Journal #5 🚩

Journal #5 – (Dis)abilities, and how we think of our most diverse learners.

This week’s reading (Iannacci, 2018) and forum helped to bring all the ideas of this course together for me. After reflecting about my own teaching practices, and thinking about how I have viewed my most diverse learners, a number of important themes have emerged.

1)       How I think about students matters. I must account for my prejudices, biases, and beliefs when structuring an equitable classroom.

2)       What I believe about student ability – what students can do, rather than what students cannot do – is incredibly important. What a student can do should be the focus for personalizing their learning. This is positive-stance planning: tailoring instruction and activities to student abilities, rather than adapting existing instruction and activities to account for student disabilities.

3)       My understanding of how knowledge is gained and expressed – my epistemology – affects how I plan for a diversity of learners.

4)      Ensuring cultural relevance is an important part of personalizing learning for all students. But, in Canada in 2019, it is especially critical for indigenous learners.

5)     Making learning personalized for every one of my students is challenging. Getting to that point will require experimentation, patience, and time. I am well-advised to make small changes: drastically altering what I do in my classroom could be hugely disruptive to my students, and to me. I have to remember that I do good work already! Judicious use of a personalized learning framework will help me to make the small changes that I need to make in order to have improved student agency, more equitable learning opportunities for all, and better, student-driven engagement. I don’t need to rebuild the whole house, or even renovate the entire top floor. I’ll start by fixing up the bathroom. If that works out nicely, I’ll start to think bigger.

6)     I am not alone. The weekly forums through this course have provided an awesome sounding-board among colleagues. We have puzzled out some great ideas, have offered useful suggestions, and have supported each other. What a valuable resource we are for each other!

7)     Planning for personalized learning is many-faceted. Having a firm understanding and working knowledge of a planning structure, like the CREATIVE framework, is very helpful.

8)     Personalized learning spaces look much different than traditional classroom spaces. They have meeting places for mini-lessons, they have presentation areas, areas for research, and a storage space. Traditional desks, and desk arrangements, may not be possible or desirable in these spaces.

9)      Personalizing learning for my own students should be built on a justifiable, pedagogically-sound philosophy. In other words, I need to know that what I am doing is the right thing to do. “Success” will look different, and probably feel different for me, than it has in the past. There are big steps involved in moving my practice toward personalized learning for all. They make me uncomfortable. But I believe in the value of making these changes.

Something happened this week that helps illustrate how my newfound appreciation of planning from a student-asset orientation helped me to personalize learning for one student.

One of my students, a girl in grade five, has very notable challenges with written language. Her reading level is at an early grade two level. She struggles with word recognition and as a consequence has difficulty with writing – she constantly spells with best-guesses, rather than with any real sense of how to form the words. All the processing she does to put pencil to paper in a form readers could recognize inevitably interferes with the thoughts she would like to represent on the page. And yet, she is remarkably keen to learn. She participates. She tries. She genuinely enjoys being at school.

Recently, I noticed she was using a Chromebook to try to type out a little story. Typing was slow-going, and, while she believed it was “easier” and “faster” than printing by hand (it wasn’t), her narrative was almost unreadable. So I switched on Google Read & Write’s speech-to-text software, and spoke a few words to the computer. As those words popped up on her document, her eyes widened. She said, “What? Are you kidding me?” And of course those words typed themselves up on the screen, too. Wow! She had clearly never seen this before. The look and the smile on her face were incredible – she could have lit up the room with her joy. She could instantly see hope.

Speech-to-text software is not that easy to use. Mistakes are commonplace, and there is a long learning curve ahead for her to become proficient at it. But it does eliminate some of the barriers students like her experience when faced with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil.

I recognize that the above is the most basic level of personalizing learning. It is a subtle adaptation; a differentiation of the process and the mode of representation. This is the sort of personalized learning baby-step that I have long been doing. But I am better prepared to take those steps because I know my students better. I know what they can do. I am aware of their limitations, but I am more willing to plan from an asset basis than from a deficit basis. I knew, from conversations I had with her, and from speaking with her previous teachers and learning support teachers and EA’s, that she was capable of generating grade-level ideas, of higher-order thinking skills. I learned that she had a positive attitude toward learning and was willing to try new things. I came to know that she had good self-advocacy skills. These are learning assets, and knowing of them helped me to recognize that there was a little personalization option open to her. I am confident that this will become a useful tool in her learning toolkit in the future. And using speech-to-text will become part of the individual, personalized learning framework I use to plan for her in the future.

Iannacci, L., 1970. (2018). Reconceptualizing disability in education. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.