Students’ ability to learn depends not only on what they know, but also on their ability to navigate frustration, uncertainty, feedback, and other emotional aspects of the learning process. In this two-session workshop, participants will explore how the design of course assignments can either encourage learning or create unnecessary emotional barriers to it, and develop concrete strategies for assignment design that help students direct their emotional resources toward successful learning rather than avoidable frustration.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) calls a student’s ability to navigate the emotional aspects of learning their emotional capacity. We will use three UDL Emotional Capacity considerations as a framework for understanding how assignment design can support or hinder student emotional capacity (by removing emotional barriers or introducing unnecessary ones, respectively), and as a guide for intentionally designing assignments that reduce common sources of frustration.

This workshop utilizes an object-based teaching and learning approach, allowing participants to engage with and learn directly from assignments from a wide range of disciplines. In the first session, participants will use authentic assignments as shared objects for observation, analysis, and discussion to uncover assumptions they may hold about students’ emotional capacity before connecting those observations and assumptions to the UDL framework and UDL informed assignment design strategies. At the end of this session participants will begin to redesign an assignment relevant to their discipline by using at least one of the assignment design strategies discussed in the session. In the second session, participants will explore action-oriented feedback as a tool for maintaining motivation and promoting growth, then participate in a structured peer-review process to refine their assignment revisions. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how assignment design influences students’ emotional experiences and concrete strategies for designing assignments that better support the emotional needs of learners. By the end of this workshop, participants will be prepared to:

• Discuss concrete strategies for promoting student emotional capacity through incorporating UDL considerations 8.5, and 9.1-3 in assignment design.
• Design or revise an assignment to promote student emotional capacity through the incorporation of one or more of the UDL emotional capacity considerations.

Instructors

Lyla Hestand, The Ohio State University
Erin Mercurio, The Ohio State University

Workshop Schedule

This two-part online workshop meets in Zoom on Monday, October 19th and 26th at 8-10pm Gulf / 12-2pm Eastern / 11am-1pm Central / 9-11am Pacific/Arizona.

Audience

While every discipline has their own norms and conventions, the CAST UDL Guidelines – including the Emotional Capacity considerations we will focus on – are designed to be applicable regardless of domain. Emotional barriers to learning and strategies for circumventing them do not depend upon content. All graduate students are invited to attend, regardless of discipline or teaching experience.

Registration

Request a registration reminder

Cap: 70. Registration opens on Monday, October 5th at 10am CT and closes once capacity is reached. Registration will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis and registrants from CIRTL member institutions or alumni of CIRTL member institutions will receive priority. Once registration closes, all registrants will be notified of their enrollment status.

Accessibility

If you have access needs, please let us know what they are. Contact Zoe Zuleger (zmzuleger@wisc.edu), who is supporting this event, to let us know how we can help you have a successful experience. In addition to meeting individualized needs, we will also take measures throughout the event to support accessibility for all our students:

• Enabling live captioning in synchronous sessions
• Incorporating multiple modes of interaction into synchronous sessions

About CIRTL Programming

CIRTL Network programming is designed to develop future faculty committed to implementing and advancing evidence-based teaching practices to create undergraduate educational experiences that are accessible to all learners. Participants can explore our programming in any order, and to whatever extent supports your own teaching development needs and interests. To help participants understand what they can expect across all our programming, all CIRTL programming aligns with four broad learning goals; within those goals, programming might provide participants improving evidence-based teaching.

This workshop supports the following CIRTL learning goal:

• Goal 1: Develop evidence-based teaching knowledge. See more Goal 1 programming.