Hartman

According to the learning styles assessment we took I am primarily a **Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learner.** I found the strategies they suggested I employ to accommodate my learning styles somewhat humorous because many of them are techniques I have developed and honed over the years. Although I agree that I am primarily a kinesthetic learner, I also scored relatively high on auditory learning style. I believe that this is why many of my adaptations seem to involve verbalizing what I know. I always try to sit at the front of the class and take rigorous notes throughout the class period. I’m so involved in doing the work or calculations myself that in some classes, specifically mathematics, I tend to fall behind while taking notes. When I study I have a tendency to talk to myself or read the material out loud which I find to be very effective and also somewhat embarrassing, specifically when I decide bring my flash cards to the gym because being up and mobile seems to help me concentrate. I also seem to do really well in the group study setting for similar reasons. Before big math exams my friend Holly and I tend to find a vacant room in York Road and spend all afternoon studying together. We will discuss the answers and work out the problems together on the available white boards and verbalize to both ourselves and each other the processes as we used to complete each step. I rarely hear of my students forming study groups, but I think, especially for auditory learners, this is one of the most effective strategies to review and retain information. Kudos to you for doing this and for knowing the strategies that make you a good learner.
 * __Learning Styles Reflection__**

Unfortunately I didn’t really learn anything new from the learning style survey. Although this might seem like a negative review, it’s actually quite positive because it confirms both the accuracy of the information on the site and also confirms my previous assumptions and knowledge. It shows me that my study skills are on point and that there is an specific reason why the methods I use are more effective for me. This test makes me wonder if teachers are aware of what each student’s individual learning style is. I don’t remember being formally assessed in either middle school or high school so it makes me wonder if my teachers knew how to reach me specifically when I didn’t seem to understand the material. I would be interested in having my students take a similar assessment so I would be better informed on how to teach them as individuals.
 * __UDL Reflection Assignment__**

To be quite honest with you I wasn’t overly impressed with the CAST website. I thought it had a lot of nice elements but in most cases I found it to be nice in theory but not necessarily in practice. I liked the idea of the glossary because I am the kind of person that frequents dictionary.com while reading, but I found the bright blue hypertext in nearly every sentence to be incredibly distracting. I didn’t realize there was a toggle switch in the upper right hand corner that allowed you to “Turn on glossary”(turning the blue text to black) until I was three quarters of my way through the assignment. Additionally, I liked the idea of the notepad but to be honest it wasn’t very practical. It made it easy for you to cut and paste key terms, definitions, or ideas but it wasn’t easy for you to reference the notes you had already taken because the window was so small you couldn’t see much more than a sentence at a time. One of the things I found most helpful during this assignment was the group of links on the left hand side of the page that had links to each of the sections contained within the chapter. I used this function frequently when working on our group’s PowerPoint. I think my favorite part of the website was the fact that you could change the text into something they called the “Universal Learning Edition”. I found this version of the text much more user friendly and conducive to my learning. I liked that it gave me a layout that was closer to a traditional text book, but more specifically I like that it gave me a layout that was free of distractions and clutter. I honestly believe that part of the reason why I struggled with the assignment in the beginning was because I found the format of the text to be very distracting. There were way too many boxes, links, tabs, and drop down boxes. What's great about the CAST website is that it does practice what it preaches - to say that the web designers do take into account the various preferences of learners and have designed the site with a number of options. Perhaps it was because there is SO much information on the site that it was a bit overwhelming to you. I hope in the future, however, you'll be able to access the site again for help in teaching students with special learning needs.

I really enjoyed the second activity and how it asked specific questions that helped us understand the basics of and the relationship between the recognition, strategic, and affective networks. It really drove home the point that people could interpret the same things differently because of how individualized the affective network is. I was less interested and involved in the first activity than I was the second one. I believe that part of the reason why I struggled with the first activity was because I found my strengths and challenges to be very similar to one of the other characters. I found it very difficult to come up with a set of unique strengths and challenges, specifically in the recognition and strategy sections. I don’t know that I would say that I learned anything about new about my strengths or talents other than the fact that what I consider to be strengths or talents depends entirely on the task I am trying to complete. That's fine, some things are better for some than others. However, I hope that you did come away with the idea that - in this day of the popularity of cooperative/collaborative learning - you can help students to identify the strengths they bring to a group and to help that process to be more successful for all learners.

If I were to try to incorporate some of the information from the electronic version of the text into the classroom I would most likely try to write lesson plans while keeping the three different brain networks in mind. I would make sure that my learning goals were separate from the means of teaching so the students would be able to use whatever approach was easiest for them. We learned a great deal about differentiated instruction in SCED 460 and in general I am a big fan, but I worry that it will be too much work to differentiate every lesson I plan, especially during my first years of teaching. I feel like it will be a lot easier to differentiate your instruction once you have been teaching for a few years because you will have accumulated a number of different resources on different levels over the years. I believe you're correct here - some things will become "second nature" to you as you teach after you've had experience. I will do my best to provide multimedia sources that aid in differentiating and individualizing learning process whenever possible but I worry that I won’t know what kinds of media sources are affective in a mathematics classroom or that the school I end up teaching at won’t have the technological capacity to do what I want to do. I think it would have been helpful if the CAST website had provided us with a few sample lesson plans for each subject that were created using the universal design for learning. It’s great to talk about what we should do, how it should be done, and why we should do it, but I believe it would be even more effective to see the process in action. Actually, there are sample lesson plans on the site - if you go back there you'll be able to find them.

LINK to Hartman Page 2