Category: design thinking

395. UDL 3.0

Posted in accessibility, classroom community, design thinking, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, universal design
May 28, 2025

The Universal Design for Learning (or UDL) framework is based on research on how students learn. In this episode, Tom Tobin, Lillian Nave, and Jennifer Pusateri join us to discuss the most recent evolution of the UDL guidelines.

Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Adopting Universal Design for Learning across Higher Education, as well as Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning. Lillian is the Faculty and Educational Development Specialist for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University’s Hickory Campus, a senior lecturer in first-year seminar, and the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. Jennifer is the Senior Universal Design Consultant at The University of Kentucky and has served as the co-chair of the international UDL in Higher Education Network. She is a member of the CAST National Faculty and is the author of Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning: Six Steps to Jumpstart Your Practice. Tom, Lillian, and Jennifer often serve as keynote speakers on UDL and other issues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The Universal Design for Learning (or UDL) framework is based on research on how students learn. In this episode, we discuss the most recent evolution of the UDL guidelines.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Tom Tobin, Lillian Nave, and Jennifer Pusateri. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Adopting Universal Design for Learning across Higher Education, as well as Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning. Lillian is the Faculty and Educational Development Specialist for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University’s Hickory Campus, a senior lecturer in first-year seminar, and the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. Jennifer is the Senior Universal Design Consultant at The University of Kentucky and has served as the co-chair of the international UDL in Higher Education Network. She is a member of the CAST National Faculty and is the author of Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning: Six Steps to Jumpstart Your Practice. Tom, Lillian, and Jennifer often serve as keynote speakers on UDL and other issues. Welcome Jennifer, and welcome back, Tom and Lillian.

Tom: Thanks a bunch, glad to be here.

Lillian: Very glad to be, again, with you all.

Jennifer: Yeah, excited. My pleasure.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Tom, are you drinking tea today?

Tom: I am, I am coming to you with some peak leaf cold brew iced tea when all you want is just the tea. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Love it. Lillian?

Lillian: I would like you to notice I’m drinking in my Tea for Teaching podcast mug that John gifted me at a conference, and I brought my organic hibiscus or hibiscus, depending on if you’re from the south or not, my hibiscus tea bags.

Rebecca: And how about you, Jennifer?

Jennifer: So, I’m not a tea drinker, guys. I drink a coffee in the morning, and then the rest of the day I am team water. So I’ve got my emotional support water cup with me here today.

Rebecca: I do like to always point out that water is the foundation of tea. [LAUGHTER]

Jennifer: That is true.

John: And I am drinking a pure peppermint tea because it’s been a long day filled with caffeine up to this point.

Rebecca: And I have my last cup of London Strand. I’m at the end. It’s very sad.

John: You may have to head back there again.

Rebecca: I may.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the UDL 3.0 guidelines that were released on July 30, 2024. But before we discuss the changes that have occurred, could you describe what the UDL framework is and what remains the same?

Jennifer: I’ll give it a shot. So the framework of UDL is essentially a collection of, gosh, I think there’s over 1200 different studies that have kind of been boiled down into these nine categories, and those categories are organized in a grid format. So you can kind of look at it in lots of different ways, but essentially this framework, the UDL framework, tells you what research says works in teaching, and it tells you about that in nine different areas. So three of those have to do with engagement. Three have to do with representation, or how things are presented, and the other three have to do with action and expression, kind of how people are taking action with and showing what they’ve learned. So that’s how the framework of UDL works, and it’s been updated many times. There was an update that I remember in 2013. There was another one in 2018, but the move from the 2013 to the 2018 version, the words didn’t really change, but the order of some of the guidelines changed around a little bit. So this is the first time in quite a while, and this new version, the 3.0 version that came out here in the summer of ‘24 this is the first time we’ve seen some changes to the actual words inside of the guideline themselves. And there’s actually quite a lot that’s the same. I don’t think anything was removed, per se. Some things were combined. So they took two that might have been similar and combined them into one consideration, which is what we call the bullet points that you see if you’re looking at the framework of UDL. So many were left the same. And then we also had some brand new ones, and those are really scattered across the framework, and a lot of them are bringing into focus some other things we hadn’t really talked much about in UDL. So I’m excited to learn a little bit more about that from my colleagues today, but I always love to talk about the framework of UDL, so I’m here for it. And for a webinar that Lillian and Tom and I did last week, we put together a crosswalk document that will show you what things stayed the same, what things are new, and maybe some things where it’s been changed, but it’s close. So we have a whole document laid out for that, and we will be happy to put that in the show notes.

Rebecca: Always like a good resource around here, that’s for sure. So as Jennifer just noted, both the current and earlier versions of the UDL guidelines include things related to multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression, but there were some revisions to the language about how these are described. The earlier guidelines asked faculty to provide each of these, and the current guidelines remove the word “provide,” and have shifted the focus to learner agency. Can you talk a little bit about what motivated this change and what are some ways of building learner agency into course design?

Tom: Rebecca, this is an excellent question, because one of the reasons why we moved into a new version number with universal design for learning is that, in earlier versions, we assumed a command environment where the instructor had all the skill, the authority, the deference and the learners were just there to sort of bask in the glory of the knowledge of the instructor. And that’s not necessarily the case. I mean, if you’re teaching elementary school students, you act in loco parentis. At the same time, in higher education, we’re working with adult learners, and they are their own folks. They’re there for their own reasons, and we don’t have any legal obligation to treat them in a power dynamic. So when we think about the shift to learner agency, there was, for many years, a call among practitioners to say the designers and instructors are not the only people with power here, and the designers and instructors are not the only people who are engaged in the learning process. So it’s not, “Hey, we design it and then you lucky people get to experience it,” but we should be making space to help learners understand their own learning process and then build up into agency. So the goal is not to create expert learners, but now they’ve actually shifted that language into learner agency, or agentic learners. In colleges and universities, a lot of our learners already have some experience under their belts, so there is much less of a need for an expectation to establish a command environment, like I was saying a minute ago. Now, that actually lets us design better for the goal of agentic learning for Universal Design for Learning, since we are in the business of preparing our learners to join us as professionals in our fields. And if you want to take a look into one of the new guidelines, you’d watch for language in the 3.0 version that talks about co-creating, and we can apply that broadly where it doesn’t yet appear. So Jennifer talked earlier about there are three big principles of universal design for learning. So design multiple ways to get engaged, to represent information, and to take action and express yourself. Each of those three big principles is further divided into nine guidelines. And each of those nine guidelines has several considerations underneath it, specific practices that people can do. The new consideration 8.3, “foster collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning,” it explicitly talks about learners creating their own learning conditions. But one of the older considerations, 2.1, which is “clarify vocabulary, symbols, and language structures,” it doesn’t yet do that. So if you want, listeners, you can search for research on social construction of learning, with colleges and universities in your search terms, and you can kind of address that gap. Similarly in how we design is there’s an assumption in Universal Design for Learning that learners’ brains are still developing. The UDL came out of the K-12 environment, and if you think of maybe a mom and her grade-school-age son, they’re sitting at home, they’re both working on their homework, she’s in college, so she’s on her laptop; he’s in grade school, so he’s got a pencil and a piece of paper. and we need to support developing executive and emotional aspects of learners in K-12 environments. But for college, we kind of have to shift our focus from developing brains toward social-emotional elements, and we see some of this in some of the newer UDL considerations. So the research that’s cited for consideration 3.2, it’s one of the old ones, that’s “highlight and explore patterns, critical features, big ideas, and relationships,” right now, the research that is cited for that doesn’t contain any higher education examples, so we’ve got about 15 years worth of studies like Jen was talking about earlier. And to address this, we can kind of move beyond the simple neurobiology argument of UDL toward a more social constructivist mode of practice. So we’ll design options specifically so that we can help reduce cognitive load, dissonance, and environmentally interfering conditions for our learners. So watch out in the new 3.0 guidelines for language that talks about emotions, self-regulation, and review the research page of those considerations to see what sources were used to develop them, and you can supplement your search with keywords from those considerations, plus college, university or adult learning in your research databases. So there’s a lot to unpack in the new guidelines.

John: The new guidelines also emphasize issues related to individual identity and building on the strength of the diversity in our classes. Some faculty, though, especially in STEM fields, are somewhat resistant to that. They’ll say, “When I’m teaching students how to work with differential equations, identity doesn’t matter.” How can we convince faculty that perhaps they should at least consider the diversity of students in their class and build on that diversity?

