Lesson3: Principle III. Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

Principle III. Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

Students differ markedly in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. Some students are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty while other are disengaged, even frightened, by those aspects, preferring strict routine. In reality, there is no one means of representation that will be optimal for all students; providing multiple options for engagement is therefore essential.

Guideline 7: Provide options for recruiting interest

nformation that is not attended to, that does not engage a student's cognition, is in fact inaccessible. It is inaccessible both in the moment—relevant information goes unnoticed and unprocessed—and in the future—relevant information is unlikely to be remembered. As a result, teachers devote considerable time and effort to recruiting student attention and engagement. But students differ significantly in what attracts their attention and engages their interest. Even the same student will differ over time and circumstance; their interests change as they develop and gain new knowledge and skills, as their biological environments change, and as they differentiate into self-determined adolescents and adults. It is therefore important to have alternative means of recruiting student interest, means that reflect the important inter- and intra-individual differences among students.

Guideline 8: Provide options for sustaining effort and persistence

Many kinds of learning, particularly the learning of skills and strategies, require sustained attention and effort. When motivated to do so, many students can regulate their attention and affect in order to sustain the effort and concentration that such learning requires. However, students differ considerably in their ability to self-regulate in this way. Their differences reflect disparities in their initial motivation, their capacity and skills for self-regulation, their susceptibility to contextual interference, and so forth. A key instructional goal is to build individual self-regulation and self-determination skills, which will help equalize such learning opportunities (seeGuideline 9). In the meantime, however, the external environment must provide options that can equalize accessibility by supporting students who differ in initial motivation, self-regulation skills, etc.

Guideline 9: Provide options for self-regulation

While it is important to design the extrinsic environment so that it can support motivation and engagement (see Guidelines 7 and 8), it is also important to develop students’ intrinsic abilities to regulate their own emotions and motivations. The ability to self-regulate—to strategically modulate one’s emotional reactions or states in order to cope or engage with the environment more effectively—is a critical aspect of human development. While many individuals develop self-regulatory skills on their own, either by trial and error or by observing successful adults, many others have significant difficulty developing these skills. Unfortunately, most classrooms do not address these skills explicitly, leaving them as part of the “implicit” curriculum that is often inaccessible or invisible to many. Furthermore, classrooms that explicitly address self-regulation generally assume a single model or method for doing so. As in other kinds of learning, considerable individual differences are much more likely than uniformity. A successful approach therefore requires providing sufficient alternatives to support learners with very different aptitudes and prior experience in learning to effectively manage their own engagement and affect.

Lesson 4: BluePrint Module

Title of Lesson: Unit: (if applicable)

Content Area: Grade Level:

Lesson Description:

Include a brief description of what students will learn, approximate duration of the lesson and if it's a component of a unit.

Academic Content Standard(s) Addressed

List the standards addressed

Goal(s)/Essential Question(s)

Enter goals and objectives for your lesson in the text box. 

Identify clear goals/objectives that are separate from the means of achieving lesson goals so that all students are successful. 

A clear goal/objective focuses on what you want students to know and understand, not the means of knowing and understanding. 

For example, a clearly stated goal/objective might be, "all students need to know the location of places, geographic features, and patterns of an environment." 

A goal/objective that is confused by adding the means of achieving the goal to it might be, "all students write about the location of places, geographic features, and patterns of the environment." Using the word "write" limits achievement of the goal by all students since some students may not be able to demonstrate understanding by writing. 

Goals/objectives guide methods, assessments, and materials used in a lesson and goals/objectives are measurable and achievable by all students. 

It's important to make sure your students understand the goals and objectives of a lesson. 

Methods

Anticipatory Set

Use a repertoire of varied teaching methods to accommodate the diverse needs, preferences, abilities, and backgrounds of your students. 

Describe how you will leverage students' prior knowledge for success in this lesson (examples: ask students to respond to questions about their current knowledge on the topic). 

There are two parts to a lesson introduction: the "hook" and accessing/tying-in to prior knowledge. 

The "hook" 

Initially, you need to identify varied activities that will engage or hook students into learning goals. 

It is important to note that no one method of engagement works for all your students; therefore, you need to identify several ways to engage students' attention. 

Accessing/tying-in prior knowledge 

Once students are engaged in a lesson, access students' prior knowledge, make connections between the lesson and what they have learned in the past, concepts they already understand, and contexts they are familiar with. 

Seek to provide your students with flexible activities and presentations that incorporate their past learning. 

Look for ways to tap into your students' unique outlooks and cultural and familial backgrounds. 

Students learn better when something new is connected to something they already know; the more connections made, the stronger and more lasting a learning experience becomes. 

