Scouting for Growth: Leveraging Peer and Instructor Feedback for an Innovative UDL Learning Plan

In today's classrooms, understanding and responding to diverse student needs is crucial. Integrating peer and instructor feedback into a teaching plan can allow us to better follow Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and help us address student needs effectively. In this post, I will examine my experience in receiving feedback, revising my plan and researching how mindful groupings in middle school can boost learning, especially for students facing challenges.

A Path to Innovative Learning

In this plan I focused on creating and exploratory experience that embeded augmented reality into the lesson through the use the Merge cube to help students visualize the nervous system. The goal was to help students have a better idea of the structure of the nervous system so that they could think more deeply about how the structure of the system allows us to interact with our environment.

Students using the Merge cube to explore the nervous system. (Photo taken by author)

The Importance of Feedback in Learning

Feedback is vital in education. Peer feedback can offer multiple and new perspectives, allowing us to ensure all learners are engaged and broaden our own ideas. Instructor feedback ensures that our learning aligns with the learning goals and ensures that assessments meet educational standards. This dual approach fosters a culture of growth where continual improvement becomes the focus.

As teachers, we know that feedback should be specific and opportunities for peer or self-assessment should be structured to ensure focused feedback is constructive and useful. Through this experience, I had the opportunity to provide and receive feedback about innovative learning plans using different feedback guidelines. I recieved feedback from two peers. This feedback came from another high school science teacher and a development kindergarten teacher. It was really interesting to see the different feedback that was given, and it was a great reminder that some aspects of teaching span grade levels and content.

The structure provided allowed my peers to give meaningful feedback that I could more easily apply to my work as well as areas that I could explore through their prompts and questions. So what were those questions?

Question I still had...

When looking at the feedback, I began thinking about how I arranged my groups. Since I don't have any learning support in my classroom and I have several students with learning challenges, I began thinking more about UDL (Universal Design for Learning) and how ensuring that I am grouping my students well would create the type of classroom that would provide all students with the best learning environment. However, I wondered what exactly the best grouping was. Should I be grouping academically strong students together or mixing the ability groups? Should I give each group a student who had focus challenges in the hopes that the other students would be able to keep them on track? While this isn't new to me I did want to know if there was research that supported one grouping over another.

Revisions

Chris Harrison noted, in the UK Department of education video (2005) on mixed abilities, that student grouping might change depending on the task and that it is important to find a way to teach the material naturally while still finding ways to support each student. When looking to revise my learning plan I tried to consider how in this particular activity groupings might impact student learning. I noted that I was going to group according to level of independent learning as station require students to work together but without direct teacher instruction. Also after reading Belland et al's (2009) work on the roles of students in mixed ability groups I decided to add in roles for the stations to help support all the students. Hopefully, these changes enhance the students' learning experience and ensure all students have the access they deserve.

References

Mixed ability : group work. [electronic resource]. (2005). Teachers TV/UK Department of Education.

Brown, P. L., & Concannon, J. P. (2019). Exploring the Relationship between Ability Grouping and Science Vocabulary Learning. Science Education International, 30(4), 373.

Matthew T. Marino, Chad M. Gotch, Maya Israel, Eleazar Vasquez, III, James D. Basham, and Kathleen Becht. Learning Disability Quarterly 2014 37:2,87-99

Belland, B. R., Glazewski, K. D., & Ertmer, P. A. (2009). Inclusion and Problem-Based Learning: Roles of Students in a Mixed-Ability Group. RMLE Online: Research in Middle Level Education, 32(9), 1–19.