 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this Teacher Academy webinar organized by School Education Gateway. My name is Marta and I will be your host for today. So moving forward, the focus for today is how school teachers can support students in catching up. The webinar begins with examinating the catch up framework facing schools in helping students to progress, stay resilient and more motivated to take control of their own learning. Additionally, we will explore different approaches that teachers can adopt to support their teaching and their students by looking at examples from various European schools. But without further ado, I would like now to give the floor to our guest speakers for today, Richard Powers, Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Maryland Global Campus. But Richard, sorry, I forgot one important thing before I give you the floor. The webinar is recorded and the recording might be used for dissemination purposes. Please, participants, if you have questions or comments, please post them in the chat and we will address them towards the end of the webinar. Thank you very much. Richard, please, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Marta, for that very warm welcome. Hi, everybody. I'm going to share some slides, but they're kind of big, so it's going to take a minute. So what's always fun to do is I hope everybody is slowly coming and you're rushing in or rushing in. It's a good time to just sit down, relax, take three breaths. If you're at home or someplace nice, you can take your shoes off and relax. I think a lot of us are teachers and now we're going to have a very nice hour together just to be able to talk together about what's happened in the last couple of years. One fun thing to do while my slides are loading is if you could put where you're from and since we're such an international group, it's always fun. What did you have for lunch? Put what you had for lunch in the chat and we can see where you're from and what you had for lunch. The results are coming and I will probably, for people who didn't have lunch, now we'll get you very hungry. Richard, meanwhile, I don't see your slides are loading. Well, just let me know if you have any kind of issues and I can upload them for you and you can just take control. No, they're coming. Okay, no worries. Marta, can you stop sharing in the meantime? Oh, wow, look at this bread with avocado, delicious yogurt and fruit. Okay, now everybody's made everybody else hungry for dinner. And plus everybody's given everybody great ideas to still loading. It says the slides will appear when they're ready. Now we can see it slides perfectly. Okay, funny. I can't see mine. As always a little technical thing says we'll have no worries. You cannot see the slides on the screen. Right, you can wait a little longer or try reloading. Yeah, maybe you can try reloading. And let me share again. Thanks for your patience, everybody. It's a nice chance to relax and get yourself situated. It's loading. That's nice. That's a good sign. You can see them. Yeah, you too. Maybe everybody had a chance to get a drink of water or to kind of relax. Because now we have some time to talk amongst ourselves. Today's topic is how school teachers can support students in catching up. And as Marta said, I'm a professor of Emeritus of the University of Maryland Global Campus. And right now I'm a learning designer working with teachers and training. Student teachers at the Professional School of Education, Stuttgart, Ludigsburg. Kind of a blast from your past. This is kind of a full circle moment for me in a little bit. Because back in March of 2020, maybe some of you were there. I gave four webinars. Just when COVID had started breaking out had come and it wasn't a vaccine. Schools were closing. People were dying early. It was a terrible, terrible time. And the seminar's title, Keep Teaching. Planning and delivering remote instruction to your students during this hard time. And the funny part about that is when I was looking through those slides, this was the highlight from March of 2020. We all felt in those days that Maslow's hierarchy of needs was more important right then than Bloom's taxonomy. And that was a simple way of saying normally as teachers were interested in outcomes, academics, performance, test scores, all of those things. And at the time taking care of our students, social needs, their emotional needs, whether or not they had access to going to school, all of that was much more important. So it's interesting to think two years ago where we were and where we are now and all of you, we are all on that journey together. So if you're out there listening now, give yourself a big hand. Congratulations. What you've done if you start seeing the last two years in your mind, the hurdles you've overcome, how you've been able to keep students learning and going. It's just kind of remarkable testament to your resiliency. Today we're going to talk about these things just to kind of show that it's not over, right? All that resiliency and the hard work that people have done for two years, the new approaches, the new educational technology systems that have come in, trying to keep students learning during that time. We still have challenges and obstacles to overcome. Today we'll talk about survey findings. We'll talk about present classroom challenges that you might be undergoing. And we'll also talk about different approaches. You know, traditional teaching has a lot to do with the teacher and the focus on the teacher, textbooks, tests, standardized tests. These new types of approaches, UDL, PBL and SEL sound so funny, right? Lots of acronyms there, universal design for learning, project-based learning, social-emotional learning. A lot of theories you've probably heard about and approaches that maybe we're starting to see a lot of more successes and open-minded for using them as we're going through. First of all, some context, right? UN, right, back in 2020, referred to what was happening in our schools as a global generational catastrophe. And they're pretty much right. Remember those days, it was 1.4 billion students were suddenly out of school. And to show how that's not really ended, it's the second point where it says UNICEF in their March 2022 report still notes that 23 countries haven't opened schools. Now, many of these are not in Europe. Many of these are in Africa and the Far East, Middle East schools and countries that still have the virus predictions and things moving forward. But it just shows you that the pandemic is still there. The pandemic's not over. Many of us right out there are still coping and maintaining with the virus. There's this huge wave, perhaps in your country too, the way it is in Germany. Lots of people who hadn't had COVID are now getting it. It's two or three days, doesn't seem to be as heavy, but they're experiencing feelings of fatigue, emotions staying out of school. So all of those things too. And then the aspects about mental health that are affecting people too, the traumas and things that have gone through the