Lillian: Well, I’ll take that one, John, and let’s not give, and you’re not doing this, give the STEM professors a bad name or anything. But I do hear this a lot in a lot of my conversations with faculty, and I think it’s just not really broadening enough… broadening our definition of what identity is. It’s really not just the things that we can see, but recognizing that all of the students in our classroom are different, and identity can take many forms, and that’s the reality that we have in our classrooms. More and more students are coming to college than have ever gone before from different backgrounds: We have first-generation students, English language learners, college prep students, and students who’ve had really no college prep, so neurodivergent students, students with disabilities, etc. So it’s really a matter of understanding who’s in your classroom and taking down barriers to learning for all of those students. So all of your students are going to have some strengths. Some are going to be really stem focused. They’re going to have a great math background. They’re going to be ready to go into your physics lab with really no problems. And other students might come in with a lot of other maybe verbal strengths, reading comprehension, a lot of vocabulary, but need a little bit more structure and background with some of the math as they move into your physics lab, okay? So we’ve got lots of challenges and opportunities for all of them. What does that look like? Well, I can use the example of my daughter, who was a typical college student and would have shown up in many of those STEM classes, because she was a STEM major, and she was kind of the typical, you know, most college students now are young women… [LAUGHTER] that’s the majority… are girls. And by the way, she gives me full permission to share this story. And thinking of all of you college lecturers and professors out there, how many of you have had a student named Emma? Probably 100% of them. So she’s in your class, but what you don’t realize is that there are lots of things that are part of one student’s identity that you don’t know are making it harder or are barriers. So being a girl in a STEM class is sometimes just a little bit awkward, when even though they’re the most of the students, they are less represented in STEM classes. So when she was in a physics class, she was in the minority. No big deal. But when you keep adding on a few other things, like the fact that, as a left hander, she really couldn’t write as fast as everybody else, and so she needed a little electronic iPad to work on there. That’s number two. And then the fact that she’s neurodivergent in two ways, with ADHD, anxiety, that made it a little bit more hesitant for her to go up and ask questions when she was feeling far behind. And then add on to that, a chronic condition. So she has to get immunotherapy and go to a clinic. That means she has to leave campus. She has to get those set up even before the semester starts. So, too bad it conflicted with her physics class because she didn’t know which section she was going to be in. So all of those things are things that created barriers for her, and I’m not saying that the faculty member needs to know all those things, you don’t, but those are the kinds of things that are part of your students’ identities. So if you can make sure that you have accessible slides, that if a student has to miss for no fault of their own, they can get that information, then you’re doing a service to your students. In fact, you’re just making it accessible for your students who can’t be there. If you’re making sure that everybody knows, really well organized, what the material is, and that they can go back and look at things that were building up to that particular date, if you have to miss, then those are just other ways that you are supplying the information to all of your students, no matter their identity, if they have a lot of background or a little bit of background, etc. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about. And it’s not just accessibility, but it’s just thinking about you’re going to have students that are coming at your material from a different direction, and they are going to be better served by a variety of ways to get to the end point, not just the one way that you’re the most comfortable with. Because every student is different. Every faculty member is different. My favorite saying that I use all the time is we really don’t want the same students to be uncomfortable all of the time, but we want all of the students to be uncomfortable some of the time, and so if we can spread that out, we get all of the students into that learning zone where they risk just a little, but they’re not always in that risky fight or flight mode, then we’re better serving our students. So that’s what I say about identity for our students, it does matter just because everybody’s different.

Rebecca: Sounds like we also need to think about as faculty also sometimes having that experience of being uncomfortable like that goes… [LAUGHTER]

Lillian: Yes, exactly.

Rebecca: …not all the same faculty need to be uncomfortable all of the time. So building on what you were just talking about, Lillian, and what Tom was mentioning before about the social aspects that are now in UDL. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which our courses can more effectively foster a sense of belonging?

Lillian: Yes, yeah, so I’ll go all in on these two questions right now. So we’re all in this learning together, and all of our students and faculty have a relationship, whether you realize it or not, it might be a terrible relationship where students are afraid to come into class because they’ll get called on and they’re anxious about it, and they’re like dreading two o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s a relationship that you may or may not know, but it also could be a very warm and inviting relationship. I know that I’m going to go into class and there’s going to be something interesting and exciting and feel like they’re valued or ready to learn something new. So anyway, everybody’s got some sort of relationship. But how can we leverage, really, the design of the course into learning together and making it really a social learning opportunity? There’s lots of different ways to do that. So you can do that in person, online or hybrid. For example, if you have even a large in-person class, a way that all of the learners can really understand that they’re in the same place, they’re all learning together, is if you were to use, like an in-person or synchronous poll, and it can be completely anonymous, and then the faculty member could really determine, like, where are we as a class? There’s no points associated with it. It’s completely anonymous. So, could throw out a concept and see where people are, maybe on a continuum. Or how confident are you in this theory? Do you think you could solve this problem? And then the students could be like, “Oh, it’s not just me. About the third of the class thinks we need to review this again.” That’s just one way that everybody in the classroom is understanding their learning together. And it doesn’t have to be like, throw everybody in a group. You don’t have to do that, although that’s also helpful, but that’s just like, one of those things. In an online class. I love using a Q & A forum, so this is different, but this is understanding or seeing how somebody else in the class may solve a problem differently than you, but you want all of your students to attack this problem, and you don’t want it to be a discussion board where the first person answers, and then everybody else says, “Yeah. I was thinking that too.” Instead, this is something where everybody has to come up with their own answer, or way they would solve the problem or their thoughts on it, but they don’t get to see anybody else’s until they’ve answered. You have to wait 15 minutes after you answer to see if anybody else has and there’s some great mechanisms to do that. And that could be in smaller groups, it could be in the whole class, but we really do learn a lot and have a much more rich and more nuanced understanding the material when we see that other people are learning that, like I can read a passage and get something out of it, Jen can read the same passage and see something completely differently. Tom will see it a whole ‘nother way and pick up different things, and I’m a much better learner when I see that rich and nuanced perspective of my classmates. So there we all are learning together. So you can design for group learning, whether it’s hybrid, in-person, online, if you give also really good roles for any group work you want them to do. Don’t just throw them in the group and say, “have at it.” Is there going to be someone who’s the convener, who’s going to be sending out the emails? What are the roles? Is there an editor in the group, or what are they supposed to be doing? And also, what sort of document are they creating? Is it accessible, so that all of those students can really find what they need to do. So giving really good instructions on those things can help people learn together. And finally, I think the last thing is, have fun: games, quizzes, review days, trying things out together, making it sort of fun in learning is another way, I think, that we can bring that sense of community into the learning process.

John: One of the things you mentioned was doing some sort of a poll at the beginning of class, or gathering information about the identities of your students. One useful resource for that is the “Who’s in Class” form that was put together by Tracie Addy, Khadijah Mitchell, and Derek Dube, and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes, as well as an article they wrote about that. One of the other things in the new guidelines is that there’s an increased focus on addressing biases in the use of language and symbols, as well as biases related to modes of expression and communication. What are some of the ways in which these biases may appear, and how can we address them in our classes?