Accessing students' prior knowledge also increases engagement, interest in and curiosity about your lesson. 

Introduce and Model New Knowledge

Use a repertoire of varied teaching methods to accommodate the diverse needs, preferences, abilities, and backgrounds of your students. 

Describe how you will introduce and model this lesson's new information to your class. 

Introducing new knowledge gives your students a clear, logical start to a lesson and provides grounding in new subject matter. Initially, you want to identify varied activities, materials, techniques, and resources that will guide your students through the introduction of new concepts, information, and knowledge. 

To address the diversity of your students, you need to differentiate instruction; for example, you need to highlight critical features, provide multiple examples and non-examples of the new information, and support background knowledge. 

You also need to define techniques for modeling new knowledge for your students by demonstration and guidance (for example, you may want to follow the steps of an activity first, in front of your students, to show them how to complete it). 

Modeling enables your students to grasp what is expected of them more easily and allows them to focus on learning rather than procedure. 

Provide Guided Practice

Use a repertoire of varied teaching methods to accommodate the diverse needs, preferences, abilities, and backgrounds of your students. 

Describe how you will provide students with opportunities for  guided practice.

Define the methods that you will use to provide your students with an opportunity for guided practice, i.e., giving your students a chance to try out new understanding with a helping hand from you as needed. 

Seek to offer your students the level of guidance that suits their needs (examples: a student may ask you to read material aloud, you might do so and then ask the student to read to you in turn; a student may lag behind in beginning an assignment, yet enjoy one-on-one attention from you to get started, you would then guide the student to continue the assignment independently). 

Guided practice at a variety of levels ensures that all of your students will learn from your lesson and remain interested and engaged. 

Giving students just as much assistance as they need, but no more or less, allows a lesson to challenge students at the right level for them. 

Provide Independent Practice

Use a repertoire of varied teaching methods to accommodate the diverse needs, preferences, abilities, and backgrounds of your students. 

Describe opportunities you will provide for your students for independent practice with new skills and knowledge. 

Choose varied independent practice activities (both in-class and for homework) that give your students the opportunity to experiment with, test, and strengthen new skills and conceptual understanding. 

Seek to provide students with a variety of methods/choices for investigating new ideas and alternative means of completing activities and assignments. 

Students perform better, and enjoy learning more, when they have choices. 

Students remember information and concepts longer, and understand them more thoroughly, when they have had personal involvement in and hands-on experience with their learning. 

Personal investment is a major component of engagement; encourage your students to take pride in having responsibility for the quality of their own work. 

Wrap-Up

Enter information on how you will conclude your lesson. 

Choose wrap-up activities that provide you and your students with varied opportunities to summarize and solidify what was learned in a lesson. 

Seek to reinforce new learning and review key concepts. 

You may also want to use your lesson wrap-up as an opportunity to explain any lesson assessment(s). 

Your wrap-up should provide your students with a straightforward conclusion to your lesson and help them to remember what they learned. 

Assessment

Formative/Ongoing Assessment

Describe the assessment(s) you will use in your lesson in the text box. Your assessment component may be a list of key concepts, text of questions and answers, a description of a portfolio or visual assessment option, reminder notes for ongoing in-class evaluation, or a combination of several of these. 

Provide a description of any formative assessment(s) you will use in this lesson. 

Identify the formative/ongoing assessment that takes place during the course of a lesson or project. 

Use varied methods of flexible, on-going assessment to inform instruction and student progress and to resolve misconceptions (examples: periodic evaluations of student work during a medium- or long-term project, rotating through and participating in small-group discussions in turn). 

Provide your students with relevant feedback as a lesson progresses (ask questions, ask for demonstrations, point out key features, re-direct off-task tangents) and help your students reflect on their progress relative to lesson goals. 

Summative/End of Lesson Assessment

Describe the assessment(s) you will use in your lesson in the text box. Your assessment component may be a list of key concepts, text of questions and answers, a description of a portfolio or visual assessment option, reminder notes for ongoing in-class evaluation, or a combination of several of these. 

Provide a short description of the summative/end-of-lesson assessment that takes place at the end of a lesson, unit, or term relevant to intended goals. 

Use a variety of summative assessment formats with your students (e.g., oral reports, portfolio assessments, paper-and-pencil tests, oral and/or written exams, student presentation of completed assignments computer-based multimedia projects) to ensure that assessment accurately evaluates students and addresses the inherent diversity of your classroom. 

Seek flexibility in how you test and evaluate performance and the acquisition of new skills and knowledge. 

Recognize that any test will be a limited means of assessing a student's body of knowledge and their individual learning styles and abilities are factors in the assessment. 