past years and things going on. So Human Rights Watch 2022 in their most recent report, their main finding was that people's lack equal and inclusive access to online and remote education. That was the other issue that's coming up out of this pandemic. What would be nice now is if we had a little bit of interaction in the chat, we'd be able to read through these things. And it would be interesting if you thought about your country, your culture, where you are right now, which of these major points that I'm going to talk about affects you right now the most? Disruptions, absenteism from students, quarantines, canceled classes, teacher and staff shortages, teacher and staff competences that need to be developed in new areas. Loss in teaching and learning time. Anticipation of another pandemic wave in the fall. Colds and flu season is traditionally, and now people think this is coming up. And then also navigating that world with masks in schools. So maybe some reactions in the chat, which is the most difficult of these to do. Okay, people are having issues with the screen. Okay, now I'm on context here. Now I switch to the next one and people should say survey findings. Can everybody see survey findings? Yeah, now we can see survey findings. Excellent. Okay. So some of these texts were coming in, and let's see what some of the surveys have recently shown with these ideas too. Okay, one survey, the UK, yeah, accepting marks in schools, right? Christina comes up and says that's, you know, grades, because if the grades are going down, how does a student who is traditionally an A or a B student or a one or a two suddenly deal with having a three two, right? Teacher and staff shortages, right? We're getting from the Netherlands that that's an important issue that's happening right now, right? How do you catch up, right? If we're simultaneously going through staff source shortages out there too. Okay, when we talk about schools, it's always hard because you have learners at different levels and ages, right? For example, the first one deals with six years old, six year olds. And what this survey found is that about 68% two thirds of the students they found were about a year behind or where they should be, or where test scores had been a little earlier. And when you're trying to look at, you know, students in that earlier game, nursery school, kindergarten, grade one, how they're doing and where they are with reading and math skills that then they're going to need for primary and secondary skills, so important in there. And that leads us to the second one, primary and secondary schools learning gaps depending on the country, depending on the area, mathematics, phonics, reading, writing, stamina and handwriting, so much as digital languages, speaking and listening part, not so much the reading and writing and then physical education and sports, right? And that was from an EU 2021 study. Christine is also mentioning that professors are just worried about carrying out with the students missed, such a great point. I mean, the hardest part of all of that is trying to determine what did the student miss and then how do you make arrangements for putting that back into the curriculum and seeing how that's going to work. And what's really interesting, Christine, it also adds great number of students who dropped out or became anorexic. And that's where I talk about that falling through the gaps or falling through the cracks, you know, even learning one student who might be at an upper level, I'd say the 14 year, 15 year olds, they're close to their degrees in a couple of years and they decide schools become too hectic and they drop out or as we alluded to before, the mental wellness and health issues that come. So students an increase of psychological issues in case of learning disability issues all coming up. So all impacting that as well too. The hard part of course, all of this is we know as teachers, how do you assess a student? You know, we all have those standardized tests and it seems like for the most part we end up using them because there's nothing better yet. But other ways to try to do that is through observation or seeing the other areas of kind of, they hit them with these national testing assessments in the areas too. But not that we could try a Slido. So if you can see in the chat and if you can go to this link, Slido.com and then when you get to that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And then you can just impact teacher as the hashtag, as the code to come in there. And then it would be great if you could see the answers and then start responding to it. How do you feel today about the students catching up because of the disruptions due to the pandemic? You know, are you motivated? Students can do this? Or are you neutral? Not sure students can do this? Or discouraged? You know, it's impossible for students to catch up. And we're seeing some interesting stats. 78% are saying motivated. Students can do that. Wonderful. Wonderful. Neutral. Looks like it's about 25. Oh, the numbers are changing a little bit too. Nice. So take a minute. We have about 30 more seconds for it. If you can find the link, Slido.com and then enter teacher is the code. And it looks like we've got some good numbers here. 63% out there are motivated. Wonderful. Neutral about 26%. And 11% say, you know, discouraged. It's impossible for students to catch up. Interesting. Okay. We have one more. You can put in the code again. And see this next questions is, where are your students today? Are they at the levels they should be? Are they zero to half a school year behind? Are they one year or more behind? Or are they ahead of where they should be? Yeah, I don't think, you know, we'll see if anybody says that they're ahead. Very interesting at the levels they should be. Zero to half a school year behind. One year or more behind. Right. So about 30 more seconds. Really interesting numbers. At the levels they should be. It's still encouraging, right? Zero to half a school year behind. And one year or more behind. Wow. Those are some intense numbers. It looks like they're stabilizing a little bit. The numbers case about. 10, 5 more seconds. At the levels they should be about 25%. That's not bad. Wow. That's a lot of good work out there. It would be interesting also to know what level, right? Do you think that's the best way to get that? That high school or is it primary secondary? Or where that's going in? But 25%. Right. Not bad. But then these are the sobering statistics here. Zero to half a school year behind. 52%. And then one year or more behind. 