Tom: This is actually one of the big shifts in Universal Design for Learning 3.0, is that there’s an increasing awareness of and a need to create space for the intersectional identities or characteristics that learners and instructors bring into learning spaces. So those kinds of biases can be often unintentional ones. So for example, physical assumptions. When I’m giving a webinar and I say, “as you can see on the screen,” well maybe everybody can’t actually see what’s on the screen, so I’ve taken to doing visual description, or just using ableist language. When we think about something that’s really difficult, we say it was crazy or it was insane, and those are small but telling, unknowing ways of saying, “Yeah, if you fall into one of these categories, maybe this is not for you, or you don’t belong here.” Our colleague, Ann Gagne has a wonderful approach to addressing some of these biases, is using very neutral language in very charged or meaningful ways. So if you had a challenging day and someone asks you, “Hey, how did things go?” You can say “it was bananas,” and Ann, in a recent webinar, she used that kind of language, and she talked about one of her colleagues just saying giraffes. It was like a herd of giraffes, and it’s evocative, yes, ableist less so. When Jen and Lillian and I held a webinar for the Professional and Organizational Development Network Accessibility and Disability special interest group, or the POD A and D SIG for short, recently, we each got to talk about one of the new Universal Design for Learning considerations. The one that I was facilitating with some colleagues was 6.5: “challenge, exclusionary practices.” And this gets to your question, John. We can kind of examine power dynamics now within universal design for learning in a way that it wasn’t explicitly included before. So when we’re thinking about power imbalance, the people who teach in higher education, we are not ourselves a homogeneous group. We experience and express privilege and power in varying ways. So the same inclusive practices that white male instructors like me might use in order to lower barriers and smooth the way for learners, those might result in pushback and mistrust when they’re implemented by younger colleagues, women in the classroom, people of color who are at the front of a classroom. So we should acknowledge the privilege and standing that are needed in order to implement many of the UDL considerations. And when we design for variability, we should do so thinking about the variability, not only of our learners, but of the instructors who are going to be in communication and community with them. So when we’re thinking about biases, we can think along lots of different vectors: we can think about socioeconomic, we can think about gendered bias. There’s lots of those that listeners, you are probably familiar with. And when we think about Universal Design for Learning, just as we’re thinking about the variability of the learners, we also should start thinking about, “Okay, who has the privilege to be able to do these things and facilitate them well in the classroom. So that’s one piece where I’m hoping to see more research come out. We’ve actually got a number of different researchers who are working on these kinds of questions as their doctoral work over the last couple of years and into the future in the next two or three years. So I’m excited to see some of this research come out.

John: We should note, Tom, that you wrote an article with Chavella Pittman on this issue a while back in The Chronicle, and we had a podcast discussing that as well, and we’ll share links to both of those in the show notes. So, when talking about agency and power dynamics, the new guidelines seem to provide a bit more focus on the development of student goal setting, executive function, and metacognition, while also recognizing the individual, institutional, and systemic barriers to learning. What are some ways of incorporating this into the design of our courses?

Jennifer: Yeah, well, John, one of the biggest changes that we saw in the framework of UDL from the 2.2 to the 3.0 was moving executive functioning, which was a part of the previous version, but it was only one of the nine guidelines. So in this iteration, they have expanded that to be the entire bottom row, and so that’s including several different pieces of executive functioning. And that whole row now is labeled as executive function. So one piece of that would be emotional capacity. That would be things like emotional regulation or motivation, even inhibition and metacognition are part of that emotional capacity piece. It also includes the building knowledge guideline, and that used to be called comprehension, but is now renamed to building knowledge, and that piece is really going to be talking a lot about the information processing and the working memory piece that is part of this umbrella term, executive function. And then the last is strategy development, and that’s the one where we get into those, what people typically think of as executive functioning, goal setting, planning, organization, time management, that kind of stuff, all falls under that category as well. And I’m really glad that this is the way they have restructured this, because I’ll be honest, I ran into a lot of questions from folks in higher ed and K-12 as well, because previously there were two guidelines. One was executive function, and then the other one was self-regulation. And so I had a lot of people saying, well, aren’t those kind of the same thing? And I don’t want to go down too much of a rabbit… well, that’s not true. I do want to go down a rabbit hole… but I’m going to refrain from going down said rabbit hole. But it’s really interesting to me that now we’ve kind of acknowledged that, “Okay, yeah, the self-regulation part is a piece of executive function.” I think that’s why they went through and renamed some of these on the bottom row. And these are really important. We’re noticing, at least at my university, and I would guess at others as well, that we have quite a few more neurodivergent students than we used to have, and some estimates would say even up to a third of our students could be considered as neurodivergent. And for neurodivergent students, that executive functioning row, that bottom row of the new 3.0 guidelines, is a game changer, because a lot of the pieces that we forget to mention in higher ed kind of that hidden curriculum that we might talk about, or that hidden structure, those things are made explicit through that bottom row of the guidelines. So, for example, if we wanted to think about strategy development, we could be looking at something like walking students through what journal of articles or academic articles look like in your field and how you read those. So, I’ll use myself as an example. I did not know until my PhD program that you don’t just start at the beginning and read all the way through an article to the very end, like front to back. In my mind, that made sense, because that’s how we read everything else. But as it turns out, my professors in my education department were telling me, “Well, there’s kind of a different way you can go about this. You can start with the abstract, read through that, see if it’s still within the realm of what you want to know. Then you can kind of skip to the discussion part at the end. Read through that a little bit, figure out if that’s what you need to know. And then, if you’re still interested and still want to use this article, then you can read some of the other pieces.” Well, I had no idea. Like no one had ever said that. So why would I know that? So when we can pull those kinds of things out and make them clear and explicit to our students, transparent is another word that we might use for that, and that reminds me of the work of Mary-Ann Winklemes in transparency, in learning and teaching, TILT. You may have heard of TILT Higher Ed or transparent assignment design, and those are really all kind of doing the same things. We’re taking the guesswork out of our teaching and learning, and that’s, of course, going to help our neurodivergent students, but that’s going to help a lot of students as well, first-gen students, international students. And if we’re able to do that and make those things really clear, then we’re going to help a lot of students. We could look at another example, if we’re thinking about the, and this is in the building knowledge guideline, so 3.2 is highlight and explore patterns, critical features, big ideas and relationships. There are lots of ways that you can do this, but one way I really appreciate, because I kind of lean toward visuals, is having a concept map, or some visual way of connecting the information to the other information, like connecting it and helping me to orient myself within both the thing that we’re learning about, but like, what am I learning about there, in relation to the whole course? So being able to kind of see those relationships laid out in a visual way is also going to be really useful. And then Lillian actually talked already a little bit about this idea of group work and how we might set that up. And there are several considerations that talk about this kind of idea of, like, working together in some way. And one of the ones I really like a lot in the emotional capacity guideline is talking about cultivating empathy and restorative practices. And one way, of course, we can do that, and Lillian actually kind of mentioned a little bit about this as well, is helping students to reflect on, like, what is actually helpful for me when I’m in a group setting? Like, what kinds of things make me feel comfortable enough to share my thoughts and ideas? What kinds of things get in the way of that? Like, what are some of the barriers that I encounter in a group setting? And having students actually work through that, kind of process that information and process their own metacognitive view of themselves working in a group before we get into a group. And if we can do that first and reflect individually, then we can come together as a group, and now we can start to build this trust framework, this sense of belonging, because I can now share those things. I can say, “Gosh, when I’m in a group, I don’t always talk first like, I’m just not usually that person. But if someone is like, ‘Jennifer, what do you think about that?’ And they ask me, then I’m going to contribute to the conversation.” So things like that really helped me in a group setting. And if I can say that to my group, now they can understand, perhaps, why I’m not jumping into the conversation immediately, and that builds that empathy. And then we can also figure out what are some things that I can make sure I don’t do so that I’m supporting my other group members as well. So I’ve actually got a really good group contract activity kit that I put together for one of our workshops at the University of Kentucky, and I would be happy to put a link to that in the show notes as well. And this actually has kind of that breakdown. First, there’s an individual reflection, then you get together in your groups, and you do a group discussion with your reflection, and also you put together a contract, and it kind of walks professors through how they could go about doing something like that. So I will make sure I get that in the show notes.

Rebecca: That sounds awesome. As we’re thinking about changing times, we also can think a little bit about generative AI and how that might support the UDL framework in its new form.

