Utilizing the Universal Design for Learning and open educational resources (OER) should be a common practice of all educators, no matter the content area. Providing multiple avenues of engagement, reaching all learners and assessing each individual student are all cornerstones of quality education. If students aren’t engaged, they aren’t learning, they’re regurgitating. If content isn’t presented in different formats, you might be missing the students who have different learning styles. I have always promoted assessing students in ways relative to the content. If I am teaching a conditioning class, it doesn’t make sense for me to teach students how to complete an exercise and then make them take a written test about it. I want to see the student perform the action. This ‘learning by doing’ mentality can crossover through all content areas. For example, if you are teaching US History you could conduct a debate having students pull information about the causes of the Civil War. Students would be reusing, remixing and revising OER materials to utilize as support for their stance. Through my 20 years in the classroom, the education system has changed significantly. As educators, we went from a modified version of ‘reading, writing and arithmetic’ to going beyond the picture-perfect lecture to providing opportunities for our students to demonstrate their knowledge through action (Gooblar, 2020). There are several opportunities to line up the Universal Design for Learning and open educational resources through all content areas.
Reuse/Remix/Multiple Means of Action and Expression
Currently, I teach conditioning to high school students, most of which are athletes. Usually, when we are working through a unit, I try to make it more about why we lift and how it impacts our future, rather than about just the technique and gaining muscle for the high school level sports. Every once in a while, while we are covering various topics, I will ask my students to watch a video on YouTube put out by a college or professional coach that discusses the topic that we are covering in class. This gives students an opportunity to encounter an opinion other than my worldly outlook from Bennett, CO and it also gives some support to what I am teaching them. Then, I would ask them to journal under a prompt like, “What are the points the coach is trying to get across? How can this benefit you, as a high school athlete?” Once they have watched the videos and journaled, I would have them create their own video demonstrating the skill or discussing their own opinion of the content in the video. This provides an engaging, useful and creative lesson for them to see how the effort they put forth each day can have real results for the future.
Remix/Revise/Multiple Means of Engagement
I feel like I often remix and revise material simultaneously. Generally, I will try to find resources that are relative to my content, but they aren’t always exactly what I’m looking for. Therefore, I beg, borrow and steal to create an ideal lesson for the unit. During my years teaching agriculture in the classroom, I would usually create my own lessons, but every once in a while, I wanted to see what else was on the web. We didn’t have a greenhouse, so I would have to get creative with my lessons. I usually have a method and stick to it, but one year I was looking for something else. I was in my plant science unit, studying parts of a flower and I would often go through a slideshow, then we would move into the next activity of the unit, which was flower dissections. I understood that my students didn’t always want to sit and listen to my lecture, but I also realized the value of the content that I covered through the presentation. I found an activity for them to build the plant with play-doh, as we go through the PowerPoint. When I would turn to the slide about the stamen, they would build the stamen and add it to their flower. This was a great way for students to get involved in the lesson and sometimes, I would even give out candy to students who made the most realistic structures. There is research to support that involving students in the lesson and encouraging them to take charge of their own learning, encourages them to enjoy learning, fuels a drive for critical thinking and increases focus and attention (Engaging students in learning, n.d.).
Reuse/Revise/Multiple Means of Representation
While teaching agriculture, we spent an equal amount of time in the shop and classroom. For the shop portions of the classes, I would use the National Association of Agricultural Educators’ website called, Communities of Practice to maintain creative lessons for use in the shop. Through that website, I was able to find individual lessons for both electricity and plumbing, although they weren’t exactly what I was looking for, so I modified them to fit my unit and my students. I took both units and taught them, as they were presented on the website, but I wanted a final project for students to create as an assessment, instead of a written test. I decided to have my students create a wall, that they had to run electrical wire and plumbing through in order to test out of the unit.
References:
Engaging students in learning. (n.d.). Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.washington.edu/teaching/topics/engaging-students-in-learning/
Gooblar, D. (2020, March 08). Your students learn by doing, not by listening. Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.chronicle.com/article/your-students-learn-by-doing-not-by-listening/?bc_nonce=usx03skgndbgfo8qf3yzyw
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