22%. So that comes up to something like about 70, 71%. Are half a school year behind? Or one year or more behind? So then how do we kind of. Catch up for that too. So we have a survey certainly interesting. And we have our work cut out for us. Partly to deal with what is the whole concept of catching up mean. It's such a strange expression. How do you know when someone has caught up? To do something. So. Based on those surveys here are some of these classroom challenges and pressures. How do we maintain pupils resiliency? To keep learning and to catch up, right? Our students have been doing this for about two years. Maybe you've got great ticks, tricks, and techniques that keep them motivated and encouraged when they come in. I know one of my favorite ones, they come into the classroom and you'll see, I do a lot of substitute teaching. So too, you know, as teachers and training, I keep my hand in that by coming in and taking it. And if I come into the classroom and they're just kind of saying, who wants to learn today? And they all look at me like I'm a little bit crazy. Who wants to, who's this kind of crazy guy who wants to learn today to get them excited about that? What's going on? And then usually by the second to the third day, if I'm there for three days in a row, they go, oh, what are we going to learn today? There's a way of saying, OK, the classroom is a learning kind of place, right? It's moving in. So I'm sure people have their own ways that they do that, engage students. So maybe this is a great time in the chat. If you can contribute, do you have a special saying or a thought that you greet students with? Particularly when you see that they seem to be tired or they've had a, you know, maybe like this week, a long weekend, something's going, what's a nice expression you can say to a classroom of students to really kind of get them focused and then move on, right? Ah, pasta for lunch. I thought that was what you said. That always works, right? For people, you can say that too, but that's answering the first question. Great. OK, so what else? These classroom challenges, mental health issues across a broad range of neurodivergent learners. And Christina mentioned this in the chat before, seeing an increased number of students early ages too with adult level problems, right? The pandemic's not over, coping and maintaining with that. And then also the in the classroom behavior issues, engagement and motivation issues. So all of these aspects will help doing that. And this next comment is for the 11% that said, you know what, it's impossible. And it's nice in these webinars since we're all teachers and we want to keep it real. You know, that expression, keep it real and kind of really talk about what's going on is this dose of reality. What can we do to really catch up? And then this other question. What does we will catch up later mean, you know? Each one of us in is a different place, whether you're teaching sixth graders or fourth graders or kindergarten or vocational school students. Catching up is going to have a different relationship to you depending on what material in the curriculum you're trying to catch up with. And then maybe also what material in the curriculum in the past you left out. You know, a classic example is the textbook has 12 chapters. You decided you couldn't do chapter eight and chapter six. So whatever was in those chapters, it didn't work or you do geography, but there wasn't time to do geography of South America. Now, how do you catch up and then do this geography of South America or the chapters that are missing and for other, you know, skills based programs such as math shortcuts to learning are hard because they're foundational. You can't move on to algebra before you have a nice basis and integers and variables that type of language that build box. And if you miss that one, as you know, then you're going to kind of miss that and keep that whole thing together. So here's this dose of reality slide is the next one. It's a mountain and really to be honest, I said, it's impossible. It's risky and pointless to try. I mean, that's with my head because I just sit back and think, okay, how do I catch up? People have said a year behind six months time. The first reaction is, okay, students should repeat the year. They should go back. It's to their benefit. It's really good when they go back and then they learn, but then you have all those social issues. The parents might not want them repeating. They have their own agendas, the things that are going on. So while it is impossible, I mean we're teachers. We can't just say forget it and throw in the towel, right? So I found this, you know, personified kind of quote. It's impossible said pride, right? It's risky said experience. And then it's pointless said the head, the reason, right? But then what else happens here? Give it a try whispered the heart and teachers hearts. They're resilient and they're resilient in the face of all these challenges. That's why you've been able, we've been able to keep students learning over the past two years. It was impossible situations, but we kept going and moving through it. So now at this stage where we're doing more than just trying to keep students learning, if we're in this catching up phase to move forward, the focus has to be on teaching pupils how to learn and learning strategies, what their learning preferences were. And maybe some of you are like me when we went to school. They talked about learning styles. What's your learning style? Are you audio visual haptic, right? And a lot of that type of language has gone out of the way because people change, brains change, right? What we've learned about the brain and how it learns is that somebody could start maybe years ago as an audio learner and now they're more visual or probably what happens is there's a combination of things that are going on. So more than talking about somebody's learning style, these days it's about the learning preferences. And maybe a good conversation to have with your students, your pupils, no matter the age. What do you need to learn? What are your conditions? Do you like music? Do you have to have an organized desk? What are the best ways that you like to learn? Do you like video tutorials? Do you like reading a book? Do you like group work? And engage students with what are the best ways to learn so that what happens to the students, they begin to think of themselves as learners, not so much as a student or a pupil, but on a learner, a lifelong learner. And when I want to learn something, this is what I need to do and how I move forward with it. So rather than all that standardized drills and standardized tests and memorization, all of those types of things, maybe teachers can be showing students how to learn and they're able to tell you how do you learn? What do you need to learn? What are your options? Instead of just this one way that fits all. Okay, there are some great sources out there too for this foundation's learning network that UNICEF has provided. It's fln.com. There is the hub. And UNICEF partnered with these organizations and they support resources with ministries, with districts, and then here down at the bottom, that's our group with institutions in there too. So certainly great resources in there. What I really liked that I thought was good to talk about today to us is to discuss the categories in the FLN hub organization. Notice that they've taken early child education and probably the way it should and moved it in its own category away from the school system. Then the next category is this formative