Tom: It’s a wonderful question, and I had the pleasure at the Online Learning Consortium OLC conference of being on a panel on UDL and AI with the two of you. So I’m going to not actually recycle some of the ideas we talked about there, but I’ve got some new ones. I want to talk about a lopsided house and listeners. I’m going to describe this for you. There will also be a visual that we’ll put into the show notes. I was recently talking with Marcus Popetz. He’s the person who runs Harmonize, the geek company, and we’re going to be putting together a webinar later on, on universal design for learning and artificial intelligence resistant assessments. And if that sounds like I have my wooden shoe ready to throw into the cogs of the machine, quite the opposite. So the lopsided house is an idea that I’m currently playing with. Imagine a rectangular diagram so time moves from left to right. On the bottom, there are learners who are beginners, people who don’t know yet, and they’re just starting to learn a concept or a skill or something we can teach them. In the middle are proficient learners, people who have enough to actually start doing the things in our field. And then over at the other end of time is practitioners. These are learners who are para-professionals. They’ve got the skills, and they probably their next step will be becoming colleagues of ours. Now in that rectangle, draw a diagonal line from the very bottom of beginner all the way over to the very top of practitioner. And what you’ve just done is you’ve created an artificial intelligence tool use diagram that matches up with what we might call designed UDL. So when someone is a beginner, we want to, as designers and instructors, provide them with and there’s that provide word that UDL doesn’t use anymore. We want to provide optimized choices for learners in their learning experiences, and we want to do a lot of that, and we want to be a little heavy-handed with it, right? We’re the experts, and we kind of know how to guide people through those beginnings. Also, at that beginning stage, there’s very little use of tools. We’re helping people to understand the foundational ideas, get them practice, even if it’s the long way around or the manual way to do things. For example, I teach writing courses, and my freshman writers, I want them to create paragraphs that have a thesis statement and details evidence and examples that then help to support that thesis. This is not the time to let them loose on Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT. This is the time to say, “Please don’t use those tools, because I want you to learn the foundations.” Now move forward in time, and it’s about half and half. As people get more proficient as learners, we take away some of that designed UDL, we actually give them more agency. And here’s where you can draw another triangle on top of that, it’s kind of a lopsided house, where as we reduce the amount of designed universal design for learning opportunities, we start increasing where we’re asking the learners themselves to learn more about their learning process and be agentic, to take control of and show where they want to go with their learning. And when you’re more proficient, you can use tools to start working on things like giving study questions to generate off of a reading. A bad use of artificial intelligence… I’m here with Stacy Truex when she says “You can’t ask it to do something you don’t know how to do yet.” So give me a summary of the reading… bad idea. Give me some study questions from the reading and then quiz yourself on the reading that you’ve done…very good idea in terms of asking proficient learners to use artificial intelligence tools. And then when we move all the way over to sort of the end of the timeline, where people who are our learners become more like practitioners. They become paraprofessional. That’s when we really ramp up the tool use. That’s when we let them loose and we say, “Hey, artificial intelligence tools, that can help you skip the foundational steps… Now you know, now you have enough skill and knowledge to skip those steps so that you can focus on higher-order complex thinking.” And this is also the point in people’s learning careers where we want to have the least amount of designed UDL. We’re not guiding them anymore. We want them at that point to have the greatest amount of agentic, universal design for learning knowledge. And when we’re thinking about examples here, I’m thinking about study question generation, but also creating alternative formats of things. “Hey, this document is only a PDF, can you make a read it out loud to me version of that?” Artificial intelligence tools are really good at making alternative versions of existing content and materials. And the same thing when we’re thinking about as instructors or designers, because we have that expertise, artificial intelligence tools can help us to create multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representing information very quickly. You want a question bank that is tied to each of your learning objectives and segments things into question pools of three questions or more. Bang, couple of minutes, and it’s there, and then you can review it from your expert perspective. Creating quizzes, everything kind of speeds up when we’re using artificial intelligence. The key though is, in order to use those tools well, we’ve got to know what we’re talking about first, whether we’re learners, designers, or instructors. So I want to leave that sort of as a provocative thing to hang into the conversation. But AI is going to help us with universal design for learning in lots of different ways.

Rebecca: One of the things that you just underscored in your lopsided house, but also a little bit earlier, is how you might use UDL in the way that you’re designing a class as an instructor a bit differently depending on the expertise of the students in the class. You pointed that out in the difference between maybe K-12 and college, but then again, between this like beginner and expert. Can you talk a little bit more about the different ways that instructors might engage with UDL in really thinking about the expertise of the students in the room when we’re kind of thinking about level?

Tom: Yes, and I’ll be really quick here, and I want to open it up. I know Jen has done work on this as well. When we’re thinking about the students, we’ve been actually engaging in a little bit of a heresy in our conversation today, and that is, strictly speaking, Universal Design for Learning is what we do when we design learning engagements before we ever know who’s going to be in our learning spaces. So whether it’s a classroom or it’s a librarian working with students, or it’s a mental health counselor or academic counselor helping students navigate systems, the design part is what we do before day one of the class, before anybody ever walks through the door and says, “Can you help me?” Then, when we start noticing patterns among our learners over time, we can take that into account. We’re starting to see many more learners who are first-generation college learners, or students who don’t speak English as their first language at home. Or we’re seeing a lot more folks who identify as neurodivergent. Those attributes are things that we can now plug into universal design spaces, but technically speaking, we don’t know who the learners are yet, so we have to assume that there’s going to be wide variability among their characteristics. That’s what UDL is all about. It goes really well with pattern recognition and what we in K-12 call differentiated instruction. I want to make a pause here and see if Jen and Lillian can take this further too, because it’s a cool question.

Jennifer: So, I do a lot of work, both in higher ed and in K-12, and in both of those areas, one of the things I tell people is that UDL is for when a human brain is in a learning situation, and that doesn’t necessarily matter if that’s for preschoolers or if that’s for undergrads, or if that’s for postdocs, if that’s for elderly, it doesn’t matter. If you’re in a learning situation, the framework of UDL should help you to be able to meet the variability, and support the variability, of your learners. So that’s one piece. Having said that, I don’t remember, Tom if you went a lot into this, but I know we talked about this the other day in our webinar. You know, currently the UDL framework is still a little K-12 heavy, and actually we’ve actually got a project going, and I’m gonna throw that in here real quick while I’m thinking about it. So if you’ve ever gone in and looked at the CAST studio guidelines website, and you’ve drilled down to one specific consideration, so let’s say options for choice and autonomy is a good example. And you’ve gone to that little page where it tells you a little bit about this is what this means and here are some sort of generalized ways you could think about doing that in a teaching situation. There’s also a place on that page where you can look at the research that was used to put that consideration in place. Because, as I’m sure everyone knows, in the field of education, we don’t just base our educational and teaching decisions on one study. We’re basing this on a body of research that is built up over time, so that we know, over time, we’ve seen that giving students choice and autonomy is going to help with engagement. Engagement, right? So that’s what this list of all of these different pieces of research and studies are about, and most of those are focused on K-12. So we were really wanting to put together a version of the research per guideline, and even getting down to the consideration level, or the bullet-point level, if you will, that also has some research for higher ed folks in it as well. So we have put together a Google form, and we will get that in the show notes as well. But I can just throw out this quick Bitly, if you’d like. It’s Bitly, that’s, B, I T, dot, l, y, slash, UDL, dash, H, E, which stands for higher ed, H E, dash research. And so basically, we’re wanting you to think about, do you have some like, go to research that you share with people a lot that aligns with UDL? And if so, if that’s higher ed focused, we would like to know what that is, so we can start to build up our own body of research around the guidelines that really is focused in on higher ed a little bit more. So having said that, there’s a lot of ways that you can do this, that you can build UDL in. When I think about our undergrads, Tom talked a little bit about executive functioning earlier, and for the most part, yes, we’re done cognitively developing when we enter college, but we do know that there’s still some parts of your brain that are cooking up to age 25 for most and up to even 30 and 32 for others, and that’s our executive functions. So with our younger students, for sure, but honestly, with almost all of our students, really focusing in on the executive functions piece is a good place to start, because we can just go ahead and assume that our students are going to struggle with executive function. Part of it is because of their age, but also we know that this is one of the most anxious groups of students we’ve ever seen in higher ed, and anxiety, stress, trauma, all of those things compromise our executive functions. So we can assume today that you will have students in your class that are going to struggle with executive functioning. And so I think that’s a really good place to start. And some people like to start with the top row instead, because this top row is really kind of your entry point into thinking about UDL, and it would be changing kind of the concrete things in your class. So thinking about, yes, they have a paper textbook, but can I also provide some kind of a digital format for that as well, or is this something I can maybe give to them in a visual that might make sense in that way? So you’re kind of thinking about those concrete pieces of teaching, learning, and the materials and all the things, and that’s also a really good place to start, is looking at that top row. And I’ve actually seen somebody put together a version of the guidelines where they put a little welcome mat above that and said, This is your welcome mat into the UDL framework is starting at the top and going down from there. And that’s my thoughts on that.