Students perform better when assessment methods are matched to their strengths and abilities; this enables a student to focus on what they have learned rather than how it is being asked. 

Materials

List materials you will use in your lesson. 

Identify a variety of instructional materials, including text, audio, images, video, and other digital media that you will use for teaching and your students will use for learning. 

When selecting lesson materials, think about potential barriers in the materials that affect all students' access to learning. For example, providing information to be learned only in a print format will present barriers to students who have decoding problems or students for whom English is a second language. 

A variety of formats (for example, providing a reading assignment on paper, CD, audio tape, or with a text-to-speech reader; assigning a project as an interview, a library research project, or an Internet project) helps ensure access to learning for all students in your classroom. 

As you select materials, ask yourself if they are flexible and adaptable, if there are alternative formats to offer, if they may be supplemented, and if they will increase access to learning for all students. 

Lesson1: Principle I: Representation

Principle I. Provide Multiple Means of Representation

I. 

Students differ in the ways that they perceive and comprehend information that is presented to them. For example, those with sensory disabilities (e.g., blindness or deafness), learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia), language or cultural differences, and so forth may all require different ways of approaching content. Others may simply grasp information better through visual or auditory means rather than from printed text. In reality, there is no one means of representation that is optimal for all students, therefore, providing options in representation is essential.h

Guideline1: Provide options for perception

To be effective in diverse classrooms, curricula must present information in ways that are perceptible to all students. It is impossible to learn information that is imperceptible to the learner, and difficult to learn when information is presented in formats that require extraordinary effort or assistance. To reduce barriers to learning, therefore, it is important to ensure that key information is equally perceptible to all students by (1) providing the same information through different sensory modalities (e.g., through vision, hearing, or touch); (2) providing information in a format that will allow for adjustments by the user (e.g., text that can be enlarged, sounds that can be amplified). Such multiple representations not only ensure that information is accessible to students with particular sensory and perceptual disabilities, they also make it easier for many others to access. When the same information, for example, is presented in both speech and text, the complementary representations enhance comprehensibility for most students.ow to use the structure of the guidelines

- care 

Guideline2: Provide options for language and symbols

Students vary in their facility with different forms of representation, both linguistic and non-linguistic. Vocabulary that may sharpen and clarify concepts for one student may be opaque and foreign to another. A graph that illustrates the relationship between two variables may be informative to one student and inaccessible or puzzling to another. A picture or image that carries one meaning for some students may carry very different meanings for students from differing cultural or familial backgrounds. As a result, inequalities arise when information is presented to all students through a single form of representation. An important instructional strategy is to ensure that alternative representations are provided, not only for accessibility but for clarity and comprehensibility to all students. le

Guideline3: Provide options for comprehension:

The purpose of education is not to make information accessible (that is the purpose of libraries), but to teach students how to transform accessible information into useable knowledge. Decades of cognitive science research has demonstrated that the capability to transform accessible information into useable knowledge is an active process, not a passive one. Constructing useable knowledge—knowledge that is accessible for future decision-making—depends not on merely perceiving information but on active "information-processing skills," like selective attending, integrating new information with prior knowledge, strategic categorization, and active memorization. Individuals differ greatly in their skills in information processing, and in their access to prior knowledge through which they can assimilate new information. Proper design and presentation of information—the responsibility of any curriculum or instructional methodology—can provide the cognitive ramps that are necessary to ensure that all students have access to knowledge.tion into useable knowledge. Decades of cognitive science research has demonstrated that the capability to transform accessible information into useable knowledge is an active process, not a passive one. Constructing useable knowledge—knowledge that is accessible for future decision-making—depends not on merely perceiving information but on active "information-processing skills," like selective attending, integrating new information with prior knowledge, strategic categorization, and active memorization. Individuals differ greatly in their skills in information processing, and in their access to prior knowledge through which they can assimilate new information. Proper design and presentation of information—the responsibility of any curriculum or instructional methodology—can provide the cognitive ramps that are necessary to ensure that all students have access to knowledge.

rn more about the guidelines

Methods: Read an Explanation

Find Examples and Resources

Explore the Research Evidence

Introducation

A New Approach: Thinking Reader

Thinking Reader is designed to do one thing: to ensure that students, even struggling students, get the systematic support and practice they will need to become skillful, strategic, self-aware, and moti- vated young readers.