assessments. How do you go about measuring learning? It's the age old question. How do you measure effective accomplishment of a learning objective in here? So there's a whole range of different assessments for doing that. Then teaching at the right level. All the literature right now with trying to catch up. Catching up is one thing, but how do you know it's at the right level? Particularly with books that students might be reading. If they're reading them online, is somebody monitoring to make sure that the book is at the right level and moving forward with that one. Another category is the language of instruction. Maybe we should dedicate today's session also to our colleagues in Ukraine. War-torn Ukraine right now. It's got everybody by the heartstrings. Most of our countries are seeing an influx of wonderful Ukrainian children and also Ukrainian teachers. Hopefully you're being hired at the schools to do this. Whatever the language is, every culture and country has a home-based language, then has students with other languages coming into the school. And years and years ago, it was always the target language and no other language being taught. What the pandemic has taught us is that language of instruction is very important and languages should be kept going and moving forward with that too. This next category is parental engagement and none of this catching up. I remember I said it's impossible. None of that catching up is going to happen without the parents engagement. Parents speak a lot about student engagement. How do we motivate them? But now how do we do with parents? Some of you might experience up to, you know, 25% of the parents aren't supporting children at home or are busy and don't have time to look at the homework or monitor what's happening in there. So helping parents become more engaged with the learning process is certainly something that's important there too. And then also, oh yeah, thank you for putting the link in there. FLNhub.org, right? And then this last category of digital learning. So that was a long way of saying why I like this organization. You might be in a task force at your school. And if you're on a task force at your school working with these areas, those are nice categories to divide up and then have subcommittees working in those particular fields. Trying to catch up is such a nice expression. We have to catch up, but then when it has to be particularized and put into project management types of categories, these might help. And maybe think about your school and what's happening now at your school. Are there task forces that are involved with these things? Or is it kind of hodgepodge and moving through it? I know we have Marissa makes a very nice comment. I think we can assess real learning if we put students in the condition to use their knowledges and abilities to create a product. Wow, so much better than that test, right? Because that test multiple choice where they're filling in with a pencil. One type of learner is going to do well in that test, right? Marissa, better if the outcome is made by a group. It's wonderful, right? Activating and assessing collaborative skills as well, right? Really lifelong skills that you need everywhere on the job market or as people and then moving forward. So it's a wonderful, wonderful comment. In fact, some of this came out. These are these general policy recommendations out of European studies. Monetary resources and expensive tutoring additional hours are there. And most of us, if you're working at a country in Europe, you're relatively well off. Money has been relatively easy to see coming, but what to do exactly with these vast amounts of money and how the students get them, how the schools get them, and then what is done with this money. So in other countries where money is not, you know, tremendously wealthy at all, it's a real issue where the funds coming for, how's the money coming in? Most of the recommendations of post-COVID just about in every country in Europe additional money has to be earmarked and moved forward and then a lot of the governments are able to support that part. And then what that money is usually spent for, tutors additional hours from teachers, maybe student teachers are then hired to come in substitute teachers spending money for tutors so that money is trying to make up for extra work coming in there. Maybe not the best use of the money you have to talk about what people think what's happening at your school and particularly with how those are the money trickling down and if the infrastructure, for example, and the Wi-Fi is working pretty well. Okay. Another recommendation came with flexibility and expectations for curriculum goals, right? Changing goals and curriculum. There's an inquest, request for improving homeschooling options, but you might be in a country where homeschooling is forbidden. It's not part of the landscape, but making homeschooling an option if you have a parent who feels like, well, my students getting a better education at home with me, then perhaps going to school right now. We talked about the reading books and making adjustments for pupils, not able to use home learning or online learning, right? There's a certain percentage of students in your country in your school that can't use online resources and then navigating this whole repeat years for pupils. I mean, have the repeat years increased at your particular school as students that are held back a year and is there any kind of social stigma with that related to it, too? And then figuring out how to assess students' learning and everybody's looking for, okay, 2023, the new PISA results will come up. Okay, so today's impulses, right? Saying that you can't catch up by more traditional teaching methods. Just like Marissa said, textbooks and exercises are not going to cut it to try to just pound more hours into a student's life. Teachers, we can't do it for pupils. We can't open up heads and put in the knowledge in there. So the trick or the strategy is to motivate and engage pupils to do it themselves. Key point here is maybe see yourself in the role you already do, right? But when somebody asks me, hey, Rich asks me, what do you teach? I said, well, I teach English. I teach instructional design. And I've learned to change that around so that I'm saying that, well, I teach learners English. I teach learners how to learn English or you teach learners how to learn math. Teach learners how to learn writing. You teach learners how to read science, how to teach how to learn science. This whole concept of not teaching a subject as much as you're showing somebody how to learn it so we can learn it on their own. And then this is the million dollar question too. How do we get pupils to be as enthusiastic about school and catching up as they are about music, right? Students, pupils love music. They're connected to it. They really engage with it. I still think it's possible to do that with school. When an engaged teacher and a learning environment in the school all come together to get them just excited as that way. And then I'm going