How Teaching Circles Can Develop UDL Know-How Among Faculty

"Light CIrcle" by Louisa Mac is licensed under CC BY 2.0

At the Centre for Legal and Administrative Studies, within Centennial College’s Business School, we use “teaching circles” as a method of knowledge transfer among colleagues.  During casual one-hour meetings, professors share expertise on topics ranging from customer service to PowerPoint design.  This format has been effective for sharing useful information about universal design for learning (UDL).  Even though the comprehensive realization of UDL’s values in higher education is a complex project, teaching circles provide a simple way to share strategies and tactics.

Professors make thoughtful choices when designing their teaching practices.  These decisions must comply with legal requirements such as those contained in Ontario’s Human Rights Code, RSO 1990, c H.19 and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, SO 2005, c 11; however, it is not realistic to expect all college professors to interpret the law in the same way that lawyers do.  In this area, it is appropriate for the college to task experts with distilling best practices for all faculty to observe.  Checklists are natural starting points for legal analysis, but they fail to capture the specificity of diverse student experiences across different academic programs. When it comes to UDL we must avoid becoming trapped by dogmatic attitudes (e.g., “UDL = technology”) because they can be counterproductive (e.g., “So now they’re saying I have to learnsuch and such technology?”).  Unlike the institution as a whole, each program has specialized needs that are familiar to the people who inhabit it.  This makes faculty the most suitable decision makers concerning how to deliver their course learning outcomes in alignment with UDL’s principles.  By working with our immediate peers, teaching circles allow us to disseminate this first-hand knowledge without the formality that legal compliance demands.  This approach also precludes criticism of advice that comes from elsewhere in the college, which can be easy for faculty to dismiss when they believe it does not apply to their classrooms.  Teaching circles are productive because they enable faculty to tackle their problems more precisely compared to blanket guidance from the institution.

Sharing among colleagues involves an affective dimension that may advance the paradigm shift toward UDL.  The deployment of online training modules can fatigue employees at large organizations even when these same people recognize the importance of such training.  Our appreciation of time’s scarcity predisposes us to receive information that is delivered by our peers more warmly than that which comes from impersonal online sources.  It is easy to imagine someone circumventing an online training session by starting a video and ignoring it or skipping directly to its embedded assessment tool, but no one would disrespect a flesh-and-blood colleague in a similar way.  While a teaching circle may require a time commitment that is similar to an online training session, meeting face-to-face affords intangible benefits like implicit trust of the facilitator and an opportunity to work as a team.  Teaching is a profession in which we are often confined in lonely laneways of subject matter expertise, and teaching circles offer a venue for human interaction that can persuade educators to try out various UDL techniques.

In the traditional, so-called “factory model” of education, professors were gatekeepers of knowledge on a one-way street in a system that arguably met the needs of professors and their institutions better than the needs of students.  Today, in our 21stcentury classrooms, we must invite our students to share their experiences with us as their trusted educators.  Although this is perhaps unfamiliar – at least to today’s professors who experienced 20thcentury classrooms – this is easy to do. Personally, I prefer to have one-on-one meetings with as many students as I can to learn about their experiences of what does and does not work for them in a given semester.  Individual meetings can be time consuming, but it is time well spent since it results in more equitable outcomes for our students. Anonymous surveys could also be useful depending on the context.  Using teaching circles to share the lessons we have learned from students amongst colleagues amplifies the impact of our individual efforts to promote UDL in our teaching practices.

Using design thinking to enhance accessibility and inclusion in college classrooms is a tricky balancing act that demands collaboration between faculty and students.  The trouble with enumerating a hit-parade of best practices for UDL is that reliance on such lists could tempt us to become passive and complacent.  All experienced educators know that no two cohorts of students are exactly alike.  Accordingly, some efforts to promote UDL may be successful with some students and yet fail with others.  Professors must approach UDL in active ways because the spectrum of potential needs among our students is non-exhaustive.  Hence, I conceptualize UDL as a procedure that elicits data from students to inform my ability to teach effectively.  Working with colleagues, whenever it is possible, strengthens the validity and reliability of the iterative process of UDL implementation.   At the Centre for Legal and Administrative Studies, UDL-thinking has shaped our teaching practices, and teaching circles have been a particularly appropriate venue for cultivating equitable learning environments for our students.