Comm-B and Universal Design for Learning
One of the wonderful, high-impact practices characteristic of Comm B courses is the opportunity for students to engage directly with instructors about their writing and learning processes. Because we know that individualized attention and conversation supports all learners in their development, holding individual consultations with your Comm B students already aligns with the mission of universal design. However, there are several ways you can curate this interpersonal element of your work to be more intentionally accessible and inclusive of students with disabilities.
Take an explicitly collaborative approach
Because the UDL framework assumes infinite diversity among learners’ ways of being in the world, it would be an impossible task to try to plan for each kind of disability, chronic health issue, or life situation that might impact students’ performance in your class. Rather than try to guess or diagnose what a student might be experiencing, a UDL approach to one-on-one conferences encourages you to engage students in genuine conversation and work collaboratively to determine how best to support their learning.
Such a collaborative approach centers the student – their identity and their experience – throughout the consultation. Your role as the instructor in this context is to ask questions and to listen as much as it is to provide feedback, clarifications, and suggestions. In fact, it’s by asking those questions and listening carefully to students’ responses that you can most effectively provide that feedback!
Here are several questions you might ask students during individual consultations.
How would you like to work together (in-person or Zoom)? What works best for you?
Before we get started, is there anything you’d like me to know [e.g. about how you’re doing, about your experience with this class]?
Could you tell me about your writing process? What aspects feel fairly easy or maybe more difficult for you?
Have you talked with instructors about your writing before? What did you find helpful (or not so helpful) about those conversation?
Open-ended questions such as these can be particularly effective in centering students as collaborative partners in you individual consultations with them.
Offer options and flexibility
Through your conversations with students, you may come to learn that some aspects of conferences that seem neutral or inconsequential to you are not neutral and, sometimes, significantly consequential for them. You can respond – or better yet, anticipate – such instances by being overtly flexible about your individual consultations and offering options for how, when, and where consultations will occur.
The table below lists out several ways you might build greater flexibility into your one-on-one conferences with students:
| Before the conference | During the conference | In-person considerations |
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Support executive functioning
Individual consultations are an excellent opportunity for you to talk with students about potential difficulties with executive functioning as well as course content and writing processes. Executive functions include a broad set of cognitive tasks that inform behavior, including goal-setting, planning, strategizing, and monitoring progress toward goals.
The UDL on Campus website offers a convenient overview of how to support students’ development of executive functioning – especially in an online environment. I recommend you scroll through the iFrame below to learn more about this topic.
If the iFrame isn’t working, you may need to select “Allow Blocked Content” in your web browser. Alternatively, you can access the guide via this link (opens in a separate tab): http://udloncampus.cast.org/page/teach_executive
UW-Madison’s McBurney Center is also a terrific resource for support.