to throw these acronyms at us today again to do a lot of what Marissa was saying. Bring in new pupil-centered approaches instead of the teacher. UDL, PBL, SEL, probably can remember what they are, right? UDL, PBL, SEL. And then online ed tech for that too. This last little phrase, you know, it's part of a UDL background too. UDL, Universal Design for Learning. There's a study where lots of schools have paid lots of extra money for tutors and spent a lot of money. And what they were finding was that they didn't really motivate the student to stay after school to do extra work. But they were finding that students that they were behind having someone look them in the eye and telling them you can do this, I believe in you, especially at that moment when this pupil, the student is tired, comes to you, I can't do this. Trying to change that I can't to what I will try, right? That's a key learning movement when they begin to believe in themselves. And that's, I don't know, my recipe today for success of trying to catch up. It's not so much the extra work, the extra blooms taxonomy. It's just the feeling that the student wants to catch up and how do you engage that and how that has to come from the student. UDL, a few words about it. It comes out of cast.org, right? You can find that website very easily. A lot of you know this framework. You use it already with your classes. It's really an approach more than it is laws or rules. There are three principles. Engagement, representation and action and expressions. And it comes from the 1980s out of architecture and universal design. And now that you pull it to universal design for learning, at the same time, all this new work was being done with the brain and how it learns. So it simplifies it. UDL a little bit. The brain is much more complex than this, but it throws the networks into our brains and says, okay, you've got the effective network. Certain parts of your brain that deal with the why of learning, the curiosity. So if you can get students to be interested in something that stimulates that part of the brain and then they're engaged. The what of learning is the representation. It's usually the content. How the material comes to a student. Traditionally, it was a textbook or a book. Today it could be a video tutorial. It could be a movie. It could be an observation of a case study. It could be a debate. Lots of different ways to suddenly move this around and get the representation in there. Also, representation is important for images. So if everybody in the picture book is white male, for example, that's not really helping with the diversity and representation of what's out there. If the text that you supply for students are only in one language, for example, like say a poem. You're studying how to read a poem. Why not let students bring in a poem from whatever background or language they speak if it's just about poetry analysis and then showing that part. Okay, so the what of learning is that. The how of learning, the action expression, the strategic networks have more to do with executive functions, how we plan time management goals to all of those things. In short, engagement is about the curiosity. The what is how the content comes to a learner. And the how the action expression is what you do with that for the classroom. The action expression is usually that final project and essay test in the old days, but it could also be as Marissa was saying projects. It could be a song. It could be a dance. It could be a sculpture. There's lots of different creative ways of putting those things together. In fact, UDL, if you wanted to put UDL into, you know, pretty much like a one sentence means major kind of long book. It's really multiple options for learner variability. So we talked about learner preferences, all kinds of different things out there. Now presenting something that works for everybody in one kind of design, but that's super hard to do. UDL has a complete matrix associated with it. And what's interesting about it, it works horizontally. The way that it does vertically too. I'm not going to read through all of these, but if you see at the bottom, the whole goal of UDL, it's not to make a great lesson. The goal of UDL over the years is to develop what UDL calls expert learners, expert learners. And they say to become an expert at anything you need about 10 years. And, you know, when they say expert what like really mean expert like Olympic level of, you know, sports or then to become a learner. They say usually by the 10th year of studying and going to school, students should know what their learner preferences are and then how to set goals to be able to do well on a test or to be able to set themselves up for how they're moving forward and then hitting it. So expert learners, you see at the bottom, purposeful and motivated, resourceful and knowledgeable and then strategic and goal-oriented. And that's how they're working through that with the guideline. There's some more tips, right? Engagement, representation, action and expression. Well, I think they're important for us trying to catch up is important. Is the action and expression is important so that students can set goals that they have a part in their learning. Like the teacher, we might know, okay, you need to catch up on this area. Now tell the student and allow them to help set their own goals of how they plan on getting to that point. If they want to go to this next level, how do you do that so that they can kind of see what's happening for that? The engagement part is to become curious about the subject. Not, okay, we were talking about like the geography of South America, for example. How do you stimulate interest in that so that they want to learn about it? You say, hey, we did all the geography of the world last year but we haven't done South America. You know, kind of build it. Who's interested? Who knows something already about South America? So the interest is there and the curiosity moves forward. And then appealing to them, would you like to watch a video about it? A film? Here's a textbook so there's some kind of choices about the resources that they use to learn about it. Okay, and then the R is for access, right? That's kind of the equity part of putting it all together. But you know these things, you probably read them faster than I could speak. Scaffolding is in there. Text to speech tools, right? Translators. So if German, for example, in our country where German isn't the first language, is there a translation that's available to help the learner work through the aspects of what they're trying to learn, especially for math where maybe language isn't that important for that part. Okay, what is UDL? What isn't UDL? UDL is not accessibility. Sometimes people think, okay, it has to do with accommodations or people who have problems or areas for something and it really doesn't. This is a neat way to see it. If you talk about universal design for learning, it really comes out of universal design. Does everybody know sliding doors? You know where you go? They just automatically open, right? Sliding