Drawing on Reciprocal Teaching research (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), and other research on effective strategy instruction (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Report of the National Reading Panel, 2000; Pressley, 1990), CAST and Tom Snyder Productions developed the Thinking Reader approach. It provides for the explicit use of strategies with an integrated system of prompts, hints, models, and feedback designed to encourage students to make predictions, ask questions, summarize, clarify, visualize, and make personal responses about what they are reading. A multi-level strategy system of scaffolds provides different levels of challenge and support for each student and

5teaches them directly about the strategies they use in Thinking Reader. Additionally, through an electronic work log, students are prompted to review and reflect on their work in relation to their learning goals, supporting student goal-setting, self-monitoring, and self-efficacy. Teachers have access to the work logs and are able to use them for evaluation and to guide instruction.

Thinking Reader succeeds in this task by embedding these teaching techniques directly within a new and flexible medium for reading, creating an apprentice reading environment, one that replaces “fixed” and inert reading materials with “dynamic” and supportive instructional ones. Within Thinking Reader, every apprentice reader finds an appropriate level of challenge, and the systematic individualized support and guided practice that they will need to succeed.

The pedagogies and new technologies that underlie Thinking Reader have been researched and developed over many years. Specific prototypes have been refined and tested experimentally in middle school resource rooms and regular classrooms. The final outcome is a unique combination: solid, research- based methods for comprehension instruction embedded within an innovative new classroom medium for reading. The effect is to reduce many of the barriers to teaching reading comprehension.

First, Thinking Reader provides needed support for the teacher. By embedding research-based instruction and support directly within the materials, teachers have a powerful ally. Each student consistently finds, within the pupil edition, a fully supported apprentice reading environment that extends the reach of their teacher: virtual “mentors” that teach and model effective practices of good readers, prompts that scaffold students as they practice new strategies, and feedback that helps them continue to grow.

Second, Think

Lesson2: PrincipleII: Provide Multiple Means of Action and Expression

Principle II.Provide Multiple Means of Action and Expression

students differ in the ways that they can navigate a learning environment and express what they know. For example, individuals with significant motor disabilities (e.g., cerebral palsy), those who struggle with strategic and organizational abilities (e.g., executive function disorders, ADHD), those who have language barriers, and so forth approach learning tasks very differently. Some may be able to express themselves well in writing text but not oral speech, and vice versa. In reality, there is no one means of expression that will be optimal for all students; providing options for expression is therefore essential

Guideline 4:Provide options for physical action:

A textbook or workbook in a print format provides limited means of navigation or physical interaction (e.g., by turning pages with fingers, handwriting in spaces provided). Many interactive pieces of educational software similarly provide only limited means of navigation or interaction (e.g., by dexterously manipulating a joystick or keyboard). Navigation and interaction in those limited ways will raise barriers for some students—those who are physically disabled, blind, dysgraphic, or who have various kinds of executive function disorders. It is important to provide materials with which all students can interact. Properly designed curricular materials provide a seamless interface with common assistive technologies—such as voice activated switches, expanded keyboards, and so forth—that enable individuals with motor disabilities to navigate a text and express what they know.

Guideline 5:Provide options for expressive skills and fluency

There is no medium of expression that is equally suited for all students or for all kinds of communication. On the contrary, there are media that seem poorly suited to some kinds of expression and for some kinds of students. While a student with dyslexia may excel at story-telling in conversation, he may falter drastically when telling that same story in writing. Alternative modalities for expression should be provided both to level the playing field among students and to introduce all students to the full range of media that are important for communication and literacy in our multimedia culture. Additionally, students vary widely in their familiarity and fluency with the conventions of any one medium. Within media, therefore, alternative supports should be available to scaffold and guide students who are at different levels of their apprenticeships in learning to express themselves competently.

Guideline 6:Provide options for executive functions

At the highest level of human capacity to act skillfully are the so-called "executive functions." Associated with the prefrontal cortex in the brain, these capabilities allow humans to overcome impulsive, short-term reactions to their environment and to instead set long-term goals, plan effective strategies for reaching those goals, monitor their progress, and modify strategies as needed. Of critical importance to educators is the fact that executive functions have limited capacity and are especially vulnerable to disability. This is true because executive capacity is sharply reduced when (1) executive functioning capacity must be devoted to managing "lower-level" skills and responses that are not automatic or fluent (due to either disability or inexperience) and thus the capacity for "higher-level" functions is taken, and (2) executive capacity itself is reduced due to some sort of higher-level disability or to a lack of fluency with executive strategies. The UDL approach typically involves efforts to expand executive capacity in two ways: (1) by scaffolding lower-level skills so they require less executive processing, and (2) by scaffolding higher-level executive skills and strategies so they are more effective and better developed. Previous Guidelines have addressed lower-level scaffolding, and this Guideline addresses ways to provide scaffolding for executive functions themselves.