Learners are highly variable in terms of the ways they are inspired to persist through challenging aspects of the learning process, and this variability can shift depending on the learning context. To sustain effort and persistence, effective learning designs consider options for creating goals that are meaningful and purposeful, offering scaffolds and supports in service of challenging goals, fostering collaboration and belonging, and offering on-going, action-oriented feedback.
Over the course of any sustained project or practice, there are many sources of interest and engagement that compete for attention and effort. To support sustained effort and persistence, it is essential for learners to be clear on the goal and to have space to explore how the goal is meaningful to their own lives and communities. Further, it is important the meaning and purpose of the goal is clearly and consistently reinforced and apparent to learners throughout the learning process.
| Strategy | |
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| Explicitly formulate or restate the goal. |
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| Display the goal in multiple ways. |
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| Encourage organization of long-term goals into short-term objectives. |
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| Use prompts or scaffolds for imagining desired outcomes. |
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| Co-construct ideals of excellence and generate relevant examples that connect to learners' cultural backgrounds, identities, and interests. |
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The UDL framework is grounded in a belief in the brilliance of every learner and the importance of setting high expectations. The design of the learning environment must not only support access, but support participation and progress toward challenging learning goals as well. All learners need to be challenged, but not always in the same way. It is important for the learning environment to embed a variety of tools, resources, and supports to promote successful engagement with the learning goal and to ensure learners find challenges that are optimally motivating.
| Strategy | |
|---|---|
| Presume competence and nurture a belief in the capabilities of every learner | |
| Offer options with varying modes of complexity or difficulty |
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| Offer options for tools and scaffolds that align with the learning goal and promote agency |
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| Emphasize process, effort, and progress in meeting standards as alternatives to external evaluation and competition. |
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Collectively generating knowledge and learning from one another’s diversity of ideas, perspectives, and lived experiences is central to the learning process. Creating communities, teams, and partnerships that can push and extend each other’s thinking and practice care for one another is a powerful way to sustain effort and persistence, and to support learners to thrive more broadly. Connected to these notions of collaboration and collective learning is the idea of interdependence — a reminder that we are all interconnected, our decisions and actions impact others, and learners can support one another. The disability community reminds us of the value of interdependence as opposed to an overemphasis on independence. We can work to support each other to ensure needs are met within the learning environment, and more broadly.
| Strategy | |
|---|---|
| Create community agreements that emphasize learners' ideas for fostering collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning | |
| Create teams with clear goals, roles, expectations, and responsibilities. |
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| Use prompts that guide learners in when and how to ask for help | Visual prompts and signals: these are important for non-speaking students so they can ask for help. These are important for new-comers who are in the pre-production phase of language acquisition. |
| Use prompts or protocols that guide learners to surface and share differing perspectives | |
| Encourage and support opportunities for peer interactions and supports (e.g., peer tutors) |
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| Construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities or who identify in similar ways. | Choice in interest groups: Construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities |
| Construct communities of learners engaged in differing interests or activities or who identify in differing ways | |
| Encourage questions to more fully understand concepts, ideas, and perspectives |
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To support learners to sustain effort and persistence — and to thrive as learners more broadly — it is critical to design learning environments where learners feel a legitimate sense of belonging and community. Fostering this legitimate sense of belonging and community is especially important for learners who have been historically excluded and/or marginalized. Further, it is important to remember the sources and meanings of belonging and community will vary across learners and contexts. Designing learning environments where there are multiple ways to develop relationships, practice caring for one another, and strengthen connections to learners' multiple and intersecting identities is essential.
| Strategy | |
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Create opportunities for learners to share their perspectives on what belonging and community can feel like and look like. |
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| Create opportunities for learners to share their ideas for different ways to foster belonging and community. | |
| Welcome interests and identities (Guideline 7) | |
| Examine when or how bias may be creating barriers to learners' sense of belonging | |
Assessment is most productive for sustaining engagement when the feedback is relevant, constructive, accessible, consequential, and timely. But the type of feedback is also critical in helping learners to sustain the motivation and effort essential to learning. Action-oriented feedback is the type of feedback that offers specific comments on ways to make progress and take action toward the learning goal. This type of feedback emphasizes the role of effort and practice rather than “intelligence” or inherent “ability” as an important factor in guiding learners toward successful long-term habits of mind and learning practices.
| Strategy | |
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Offer feedback that encourages perseverance, focuses on development of efficacy and self-awareness, and encourages the use of specific supports and strategies in the face of challenge. |
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| Offer feedback that emphasizes effort, improvement, and achieving a goal rather than on relative performance. | |
| Offer feedback that is frequent, timely, and specific. | Narration of correct answers: Restate the students correct answer or correct strategy for solving. For example, “You said the plural of bush is bushes. This is correct. You added ‘-es’ on the end of bush to make it bushes.” |
| Offer feedback that is substantive and informative rather than comparative or competitive. | Private redirections: minimize whole class language corrections (especially for multilingual learners) |
| Offer feedback that models how to incorporate reflection, including identifying patterns of challenges or strengths, into positive strategies for future success. | Recast: Use “recasting” as a way to correct language. When recasting, you restate the correct language form instead of making a direct correction. For example, the student says, “I runded to the park”; you simply reply, “Oh, you ran to the park? Great!). This allows students to know they were successful at communicating meaning. |
| Offer feedback that encourages risk taking and offers another (or differing) perspective(s). | |