Goal Setting & Support

Teachers meet with individual students for goal setting and support.

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Enhance Capacity for Monitoring Progress

It cannot be assumed that learners will set appropriate goals to guide their work, but the answer should not be to provide goals for students. Such a short-term remedy does little to develop new skills or strategies in any learner. It is therefore important that learners develop the skill of effective goal setting. The UDL framework embeds graduated scaffolds for learning to set personal goals that are both challenging and realistic.

Provide prompts and scaffolds to estimate effort, resources, and difficulty
Provide models or examples of the process and product of goal-setting
Provide guides and checklists for scaffolding goal-setting
Post goals, objectives, and schedules in an obvious place

Guide Appropriate Goal-Setting

Provide prompts and scaffolds to estimate effort, resources, and difficulty
Provide models or examples of the process and product of goal-setting
Provide guides and checklists for scaffolding goal-setting
Post goals, objectives, and schedules in an obvious place

Develop Self-Assessment & Reflection

In order to develop better capacity for self-regulation, learners need to learn to monitor their emotions and reactivity carefully and accurately. Individuals differ considerably in their capability and propensity for metacognition, and some learners will need a great deal of explicit instruction and modeling in order to learn how to do this successfully. For many learners, merely recognizing that they are making progress toward greater independence is highly motivating. Alternatively, one of the key factors in learners losing motivation is their inability to recognize their own progress. It is important, moreover that learners have multiple models and scaffolds of different self-assessment techniques so that they can identify, and choose, ones that are optimal.

Offer devices, aids, or charts to assist individuals in learning to collect, chart and display data from their own behavior for the purpose of monitoring changes in those behaviors
Use activities that include a means by which learners get feedback and have access to alternative scaffolds (e.g., charts, templates, feedback displays) that support understanding progress in a manner that is understandable and timely

Use Multiple Tools for Construction & Composition

There is a tendency in schooling to focus on traditional tools rather than contemporary ones. This tendency has several liabilities: 1) it does not prepare learners for their future; 2) it limits the range of content and teaching methods that can be implemented; 3) it restricts learners ability to express knowledge about content (assessment); and, most importantly, 4) it constricts the kinds of learners who can be successful. Current media tools provide a more flexible and accessible toolkit with which learners can more successfully take part in their learning and articulate what they know. Unless a lesson is focused on learning to use a specific tool (e.g., learning to draw with a compass), curricula should allow many alternatives. Like any craftsman, learners should learn to use tools that are an optimal match between their abilities and the demands of the task.

Provide spellcheckers, grammar checkers, word prediction software
Provide text-to-speech software (voice recognition), human dictation, recording
Provide calculators, graphing calculators, geometric sketchpads, or pre-formatted graph paper
Provide sentence starters or sentence strips
Use story webs, outlining tools, or concept mapping tool
Provide Computer-Aided-Design (CAD), music notation (writing) software, or mathematical notation software
Provide virtual or concrete mathematics manipulatives (e.g., base-10 blocks, algebra blocks)
Use web applications (e.g., wikis, animation, presentation)