also to teach sequencing. They collaborated with each other as they sequenced the short story.