It. Has. Begun.

While contracted inservices don't start until next week, this was a week of learning. I had the opportunity to spend Tuesday and Thursday with colleagues down in Oconomowoc at their district's UDL Academy (yes, it has been a UDL-filled few weeks). I also got to be in the new middle school on Wednesday with some of the other middle school teachers getting acclimated to our new surroundings. Here's a recap of the highlights (not EVERYTHING) from the last few days!

Tuesday morning's UDL Academy began at the Oconomowoc Arts Center with Joni Degner speaking on "Empowering All Teachers." I had the opportunity to hear Joni in Boston, but this keynote was different than the one she gave in Boston, but it was just as good! Right away we were introduced to a tool that I can't wait to use in my classroom--https://answergarden.ch/  This site is an instant word cloud creator that fills as participants give their answers. I want to use it with my students as soon as I can! Joni then went on to share 3 pathways for teacher empowerment: UDL, collaboration, and professional learning. She discussed the importance of each aspect, and one thought that stuck out to me is that, "Variability is the norm, and flexibility is the rule." As teachers we need to realize that our rooms are full of variability and we need to remain flexible. Joni finished her keynote with a challenge: What's your UDL commitment to your learners, colleagues, or self? 
Following the keynote, I sat in on a session with Katie Novak on "Quick and Dirty UDL Planning."
One big aspect of this session was about the fact that there is a big difference between providing options and offering choices. and she shared an outline on the process of making choices:

The Process of Making Choices (What students do/what teachers do)

• Students choose, and teachers...
• Provide multiple means of executive function
• Heighten the salience of goals and objectives
• Students do, and teachers...
• Support the strategy
• Provide scaffolds, supports, and tools
• Students review, and teachers…
• Monitor progress
• Foster self-reflection and self-assessment

This process really supports the idea of teacher as facilitator rather than sole expert in the classroom.

The following session was once again with Joni Degner, this time speaking on "The Myth of the Average Student, the AP Student, and the Struggling Student." Joni shared the fact that UDL gives us a way to proactively and intentionally support systematic learner variability, and that if you design for the average, then you design for nobody. Every learner is complex. No learner is just one thing.

When we label students, we tend to think of them that way across the board, but excelling in one area does not mean all areas.

The UDL Academy for today seemed to have, in my opinion, a theme of community (which is obviously important for UDL). Part of the keynote by Liz Berquist dealt with how we are going to build up the emotional resiliency of those around us (colleague community), and the session I attended with Katie Novak focused a lot on establishing an environment of safety, inclusion, and collaboration (classroom community). Without a strong community, members of the community won't feel comfortable to make a choice that could be a risk, and risks in education can lead to great things!

So, back to Joni's challenge: What's your UDL commitment to your learners, colleagues, or self? I decided that my commitment would be to build up the emotional resiliency of my team (while helping myself at the same time) by taking more opportunities to do classroom visits to my colleagues' classrooms and then tell them what's great about their teaching.

Wednesday was a fantastic day spending some quality time with my new middle school family in the learning spaces of the middle school! We spent a good portion of the day working on identifying possible barriers the students would experience once school starts up and determining how we can remove the barriers during the Launch of the school year to help the students be successful. We also had the opportunity to test out the new seating options for the students and come up with some possible classroom layouts. There were a few scheduling problem solving situations my team worked on as well. In the afternoon we were given some much-needed time in our classrooms. I am so excited about my new learning space! I am going to be situated in a science lab that connects the 7th and 8th grade neighborhoods so that I can easily work with both the 7th and 8th grade students I will have. I have some classroom setups in mind, but I haven't really had the chance to try them out just yet because I am working on sorting through all the science resources that I inherited from the previous teacher. My room has a great deal of storage space and will end up being the "collection center" for the 7th and 8th grade materials, so I want to be sure to store them in a way that makes sense for myself and the other science teachers. Right now I have things unloaded from the carts they came on and spread out across the tables, organized in a way that I think the materials would work for units. However, I'm going to check with my teammates before I start storing them just to make sure...

The next few weeks are going to be busy, and I can't wait to get my classroom organized and ready!