Lillian: In addition to the differences that UDL can be used in K-12, and then also the difference between a freshman seminar, which is what I teach, and what you might use in a senior level or grad course, is thinking about UDL can be used and should be used everywhere, because we’re dealing with people, and people are different, and everyone is unique. And so what it might also look like is thinking about it in workforce development. So not just are you providing multiple ways for your students to learn, but if you have a company, are you providing multiple ways for your learners that are in your company to move forward, to learn new skills, but also to do the things that they’re doing? So do they have options for working off hours or in remote settings? Or do you have a human- centered approach to doing whatever it is that you’re doing, so that there might be quiet spaces, or just the way that everybody can work to their strengths, so that you don’t push aside talent that you can really use, and that the people who are working for you or working in this job or in part of a company are the ones that know themselves best, and so can they offer or select specific requirements or ideas that might help them the most. And the more that we can be flexible, but still have the same end point, like we want to figure out what the goal is, but there can be multiple ways to get to that goal. Does that mean if you’ve got a project, and somebody can do that project, whether they’re in the office or not, and do a really great job, does it matter that they have to be in the office for 40 hours at the time that you’re there, just those sort of lessons we learned during the pandemic. Let’s not forget them, but that it can be something that’s really useful in the world. And think about how we teach our students. So if we’re going to teach a student to create a document, why not tell them also about how to be accessible, so that when they’re in the working world, they know to put alt text in a picture because they’re going to put it on the web, they know how to do headings in a document, so that somebody who needs a screen reader or is blind can figure out what’s going on, because your company wants to reach all those people. So just thinking about the ways that, if we’re learning it in higher ed, then that is actually going to be a really marketable skill to take on into the workforce. So it doesn’t start or stop in the education world, it just is for all humans, because we all learn and we’re all different.

John: It’s a good note to close on, and we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Tom: Well, my what’s next Universal Design for Learning is now moving from individual micro level applications to at-scale barrier-lowering across entire institutions.

Jennifer: Well, I am in the process of shopping a book around, and my book is going to be focused on neurodivergent learners in higher ed and what we can do to support them. And if we’re going to be honest, it’s mostly about UDL, but I’m also talking about other things as well, but it’s a book that needs to be written, and because it’s a book I wish my professors had when I was an undergrad with undiagnosed ADHD. So this is something that I’m hopefully going to be moving forward on very soon.

Lillian: And what’s next for me? I’m not writing a book, but I’m still podcasting, so I like to listen to everyone’s stories and try to get those out about how UDL really is changing the world for the better, and the more I can hear from folks who are implementing UDL, the better off I think we all will be. So that’s always it seems to be, what my next thing is, is the next podcast and the next guest. And other than that, you know, world domination. No, no, not that. Just UDL.

John: And I haven’t missed any of your podcasts since you started. In fact, I heard about the podcast at the OLC conference a number of years before, when someone was talking about planning this podcast.

Lillian: Excellent.

John: I very much enjoy your podcast.

Lillian: Thank you.

Rebecca: Well,thank you so much for joining us. It’s always a delight to talk to all of you and to always talk about one of my favorite topics.

Tom: Thanks for having us and listeners, we’d like to hear your stories too, so comment and you can find us on the socials, and we would love to hear from you as well.

Jennifer: Yeah, thanks for having us.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]

284. Learning That Matters

Posted in design thinking, diversity, engagement, equity, feedback, higher education, inclusion, learning, metacognition, motivation, pedagogy, teaching
April 12, 2023

Many graduates describe their college experience as being transformative, changing how they view the world and their role in it. In this episode, Caralyn Zehnder, Karynne Kleine, Julia Metzker, and Cynthia Alby join us to explore the role that college faculty can play in creating transformative learning experiences.

Caralyn is a senior lecturer in biology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Karynne is the former Dean of the Division of Education at Young Harris College, Julia is the Director of the Washington Center for Undergraduate Education at Evergreen St College, and Cynthia is a Professor of Education at Georgia College. They are the authors of Learning that Matters: A Field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education.

Show Notes

  • Zehnder, C., Alby, C., Kleine, K., & Metzker, J. (2021). Learning that matters: A field guide to course design for transformative education. Myers Education Press.
  • Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass.
  • Selingo, J. J. (2013). College (un) bound: The future of higher education and what it means for students. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  • Selingo, J. The Future Learners. Pearson.
  • Learning that Matters website
  • Learning that Matters: The Course Design Institute

Transcript

John: Many graduates describe their college experience as being transformative, changing how they view the world and their role in it. In this episode, we explore the role that college faculty can play in creating transformative learning experiences.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Caralyn Zehnder, Karynne Kleine, Julia Metzker, and Cynthia Alby. Caralyn is a senior lecturer in biology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Karynne is the former Dean of the Division of Education at Young Harris College, Julia is the Director of the Washington Center for Undergraduate Education at Evergreen St College, and Cynthia is a Professor of Education at Georgia College. They are the authors of Learning that Matters: A Field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education. Welcome Caralyn, Karynne, Julia, and Cynthia.

John: Today’s teas are:… Karynne, are you drinking tea?

Karynne: I am and I was joking yesterday that I would have to go to Starbucks and get mine because all I have is Lipton, and I did. And so I’m having some Earl Grey [LAUGHTER] in my Hawaii Cup.

Rebecca: …where I would really like to be during our impending snowstorm. [LAUGHTER]

John: Julia?

JULIA: No, actually I am drinking coffee out of my trusty thermos as I do every morning. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …there’s always one ,Julia.

John: Well, at least one.. And Cynthia? [LAUGHTER]

Cynthia: I am drinking a Tazo tea called glazed lemon loaf.

John: I haven’t seen that one.

Rebecca: It smells really tasty. I’ve had it. The smell though, is what really gets it.

John: And Caralyn?

Caralyn: I have a handpicked hand dried sweet fern and sassafras tea that my 10 year old who’s now into wild foraging blended for me.

John: Wonderful.

Rebecca: Well, that’s amazing. Can I have I have 10-year old? [LAUGHTER] I have some Awake tea today, despite the fact that it’s two o’clock in the afternoon.

John: And I have Darjeeling tea today.

Rebecca: That’s a different choice for you, John.

John: It is. I was looking for things I haven’t had recently. So I picked that one.

Rebecca: Score one for you, fail for Rebecca. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Learning that Matters. Can you talk a little bit about how this book came about?

Caralyn: Well, we, many years ago, were all faculty together at Georgia College. And it started with Julia and Cynthia started a group focused on course design. And it morphed into what became the innovative course building group. It was this grassroots… sort of bottom up… we wanted more support, and collaborative work towards teaching. And we all began working together through this and doing workshops. And so we decided to write the book that we wished we had had, when we had first started teaching. We wanted it to be based in theory, but really practical, have a lot of strategies, be really conversational, and be collaborative, and really encourage people to work together. Because we found that sometimes teaching could be so isolating that working together and talking with other people was just something that gave us so much support and we enjoyed, and we wanted that for others.

John: This book is designed to help faculty create transformative learning experiences. What constitutes a transformative learning experience?

Karynne: Well, for our book, we actually used a Mezirow’s theory and then work really from John Dewey. And our definition is about fundamental change that learners undergo, if it is a transformative education, whereby they see themselves and they see the world differently. I taught teachers and I would always tell them, the person you will be when you leave this program is not the person who you are now. So it involves a lot of reflection, whereby you have an experience, you process that experience, and then you make meaning of that. And that changes how you are viewing yourself and the world.

Rebecca: So reflection is a critical part of that practice.

Karynne: Absolutely. And that’s really what we get from Dewey is the importance of that for learning

Rebecca: So, you start a chapter with a pre-flection. Could you explain to our listeners, what this is and why you use this approach? And how we could use it in our classes?

Cynthia: Yes. So it’s one or more questions that we have at the very beginning of the chapter. And I feel like they are just gold. I thought that for a long time. I’ve always enjoyed having individuals do some thinking upfront really before we dive in. But then in a recent study, I’m going to say it was probably 2021, around there, students who took a practice test, who answered questions before learning the material, outperformed their peers who studied it more traditionally, by 49% on a follow-up test. So then I thought, well, heck, I think these pre-questions are even more valuable than I ever imagined. And when you think about why, it makes a lot of sense, because first of all, some pre-questions, some pre-flection, gets people in a good headspace and it’s got them thinking along with what it is you’re about to introduce. I think it stimulates anticipation, because now that you’ve answered some questions, you’re curious to see are the authors going to agree with me? Disagree? What’s going to happen? And I think it can highlight gaps in your knowledge that if you answered some questions previously, and then as you read, you might think, “Okay, well, yes, I said that in my pre-flection. And oh, yes, I said that, oh, but I didn’t think about that piece.” I think it kind of shines a light on those pieces that maybe you hadn’t thought of before. So I just really, really highly recommend that not only does it make good sense for a book like thispre-free questions. And when I have students reading something for homework, I always have some pre-questions that I asked them to answer before they even ever start reading.

