I’ve lived in Alberta all my life, though in the summers I feel as though my home is in British Columbia. I live with a particularly complex teenager, whose personal and educational struggles have led me down a career path that has invigorated and motivated me to create classrooms that truly support struggling students. We are both mainly homebodies, enamored with all things technology and pop culture. I spend most of my days reflecting on how I can best support my daughter, knowing that those thoughts will lead me to make the next right choices for my professional endeavors as well.
My current title is Behaviour Support Worker, though as an Education Assistant I have had many of the same experiences. I’ve been supporting students in a variety of settings during my career in Calgary. Currently I work in a specialized setting called “The Class” for students with mental health concerns that require more support than a typical classroom setting. Most of their behaviours are internalizing, though externalizing behaviours happen quite frequently as well. My position requires that I focus on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) one-to-one, in small groups, and sometimes whole-class instruction and activities. Depending on the year and the makeup of the classroom dynamics, my position can look very different day-to-day. The flexibility that I depend on to best support my students lies in my goals for inclusive practice, and meeting students where they are at, while supporting them to find success in school.
With the creation of our Google Classroom comes opportunity to connect with students and maintain some of the routines and processes that make our class cohesive. We only meet as a group once a week, but during that time we still maintain our morning check-in and explanation of upcoming learning tasks. We offer supports for students, setting up extra tutorial times and opportunities to connect through Google Meet, yet the Student Support Plans developed throughout the year are now mainly decorative. They will also have to be revised upon our return as we start as traumatic effects will need to be considered. When we first started our year, the program was new to the school, and we were flexible in determining our classroom strategy as we got to know the students, the school and community. Currently, we are in the same situation since moving our classroom to an online setting. Google Classroom has allowed us to maintain connections with our students and their families. My role includes supporting families as well, and with the move to an online setting, much of the communication has been through parents and siblings, including them more thoroughly in the students’ learning team. When we have our classroom Google Meet sessions, there are typically parents participating or listening to our classroom discussions. This offers the families a chance to see for themselves how we engage their children in learning.
Our classroom is a democratic classroom, where we consider everyone’s needs and find unique ways to support and demonstrate learning. Watters notes, “ schools have been tasked to “do more with less” and specifically to do more with new technologies which promise greater efficiency, carrying with them the values of business and markets rather than the values of democracy or democratic education”(2017). How then do we mitigate the effect of values contrary to our own within our classroom settings, particularly while we are in emergency remote teaching?
My research ideas are mainly regarding finding a balance between the use of technology in classrooms to support learning, while maintaining the tenets of Universal Design for Learning. Throughout this pandemic and its implications for our schools, I have been considering how the changes we make now will affect our teaching practices and use of technology when we return to in-person classrooms. How many of the technologies and learning platforms we are currently using will be brought with us when we return to the school settings? How can we use them to create more inclusive classrooms? In our current learning mode, how are we creating a community within an online environment. How does one “teach to the heart and mind” from afar (Katz)? In particular, I would like to know how K-12 online classrooms utilize UDL? Even more specifically, I am interested in exploring how teachers use inclusive practice in their online settings. I’m finding it a tad difficult to disconnect my learning from what is happening in our world, much in the same way that my students struggle to manage their mental health while attending to their education. I’ve learned to embrace the distraction and use it to further my practice. My students taught me that.
Katz, J. (2012). Teaching to diversity: the three-block model of universal design for learning. Winnipeg, MB: Portage & Main Press.
Nepo, K. (2017). The Use of Technology to Improve Education. Child & Youth Care Forum, 46(2), 207–221.
The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved May 10, 2020, from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning
Watters, A. (2017, May 24). Education Technology as ‘The New Normal’. Retrieved May 15, 2020, from http://hackeducation.com/2017/05/24/new-normal
