By preparing our courses so that students with disabilities can overcome barriers to access, we are utilizing the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines. The purpose of this blog is to share some small changes you can make to the learning environment so that all students can participate without barriers, increasing equity and access to quality education.

When Covid-19 got its foothold in the United States, and schools left for spring break never to return, we had to scramble to switch to fully remote learning. Now that we're resurfacing from the pandemic, many stakeholders are pushing for remote learning to continue. There are advantages to remote learning, and it does need to be utilized. Still, there are situations where being physically together in the same room can offer exceptional learning opportunities.

It can be challenging to get to know your individual students at the college level as you do not see them frequently and likely have no prior connection. Building positive, personal relationships with your college students takes time and effort, but putting in that little extra work is well worth the results.

As you complete your grading for the academic year, consider whether your course grading system promotes a learning orientation or a task-completion orientation. Changing a course grading system to focus almost entirely on summative projects produced final grades that rewarded quality over participation and effort.

Formative assessments take many different forms: exit tickets, quizzes, rough drafts of written assignments, prototypes for projects, and more. Whenever you have evidence of students learning, it can be used as a formative assessment. Even the summative test results can be used to see areas of strengths and weaknesses to inform the teaching of future classes.

I know that you’re giving everything you can to your schools right now, leaving very little time to read through emails and blogs. For Almy Education’s last February blog post, I’ve recapped all of our February communications (newsletters, blogs, emails, etc.), all in one centralized location.

We know too well that if students are not engaged, they will not learn. In this blog post we discuss goal orientation; ego-involved, task-completion, and learning, and how this impacts student success.

This first blog in the series designed to help you prepare for the first day of teaching an online class, focuses on getting to know your students and building relationships when you are not able to see them every day.

In April, more than one news outlet addressed the growing achievement gap likely to be caused the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent school closures. We will likely encounter a much larger gap in knowledge among our various students this upcoming fall than we have in past years. What can we as educators do to help bridge this increasing achievement gap being caused by the Covid-19 crisis?

Many math teachers, me included, focus on teaching more than learning. Here is one thing you can do tomorrow to improve learning in your math class.