John: One argument for it too, is that it helps activate prior knowledge, it gets students starting to make connections, recalling what they already know, and sets a frame for them to put new material into that framework and elaborate on what they already do know. It’s a wonderful strategy and I should do more of it myself. [LAUGHTER] I advocate that very often. And I don’t do it as much as I should.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I’ve discovered in using some of those strategies is that sometimes a topic is familiar [LAUGHTER] and so familiar is different than knowing. And so sometimes doing an activity like that can help someone recognize that it’s something they’ve heard of before, but they don’t actually know that much about it.

Cynthia: Absolutely.

Caralyn: And especially if it’s something where you know that there’s going to be some misconceptions or things like where the topic, how it’s described, maybe outside of your discipline is not the same as how it is inside, or the terminology has specific meanings. And it’s so good for uncovering that and so much more powerful than me standing up in front of the room, just talking about it.

John: One of the anchor concepts in your book is the principle of teaching towards equity. What are some of the ways in which faculty can work towards creating a more equitable classroom environment?

JULIA: One thing I want to start off by saying is that sometimes, because the stakes around equity are so high, we get a little overwhelmed. And when we start to think about how do I teach towards equity, and one of my lifelong goals as a faculty developer is to demystify the concept of teaching for equity. And so I like to say, at its core, it’s the process of humanizing the learning environment. And so what I mean by that is just approaching each and every student as a unique human with their own story and understanding that the story that they bring into the classroom will impact and influence how they learn, when they learn, what they learn. And then I also want to say to these folks, because I was there, and this idea, like how am I going to make the world more equitable? It’s such a big job. But really, we all as human beings have the innate tools to do this, because we’re social beings that live in a social environment. And we have a lot of practice in all kinds of parts of our lives, learning how to create relationships, how to build communities, how to live in relationship with each other. But it can be challenging in teaching, because we’re working against some pretty powerful social forces that lead us to treat students in our classes as if they’re a monolith. In particular, there’s a powerful collective story about who goes to college and why. And many of us have unconsciously absorbed this story about who goes to college and why and it does not relate to reality. It doesn’t reflect the reality of who’s in our classes. So a big part of what we need to do is understand how to make visible the rich complexity of the stories of learners in our classroom. So my advice is to start with the things you know, which is, if this is something that’s new to you, the very first thing I would say is just make space and provide value for building relationships in your class. So by that, I mean like devote some time where you’re building relationships, where students are building relationships with one another, and put some value on that. So if the currency in your classroom is points, make some points that are associated with building relationships so you’re communicating that this is actually a highly valued part of the learning. And if you’ve already done that, then I should say the second step would be thinking about structure and transparency. So building structures that are clear and transparent for students. So the transparent syllabus and assignments are a great way to start with that, the idea of making what’s hidden, visible for students, and that helps us unpack those stories, because that collective story that many of us have absorbed is the students that are coming to college already know what it means to go to college and for many of our students, that’s not true. So helping make visible what’s hidden. And then the third thing I would say, which is like a thread throughout the whole book, which is grab a friend or some friends and sit down and have some conversations about it, get a book, read it together, but find some partners in crime in here to help you figure out how how you’re gonna teach towards equity and what it might mean for you to teach toward equity. So you can find some really firm grounding and footing for that.

Rebecca: One of the things I really like about how you’re describing teaching toward equity is that it’s a spectrum. And that it’s not equitable or not, but you’re teaching towards it, or you’re moving in that direction, or you’re pushing the needle there. And I think that’s a much more palatable approach than something that feels absolute. And we all know, it’s not actually absolute anyways.

Karynne: Yeah, I think that’s actually woven throughout the book. We really try to encourage folks to take the smallest step regarding anything. And then we also very much encourage collaboration. So find a friend to do this with somebody who’s like minded, and you’re never going to get there. So we’re not there. But this mindset that you’re moving in that direction is really helpful. And I think that’s, like I said, woven throughout the book.

Cynthia: I just think so often, when we think about equity, we think of it sometimes only in terms of content, like the authors I’m teaching, the scientists I’m including, and so forth. But we also like to think about equity in terms of the strategies, not just the what we teach, but the how we teach. And I think oftentimes, that’s an area of equity that people haven’t thought that much about.

Rebecca: Those are all really good points.

John: So one area where perhaps there might be some inequities is in terms of class discussions, because some students would like to talk all the time, other students are a bit more cautious, and sometimes even think about what they want to say before they say anything. What would you suggest to create a more equitable environment for discussions.

JULIA: I’ll jump in and say, my favorite for this, and first, I would say practice in very low risk [LAUGHTER] situations. First is the circle of voices. So this idea that you’re moving around in a circle, and everybody has a chance to speak uninterrupted, so that you’ve lowered the barrier to entry, and that you’re practicing this regularly, so that every student has a lived embodied experience of what it feels like to speak before you let go of those structures, then they’re much more likely to engage once they’ve had that kind of an experience. And then any kind of structured protocol where students are not spending their cognitive power, trying to think about how they’re gonna navigate the space, because it’s really clear how to navigate the space. So they can think about the ideas and do deep listening.

Karynne: Another that we all tend to use, is having community agreements. And we’ll probably talk more about that. But going through that experience with learners, and saying, “This is what we are committing to, and this is what we will abide by.” And that way, those for whom it’s just really, really difficult to speak in a large group won’t feel put upon to do that. If your community says we’re gonna encourage people, but we’re not going to require that or we’re going to ask people to be mindful of how much they are speaking, but we’re not going to close them off if they feel the need to say a second thing.

Caralyn: And I say that sometimes we think about discussions, and we just envision like, okay, we’re all sitting around a table having a classroom discussion, but opening it up, thinking about Universal Design for Learning, and that multiple ways for students to express themselves. So maybe it is an online forum, or maybe one is this synchronous or asynchronous, so that it’s not a, okay, you need to get up and speak in front of 20 people, but maybe you get some time to write. And here’s where the pre-flection questions can really help too, because having some time to think and write beforehand can make for such a richer discussion.

Rebecca: I think the pre-flection also offers that opportunity to transition into a space. You’ve been in this other place, or I was at lunch, or I had this thing, or I had this other conflict on my mind. But then here’s some time to get in this space of what it is that we’re talking about, which does allow people to focus more. So you also advocate for a strategy of “dilemma-issue-question.” Can you talk a little bit about what this is and how it’s a useful strategy?

Caralyn: The dilemmas issues questions, or DIQ approach is basically a framework or a model for putting the course content or the skills that you’re helping students master into a big framing question or a societal issue that students care about. Because we need to provide the “why” we need to provide the “here’s the purpose,” the reason for learning this. So if I’m teaching evolution by natural selection, rather than just diving into “here are the criteria,” maybe pose the question of “which species will be able to evolve in response to climate change?” because now we care about learning about what do we need to know to be able to answer that important question. It helps students connect. It’s an equitable practice because they’re bringing their own lived experiences. They can see where the knowledge and skills are useful, and they get to be creative and do creative thinking, critical thinking, and it’s so much more interesting and fun to teach. You can just take it in so many different ways. And we don’t have to look too far outside of our ivory towers to see big societal issues that we’re all going to be facing, especially many of our students. And if we want to have hope for those things getting solved, then I think providing students with that sort of training and modeling that in the classroom is just so important.

Karynne: Not just the importance of doing this, but really changing your mindset about what is important content in your class. We’ve done a lot of work with other faculty on the content doesn’t have to be these 9 million things that you’re going to be tested on at the end of your chemistry degree, but rather, this ability to think in the present and in the future and solve problems that really, really matter. Hence, learning that matters. I think that’s important to point out. So I think it’s a jazzy name that we’ve come up with, for a dilemma issue and question, DIQs. But I also think this mindset is just so important to develop.

John: And students, I think, would find it easier to learn about things that they care about, where they see the intrinsic value of what they’re working on.