doors and then ramps. Once those started to be in use, they became interesting for everybody, not just people maybe in roll chairs or people in roll wheelchairs or couldn't turn the handles because they weren't strong enough. A universal design like a sliding door that helps everybody. When people are carrying books or people are carrying children, it just opens. It has this notion of universal design access for all. It doesn't matter the condition or the situation of mobility. There's a little bit of difference between accommodation and universal design. This is also important for learning. And accommodation is an extra thing that's put there to help people who can't. For example, can't use stairs. When you first start building it, you think, okay, who are all the possible users? Let me take all the barriers and I only need one thing that's coming in there. So with universal design for learning, that's what that's about. What are all the barriers that could be out there for students? Learning preferences. Maybe writing and reading issues. And how do I design a task or a project that is applicable for all instead of having separate and different types of assignments? Okay, some UDL thoughts are also kind of interesting. It's not about changing students. There's nothing wrong with students. It's about changing the school. And when I first read that, that kind of made a lot of sense to me too. I'd always heard it's a bad student or a lazy student or something and nothing could have been further from the truth. If the student had been engaged, they would have just been just as successful as the others who were able to take tests really well. And we talked about this other one. We talked about math, English or science. A teacher shows learners how to learn these subjects and anything else in life learners want to learn. So somebody finishes school. They can be a wonderful learner. They learned a lot in school. They don't go on to university perhaps or college. But now let's say they moved somewhere and they started a family and now they have a baby. They want to learn how to take care of it. They know how to do that. I can teach myself how to do the things that I need to do. I can be an expert learner, not somebody who has a PhD or has gone through college. An expert learner is somebody who knows how to learn something when that need is there. And a great skill that teachers can give. Alright, searching gears a little bit, kind of moving up towards our time. Project-based learning is another approach alongside with UDL. That's a lot what Marissa was talking about too, using projects in the class, but not assigning them. Align them to the curriculum and what your learning objectives are. Active learning. The difference maybe between doing a project and project-based learning is that some kind of real-world long-term problem, right? So those of you who know E-twinning really well are asked most popular topics like climate control, population, smart cities. Those topics that are hard for adults to answer and prove. Let children in school work at them, right? They're more stimulated by thinking of a real-world problem in their community than something that's just in the textbook coming in. So what happens? People's formulate questions. It's up to them to decide what questions are going to work collaboratively across the disciplines in different subjects. It's all about the process. So if they don't produce some kind of brilliant result in the end, that's what did you learn going through it? So lots of reflection, what did you learn? So when you go out and troubleshoot and problem-solve all of these things make a lot more sense that you can't do it alone. You need research and collaborative work coming in. And then when you finish the project, whatever it might be, is that it's supported by a real-world audience. You know, for example, if the students are working on a video about a current event, right, in their hometown or their village and now they've, you know, an election was recently done or something that's a sports day and they put together a short video for them, then they would be allowed to send it to the TV station or a journalist. You know, maybe the journalist would thank you, I really can't use it, but they see that school isn't this kind of bubble that things that they produce in the school then can be used and then maybe make the world a better place in that space. And maybe some of you in Germany right now, lots of money is going into makerspaces and fab labs. So students are creating things, 3D printers, virtual reality, those types of things are happening in the school. They're fortunate enough to have those kinds of grants and programs coming in. Those are all great activities to kind of advance PBL and moving forward. PBL is not just the way we looked at UDL was not accessibility. PBL is not doing projects. And you can read through this list faster than I can go through it certainly, right? Projects on one side, the teacher gives you this, you go do it. Right, the project based learning, okay, what are you going to pick for your project, you know, collaboratively working it together, student centered and have those things coming in. So lots of great resources out there easy to PBL and find that about to give this third one wanted to talk about today. We have UDL Universal Design for Learning PBL and now social emotional learning. Maybe the image speaks best for it. See the heart with the brain. You know, for years, academic intelligence. That's that's what you have in school and not emotion. But now starting to learn that the brain works well with social and emotional intelligence. So being able to understand emotions. I mean, control them is kind of hard. But as students especially in those early years, nursery school in kindergarten, learn to control perhaps anger or tears or frustration as they move in being emotionally intelligent and aware of how that works in us, especially with the studies done with neuro education showing that an intimidated brain a brain that's trying to learn out of fear or brain that's trying to learn out of in a traumatic experience. Something's going on at home or something. All those things have to kind of go by the wayside or space has to be given kind of a check in and probably notice they did that initially hi everybody take three depth breaths relax kick off your shoes kind of like a check in so that that until wish the lesson doesn't really start right when the bell goes off but there's a five or 10 minute phase and it's an important time and might think oh I can't take away the time from the learning where you're checking in and people are saying how do you feel today what's going on and then clearing the air so that is a central learning space and then the learning can begin. So learner and culture variability emotional states then become important areas to talk about these types of techniques positive reinforcement good work helping pupils find the language how are you feeling about how did that make you feel formative feedback cyberbullying and bullying and all