Higher Level of Detail/Thinking Deeply

Many students talked about instructors who were confident in their knowledge of the subject matter which enabled rich discussion and collaboration. In her book Engage the Brain, Allison Posey (2019) refers to attention and engagement as a two-way street whereby prior knowledge, expectations, and experiences prime us to attune to relevant information. The comments from the students we spoke with bear this out. The more instructors could bring forward the students’ past experiences and experiences with the content, the richer the learning.

Hardeep: Instead of instead the professor just you know regurgitating or going over what we’ve already read, he would ask like “What did you think about this? Did you understand this? This is important, like, here’s some examples,” you know things like that, things that are more discussion based as opposed to on, you know, reading, that type of stuff. There was still reading but if you go over it in more detail and you become, it becomes more engaging I think you recognize it more. That was one of my highest graded classes as well.

Chandra: It was a very collaborative intellectual environment, and I think the professor was very good at creating that environment where we had to very like think very deeply about the different texts that we were engaging with, so I feel like I grew as an intellectual in that one course, even though we had to take like four or five courses that year I can’t even remember the other courses, you know?

For Kristen, this two-way street idea was an issue of accessibility. An accessible course for Kristen meant structure and preparation, but also time (another aspect of pacing!) to prepare her thoughts for discussions which made this approach to deep learning more accessible.

Kristen: My most supportive professor did several things to make her class accessible. She provided a syllabus ahead of the class’ start, which contained all the information I needed to know for the entire semester—all assignments with detailed instructions, all textbooks, a list of class dates and topics to be covered along with required readings for each day. She did an excellent job of facilitating class discussion by having each person speak once on a topic, instead of letting discussion flow—this made it easier for me to speak up, gave me time to prepare my remarks, and avoided tense fights or arguments that I found very difficult to cope with in other classes.

Kristen: The class was small and focused on a specific topic. Each week, we were strongly encouraged to all do the readings in advance. The professor led a lecture on the topic that dove into new and helpful expansions on the material in the readings, and then facilitated conversation by allowing all students to ask questions and make comments and responding to students one by one. This highly structured method allowed us to dive more deeply into the material than other classes.

Recall that the UDL framework is structured with levels, from basic access up to internalizing learning. Kristen shows us that growing into expert learners can only happen once basic accessibility is met. Strong course design can be many things but it always start with access.