Caralyn: Yeah, because that’s all of us. I feel like every other article in the Chronicle or Faculty Focus, it’s like,” Oh, do we have a student engagement crisis?” And it’s like, “okay, well, how do we engage people?” We engage them by having things that they’re interested in and passionate about, and find purpose in, and that’s where you can have projects where students, they’ll blow you away with what they’re doing, and how much work and time they’ll put into it because they care.

John: One of the issues that people have been complaining about for the last couple of years, since we move back to face-to-face instruction is what appears to be a lack of student motivation. So one way of addressing it is asking students to work on things that they find interesting, and that they can see the value of. Are there any other strategies to increase student engagement and motivation?

Cynthia: Well, I want to start by saying that I really think the decline is real. When I’ve been at national conferences and just talking to faculty from all over, it just seems like it’s what is on everyone’s mind. I have absolutely seen it. It’s interesting to think about why is there this decline? Some of the students I’ve talked to have said, it’s just really hard for them to pay attention for such long stretches of time, when they got used to only paying attention, maybe for short periods of time, I think some began to question the importance of learning at all, especially in high schools. There were often times where teachers were told if the students do anything at all, pass them. And so what message does that send to our students? But a couple of really interesting things I’ve heard from students recently. One student said to me, sometimes I don’t think you professors recognize that these cutesy assignments you give us aren’t really preparing us for the future. And so I feel like anything that helps students better face uncertainty, deal with authentic problems, as opposed to ones that we’ve kind of created in the classroom. Those make a really big difference. And then, of course, some of my graduate students told me this. They had been undergraduates when the pandemic hit, they said, during the pandemic, we learned to cheat, we learn to cheat well. They were just right up front about it. And these are excellent students. And now we’ve of course, got ChatGPT, which makes it even easier if you want to cheat. And that’s something I’ve been studying a lot. And through studying chatGPT, oddly where I came out, after weeks and weeks of study was that students valuing the learning Is everything. Students, valuing the learning is everything. It’s the answer. It’s the foundational answer. And so the learning must matter. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what we know about intrinsic motivation, and what makes someone value learning. They value learning when they have more autonomy, how can we increase autonomy? They value learning more when they feel a sense of mastery over what they’re learning. They value learning more when they see the purpose. And often the relationship-rich type of classroom also makes them value learning more. So every once in a while, I think, would we have written a different book if we’d written it post pandemic? If we’ve written it post ChatGPT? And I think the answer is no, I think we would have written the same book, because everything in the book is geared toward that type of teaching and learning that is so focused on intrinsic motivation and engagement and relationship building and connecting to the world beyond the classroom. It’s almost like we saw this stuff coming. I don’t know. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I had an interesting conversation with a colleague yesterday about a conversation she had had with some graduate students that talked about why the students were in graduate school. And they said, “Well, I kind of got cheated out of my undergrad. I didn’t get the undergrad experience because of the pandemic.” And so the motivations that we might assume, that are not necessarily real, of why someone’s in school in the first place, it was just kind of interesting to hear the perspective that they’re not here necessarily to get a particular kind of experience, they feel like they didn’t get. So finding a way to get them to value the learning is really important. And knowing they’re not here because they are motivated, because they’re so excited about a particular topic, which you might expect of a graduate student, I think is really an interesting insight to consider.

Caralyn: And I think it connects back to what Julia was saying, we need to know our students in order to understand: What are their motivations? Why are they here? …and we can’t just assume that they’re coming in with the same reasons we did. We need to take the time, build the time into our courses, to get to know students and have those relationships.

JULIA: I’d also add, if we’re really serious about making students the agents of their own education, we really need to look at the structures of how our institutions are set up, because they’re just so patronizing in every way. Like when students come, there’s so many ways in which they get messages about how they are not able to make decisions about what they can and cannot do that the institution, the professor, that they all know best, and that they need to fit themselves in the mold of that. And that mold is often defined by that story I was talking about earlier, that one story about who goes to college and why? And there’s a lot of unlearning we need to do in higher education to create institutions that actually center student agency.

Rebecca: So we know that institutional change isn’t fast, and requires a lot of people to push against the current structure to change the structure. And one of the ways we can do that is thinking about our own courses, a place that we do have control over. So can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies we can encourage faculty to adopt or practice in the spaces they do have control over, that would help us move into this transformative space and move towards equity.

JULIA: One of the ways in which we do this in the book is we do it in thinking about designing learning experiences from a liberatory framework. And I’ll back up and say backward design has been a really valuable tool in faculty development and teacher preparation, and really has helped change the way in which we think about how we teach. So instead of allowing a textbook or some other driving force, determine what the order is, and the pathway for teaching, we’ve thought backwards about what are the goals we want. One of the challenges with that, I think, leans into what I was just saying is that centers, the faculty member’s thinking very much. It’s a faculty centered thinking design process. And so something that we really tried to do in the book is think about how might you decenter the faculty member in that process some, so that you can bring in some of those student perspectives. And so we did this in a couple of ways. I won’t talk about all of them, because it would take a really long time, but one I want to mention is using design thinking as an approach to complicate that backward design process. So design thinking is an approach that we borrowed, not just us, but lots of folks in higher education now are borrowing from product and software design. And design thinking really starts with centering the user of the design. So if you were a product designer, you would start by trying to empathize with the user. So for example, if you are a toy designer, you’d want to observe children in play and engaging with toys to understand how they engage with toys. You might also want to dig into some research about child development in your target age group so that you could think about developing that toy to be appropriately developmental. And so we translate this in an activity in our book using an empathy map. And the way that we did this, which I think is quite powerful, is we built some composite student personas that tell different stories about students in college, but they’re based on data. To build these I use the institutional data from our institution. And also if you’re familiar with Jeffrey Selingo’s student segments, we use those as well to build, I think there are five of them, that tell different stories about students in college, their histories or herstories, and also their goals for being in college. And then the exercise asked the educators to center themselves in that narrative, and think about what kind of messages might that student be getting from their family, from the college, from the society at large? What kind of goals might they have for themselves, and really think deeply about these before you write your learning goals and decide what activities you’re going to do and set up your learning environment so that process of backward design can really be influenced by having a deeper understanding of the types of students that are actually in your classroom. I’ll just say with a caveat, these student personas were derived from our data and every institution is different. So it really helps to make your own. And from the concept of design thinking, the best approach is to have access to the actual users, which is not always practical in higher education. But another way you might do this is to interview students who’ve been through your class to think about a redesign, you might interview them to understand how they engage with the material. And this is a great way to use an assessment technique through an empathy map.

Karynne: Could I add a couple of things? One is about the process and why we liked this design process. And that is iterative. And the more I talk, the more I’ve realized, oh, everything is just iterative. And so I really liked that we get to embrace that and realize that, okay, it’ll be different next time, it may get closer to the mark if I do this. The other thing I was going to comment on is, and we’ve all done this as well… So it’s not always practical to design the course, but sometimes co-designing with students is really, really powerful. And we’ve tried to take advantage of that when we have that opportunity, just again to send that message, like it’s not about the professor’s experience, it’s about the learners’ experience.

JULIA: Even taking little pieces and co-designing them… I taught a general chemistry class for years and years. And I had a rubric for the final grade and we just co-designed that every year. But it was the only thing we co-designed because we didn’t have time to do the whole course. But that was a pretty powerful thing to co-design at the beginning.

Rebecca: As a designer, I appreciate everybody talking about design thinking. [LAUGHTER]

Caralyn: It took us a while to get there when we think about higher ed, but it makes so much sense. Who do we really want to be thinking about? …and it’s the learner and their experience.

Cynthia: And I often think about the who that we’re designing for, and that all too often novice professors, I find, tend to design for a younger version of themselves. Older professors tend to design for kind of an average student. And then every once in a while someone is designing for an anomaly, where they had a student a previous semester who did something terrible, and now they’re redesigning the course ao that never happens again. And I think any one of those can be problematic, and that we’re often better off trying to design with a variety of students in mind, and not just a single concept.

Rebecca: You mean, we don’t have just one student?

Cynthia: it turns out, we don’t. [LAUGHTER] ibut that would be nice.

Rebecca: It would be a lot easier.

JULIA:Getting specific is important here. The generalities are, I think, the problem. And so what the personas do is they provide some really specific cases to think towards. So you’re not thinking in general about a group of people that morph together, but you’ve got like, one of them is Juwan. And he’s a military veteran, and he can only go to school part time, and he needs to work two days a week. Just getting those details in your mind when you’re thinking about the design are really, really valuable.