of these different things that are going out so there's a lot of love with social emotional learning a lot of being kind so some schools might have like a be kind day or a diversity week that talks about feelings and people's coming from to and it's got all about empathy kindness and the respect for humanity so one of the premiere organizations for this is the Mahatma Gandhi Institute for Sustained Educational Development Beaches and they've got a wonderful framing space learning area for these with courses that are free to the public that you can take and it's really different from teaching SEL skills right if you move forward most of us do this as teachers anyway we're teaching students these skills but SEL learning is really having that kind of environment around that's a safe space for the realization that the emotions are just as important as the brain when one is trying to learn and then trying to get into that place where the brain is not actively focused on an area and then even probably do this with your students to say hey my homework's going to be late because I had it something going on in my life being flexible enough to say yes okay take the time the course will always be there when you're ready come back to it and maybe not always a luxury in your cases of when students have to turn in work they're trying to be fair right it's also kind of an issue in there too but these social emotional skills just being very different from the way the school could work with them too okay coping with anger right all these effective skills and available on the slide you know coming in alright that takes us to kind of this last one Dr. Nash writes what about the future okay Rich that's great you just told me about UDL, PBL I kind of know about those things I try to do that in my class you know but how how do I keep it going it's webinars professional development and those things making them an issue with the schools doing presentations but Dr. Nash and her Ikel report you know Ikel the impact of COVID on key learning and education just to prepare for any future periods of disruption okay we have to do better next time it's vital that funding be there for remote schooling so there is above all that UDL PBL SEL stuff there has to be contingency plans for if something horrid happens how do we keep students learning without missing a beat without trying to go back and so far especially with the background in here so these resources need to be shared with families see how important that is came out of the pandemic with the families who are able to support students emotionally and also with things like computers and Wi-Fi they did a lot better than those students that didn't have that so structured manner to enable caregivers with limited time to make confident choices for home living and many of home learning and many of you became the caregiver for your students if they didn't have that nice network at home one interesting thing you might have seen these already these wonderful pictograms and I love these for you Ukrainian pupils they're in all 28 languages at the in the Erasmus plus each winning site and at the EU and what they are they use UDL PBL and SEL all at once to inspire students from Ukraine who are now in the classroom and then also the students that are with them in the classroom to learn each other's language and the customs this example is from the Spanish version and there's the website that you can get for all of your countries in there too but see the simple pictogram that has that image in there for learners who like the image and it's also got the emotional words and language that can be used so it's a place where bridges can start through that and I kind of think if it just had an audio component you know speech to text then it would be a universal design with all the barriers for how that's kind of working so exciting stuff is coming out of that all I talked about today UDL PBL SEL I keep saying it's almost like a t-shirt or a coffee mug right it is in relation to what we're learning also what we have learned in the last two years about these online learning pedagogies so all of that was like these were just approaches to what we can do to try to engage students and make it more student centered things that you see here are more about how education is transforming and each one of us has a different relationship with technology and how that's worked but all of these are ways to catch up to flip your classroom right where the students are meeting before they come into class instead of sitting there too build out your Moodle that you might not have a Moodle maybe you've got Ilias or Blackboard or Brightspace but Google Classroom Schoology whatever your LMS if you're fortunate enough to have a learning management system build it out blend your learning so maybe a combination of both of the async and the sync putting it together web enhance your class with links padlet a lot of us know many of these tools that are out there that are learners like to use I mean to try to study and catch up those are nice tools they can do on their own they almost are gamified ways of learning and internationalize your curriculum I think you know where I'm going with that of course e-twinning and Erasmus Plus and this last one is for us as professionals we're so busy teaching we rarely think of ourselves that what we've done and what we've taught is worth for other people so you've developed a great graphic organizer for integers or you have a wonderful vocabulary sheet right publish it in a repository as an open educational resource with the Creative Commons license on it so that others can use that so I see this in the next five or ten years in Europe it's just going to take off will it be more publishing sharing and using of our educational resources for our lessons e-twinning and Erasmus Plus mobility projects or another one besides those wonderful picto books that we saw with Ukrainian and other target languages in the lands where people are e-twinning and Erasmus Plus mobility projects together are a powerful one two connector for learning some of you might be in small and remote villages I visited them in Germany e-twinning schools as they make the rounds and it is amazing how involved students are when you talk to the teachers at some of these schools they say well they didn't have an international perspective let alone a national perspective they only kind of knew the village and now you know they've got pen pals in Italy pen pals in Spain so this e-twinning and Erasmus Plus mobility project when the student first learners meet an e-twinning they do a small little project and now with the money available they're traveling and getting to meet people that suddenly brings that whole UDL of engagement representation and action and expression it brings it all together and the resources are there right if your school doesn't have an expensive LMS chances are that you've got Wi-Fi hopefully and that you could connect and use the e-twinning okay right now it's kind of neat because e-twinning is in its own transformation right e-twinning and the education school gateway and there's an exciting webinar I guess I can promote that a little bit I think it's been moved to the 14th 16th it was going to be the 9th but we're all kind of getting excited about that it's been a great chance for us to then embrace these things and I'm getting good comments in the chat with I agree different strategies more opportunities being creative Sophia says e-twinning has enabled us to create the conditions for the learners to choose it's so true okay I'm a fan I think anybody out there who's done a project is kind of a fan because you see the engagement just you know stride in there with students all right I'm coming to the end so I want to say some time for chat so please put some comments in the chat to talk to each other see Sophia and Maria are talking it's wonderful that's what today is all about we're teachers helping teachers but this whole thing comes to what resiliency isn't easy taking on the challenges it's hard and really you guys think I'm oh he's so optimistic except but teachers are heroes right first line heroes what we've done for the last two weeks we keep having to remind yourself when you've got another stack of papers to grade or you've got another parent teacher conference or something's coming in there too what you're doing keeping learners learning is invaluable these particularly dangerous years where students will fall through the cracks but look at this to keep on going we've been doing this for two years you have to take care of ourselves right if something happens to us you can't help anybody else so particularly important teacher wellness right this is a hard one for me okay Sophia says absolutely it's so boundaries you know during the pandemic I kind of lost them because what happened it became like I maybe tricked myself into thinking all of this was fun so I was spending a lot of hours and you know because the pandemic couldn't really go anywhere but now this new phase of helping students catch up by doing that we catch up with ourselves with our families with our lives you know start smelling the roses a little bit more and realize what is out of your control and what's in your control and so things that what people are thinking about you the opinions of others the past what's happened there you can't change any of that or what's going on right now if you're particularly you know in trouble with these other areas too that's also hard so that's out of your control maybe last thought for the day here six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day and then says b6 again I mean as we say that would be nice if you could kind of that but you kind of get the point you know this is serious horrible things the pandemic the Ukraine but have to get in touch with that child and ourselves and then enjoy it right okay that was a lot sorry everybody but we do have some time for questions so Marta I'm gonna maybe stop sharing and turn it over to you yeah thank you thank you very much Richard for the great presentation and the rich content and strategies you presented to to our teachers today I saw a lot of positive and nice comments for you in the chat but please yes we have time now for some questions see if you have please post them in the chat so I can read them out loud meanwhile my colleague Eleonora will post in the chat the feedback form so remember to save the link you can also fill it in after the webinar but please just save the link now while we are waiting for some possible questions I think it worth it maybe to read a question comment from Marisa in the chat let me just retreat it was okay yeah Marisa was saying before I think we can assess real learning if we put students in the condition to use their knowledges and abilities to create a product better if the outcome is made by a group so activating and assessing collaborative skills as well I don't know Richard maybe if you want to comment bit the comment that Marisa posted in the chat it's wonderful and Marisa I want to thank you because we were like co-moderator with me because of so many great ideas and I can already see that there's a lot of people from the chat too that we think the same right we're just tired of those tests and then standard kind of achievements and we see the classrooms come alive when students can work on projects when they're real-world projects and I really truly believe it might sign naive trying to catch up the only way that's going to be done is with these super cool adult related learning skills of collaboration and working together on projects where they can figure out what they want to do what they want to use what tools and working all together rather than doing three more exercises from a book that was written three years ago sorry everybody if you're a textbook publisher I didn't mean that to offend at all but you know we all know those books they're written some years ago and then they're published and there's just a whole real world of problems and issues out there that spark you know our students mind so even students that the product I love what Marisa said because I've got students working on an e-twinning project right now they want to write a song together they said that's what and they're all so inspired at first they were like e-twinning what's this and blah blah blah it's a textbook and now I can't get them to stop sending me emails and what's apps and can you listen to this so I agree with you right now particularly products projects e-twinning you know travel with Erasmus Plus now that the pandemic is slowly moving away they're great great moving on yeah thank you very much Richard and maybe another one that it's really worth it in this context also for all the teacher Christina was saying this webinar made me feel better I'm a primary school teacher unfortunately most of my daughters professor do not care about the importance of collaborative skills so I think in this sense was really important all the presentation you have just done also to make feel the teachers better and in a really collaborative environment and make them feel understood as well and they can count on some help from from our side even though it's only maybe through these webinars but really I think it's already a thing and it's really important for them yeah well teachers I'm a big fan of course because I am one it's the best profession you could have on bias but and I think every once in a while we forget we should give ourselves a clap on the shoulder and just say great job and keep it up yeah thank you so great job everyone okay we are moving towards the end I would like to thank you again Richard for being with us today I think it was really inspiring for all the teachers here there are a lot of thanks in the chat for you and thank you of course to all the participants who joined us today please remember to fill in the feedback form and remember that no certificate are issued for this webinar so we need to close now it's 5pm we all need some rest I wish you all a good evening and thank you very much again for joining us today bye bye everyone