John: Might it be helpful also, to get data from your specific students? Do a survey of them asking about their life experiences, about what has worked well for them in the past, and what challenges they’ve had in prior classes or where things didn’t work so well, so that you can address some of those in designing your course, perhaps co-designing, or at least responding to, the students expressed concerns.

Caralyn: There’s so much information there, and it helps going back to building those relationships, they want to be able to talk about who they are, especially if they see that you’re responding to their feedback and changing something because of it. That models such awesome behavior.

John: And if you know some of the things your students are interested in, you can use that sometimes to design activities that may appeal to the specific mix of students you have in your class. So you’re not teaching to that generic student, you’re working with the actual students in your class,

Cynthia: You could design even the assessments around those students sitting in front of you.

Rebecca: What? [LAUGHTER] Tell me more about that.

Caralyn: When we get into assessment, and this is where, when we were writing and that was this collaborative writing process, where I learned so much from Julia, Karynne, and Cynthia about this, and I feel like assessment is the area where there’s so much I can do, personally in my own courses, but also where I look at like that’s where we can have some of the biggest impact because I think our assessment practices have not been well designed and we have done harm and we need to fix that. And I think we advocate for connected assessment. So assessments where they are aligned with learning outcomes, of course, but also working and designing for the whole student. So they’re holistic, they’re affirming, so we’re not trying to be punitive. We’re not trying to like here, let’s go in looking for those mistakes. But we’re looking at, “Hey, where’s the growth happening? Where’s the learning?” …and highlighting that, and being so much more focused on giving feedback and process, so, “Here’s how you’re going and here’s how you move forward” and not just like, “Okay, here’s the percentage and you should know what to do with that,” because it turns out most of us don’t. And being able to have authentic experiences, and the end, like was mentioned earlier, being really transparent. Having examples, having models, being really clear about “here are the steps.” Because if we have, “okay, here’s a project, you’re going to write a lab report,” but I don’t describe actually what goes into that, and what are the steps in how to do it, well, then I really shouldn’t be surprised when the final products are not awesome, because I didn’t provide enough scaffolding to get there. And this is someplace where I’m still doing a lot of work here thinking about my values in teaching and how if I’m looking at that, now, for me, it might be that reading table on the syllabus, like here’s where the points are, here’s where things are coming from. How does that align with my values? How does that align with the message that I want to send students? And where we can being as intentional there as possible, and talking to students about what is the message they’re getting, because what I am intending might not be what is being communicated. And then where we can, really thinking about and being open to taking a risk with some alternative grading strategies. Maybe it’s ungrading, maybe it’s specifications grading, but there are so many more resources and great smart people doing so much work in this area. And every single one I’ve ever talked to or reached out to is always super excited and willing to share their ideas and share what worked and what didn’t, because it can just really change the entire feeling in a classroom when we take away the power of grades, because they’ve really been used to stop learning and oppress in many cases. And if we get rid of that, it really opens up the space for some honest relationships.

Cynthia: Unfortunately, you have to end a book at a certain point and publish it, it turns out, and one of the things that we didn’t really get to talk a lot in the book about was ungrading. We got more into it right after the book came out. But that’s where having a website that goes along with the book has been such a great help, because we were able to put so many fantastic resources about ungraving or minimizing grades on that website. And that made me feel a lot better. Because for myself personally, getting involved with ungrading has been one of the most important things I’ve ever done for my teaching. No one told me it was going to change everything. [LAUGHTER] I thought it was just going to change one little piece, but it changed everything.

Karynne: One of the things that I’ve tried to do with the ungrading is to share with learners… mine’s a view, it’s not the only view… and I never want to be punitive with grading. If you feel like I’m punishing you with grades, please, we need to talk so that I can know more about your assets, know more about your desires, and help you head in the right direction not punish you because you don’t know something. It’s like that’s what learning is. And so that’s just been a practice of mine.

John: We’ll share a link to the website for the book in the show notes so that people can explore some of the additional resources there. One of the things you advocate throughout the book is the use of active learning approaches. But you also note that you should probably expect some pushback from students. What are some of the most effective ways of addressing the pushback from students who prefer learning by being lectured at so they can sit there passively without having to actively think about the content?

Karynne: One strategy actually you can use is to be upfront about it. So students in this course before when I’ve used these things, some of them really don’t like it, they’re very uncomfortable. So I just want to tell you that I’m aware of that. And that’s actually a point where I bring in that idea that I don’t wish to be punitive regarding assessment, you’re going to have as much say in this as I do. So the other thing is to share the the literature and the research. And again, since I primarily teach people who are going to be teachers, they really need to know about what the literature has to say, what the research has to say about learning. And it occurs when there’s some space between absolute comfort and absolute chaos or uncertainty. There’s going to be some uncertainty, so we always try to share that with learners as well so that they can go back and tap into that research. Another thing that we really try to do is to use self assessment and reflection as much as possible, so that you’re letting us know where are the ways that you are growing. I may not be aware of all the things that are changing in you and if you are able to inform me of that, that’s a much more informative approach, then, okay, I’m going to do all of the assessment. We had to learn this ourselves, [LAUGHTER] to start expecting the push back. And then they think that you don’t like them, because you’re not teaching the way that they prefer. And emphasizing that collective, how we’re all changing, how we’re all growing here, I think is another approach that you can take.

JULIA: I would also add just tapping into their lived experience of learning something new. And often they can really embody that if it’s not something about school. So like, are you good at tennis? What did it feel like when you first picked up a racket? Or did you try and learn something and give up on it? Why was that? So understanding that actually getting really good at something does have this period of discomfort before it becomes a regular part of your life so that you understand that that is actually getting you to a point where you’re going to be a different person and transformed.

Cynthia: A friend of mine noted that her students at first they said their fear was that the assessments weren’t going to match the activities in class. And so that made me think, oh, that’s probably something I need to say right up front is, this is what the assessments are going to look like. Here’s how what we’re doing in class is going to feed into that, because I can see where there may have been professors they had in the past, who taught in a way that was very active, but then assessed in a way that was very passive, and students might have had trouble making the match.

Rebecca: Well, there’s been so much great insight in this conversation today. So thank you so much for that. We always wrap up by asking: hat’s next?

JULIA: Well, that’s an exciting question for us. And I actually want to start by talking a little bit about how we ended the book, because a thread in the book that we haven’t talked too much about is really focusing on the educators identity development as an educator being a really critical piece of this whole journey. So what you’re putting together for students and doing for students may often feel like it’s just all work that’s flowing out of you. But also a very important part of that is your own development over time. And so our last chapter is called “Your turn, self and collective efficacy,” and it was really important to us to end by saying to educators, it’s important to think about who you are as an educator, and invest in yourself that way. So that’s one thing that I just wanted to put out there and make sure that people understood that that was a value for us. And in terms of what’s next for us is we are really, really, really excited about launching a course design institute that’s based on the book, which we’re going to host in August, it’s August 4th to 7th, it’s called “Learning that Matters: the Course Design Institute.”Iit’ll be here in Olympia, Washington, a really lovely place to be in August. And we’re at Evergreen State College, which is a College in the Woods, very beautiful. We have a farm and a beach. And, [LAUGHTER] I know, we’re very lucky. But the idea is to have an immersive collaborative environment to design or redesign the courses that you’re going to teach in the next fall. And to do that with people who are not necessarily at your institution. So to get a variety of voices and feedbacks. We’ll have a lot of time for you to work on your own, but also a lot of time to talk with people from different kinds of institutions who are working on different kinds of problems, teaching different kinds of courses, to build that interdisciplinary approach to the work that you are doing in your classroom and also help you build a wider community. So this is something we’re super, super excited about. And we will share that link with you so you can put it in the show notes. And then as a little bit of a teaser, we’re doing a free virtual workshop on May 9, this is at nine o’clock Pacific Time, which is noon Eastern time. It’s called Making Courses Memorable Beginning and Ending and I’m not going to say more about it because I want your curiosity be sparked there.

Cynthia: And of course, we’re also always happy to zoom in with people who are using the book for book clubs.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to sharing this and encouraging folks to pick up your book.

Caralyn: Thank you.

JULIA: Thank you.

Karynne: Thank you

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]