1. Support access and use.

Make your content accessible and easily usable to ALL of your learners. Engage the sensory and motivation areas of the brain. Can your material be accessed and used by learners who are not able to receive visual or auditory or tactile stimuli/information? What parts of your brain would be available for learning if you could not see or hear? Put yourself in ALL learning profiles shoes when designing your course. What if you had dyslexia or an attention-based disability? What sensory pathways can your course content engage in the brain? Consider using this Checklist for Inclusive Teaching from the University of Washington. For more information on how to make your material accessible, review the Creating Accessible Materials section of this website.

2. Be explicit and give context.

Reduce ambiguity and the threat of procrastination by providing explicit instructions and examples. If a learner does not understand what is needed and the why, or the how of the task, they won’t:

• care;
• be able to meet expectations; and
• learn

Help the brain find patterns and create meaning to promote memory formation, storage and retrieval. Use metaphors and real-life examples to teach concepts and ask students to generate their own metaphors and real-life examples as they see them related to course content. How explicit are your rubrics? Use rubrics as learning and formative assessment tools. Activate the cingulate gyrus, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus and grow the autobiographical memory base. Learning and memory are associative – we all store and retrieve information based on the associative ties we assign to the information – think Piaget’s theory of schema. Consider using this guide for developing your UDL-friendly syllabus and this Rubric for Evaluating Your Course Syllabus.

3. Model skills and strategies.

Don’t present, explain, and expect (don’t P.E.E.). Instead, explicitly model and practice skills and strategies alongside students. Learn new strategies from students and have students model them for one another. If you can’t model different skills and strategies used to work with your content, how can students be expected to learn them? Repeated practice spread out over time promotes learning by activating new learning genes, whereas repeated practice done in a short amount of time (mass repetition) actually activates the genes for forgetting.

4. Work with mistakes and problem-solving.

Learning is about making mistakes; otherwise we wouldn’t learn what to do and what not to do in different contexts for different demands. Maintaining objectivity and remaining non-judgmental fosters a welcoming environment and risk-taking efforts in students when it comes to trying new strategies. Practicing skills, strategies and problem-solving skills helps the brain to re-wire mis-wired or under-activated neural networks and to develop new neural network systems. Providing frequent feedback supports metacognition development by activating the caudate nucleus, basil ganglia, and prefrontal cortex and grow the autobiographical memory base which particularly supports students with attention based disabilities and executive function issues.

5. Support flexibility.

Finding ways to support flexibility forces creativity in generating learning tasks as well as providing opportunities for learners to be creative and generate new connections to content. Adaptability is part of flexibility which is part of survival in the real world. To be flexible while still upholding challenging standards, start by thinking about what the primary learning objectives are for your course. What is important for students to know and do five years out into the future? What strategy instruction will promote success towards the primary learning objectives? How will critical thinking and problem-solving apply in the flexible approaches to learning and demonstration of course outcomes?

6. Provide routines with novelty.

Routines free up memory demands and reduce anxiety and stress while novelty engages the brain’s attention systems. Remove the burden from working memory and stress-response areas of the brain, and instead, activate the attention and motivation systems of the brain. What is the routine of your class (e.g. open with review of previous information, move to activator of new information, process activity for new information, metaphor/real life example reflection/summary of new information, preview of upcoming information)? For instance, if you always start your class with a review of previously covered information, vary the ways students review the information (e.g. treasure hunt, “speed-dating,” game show with teams, etc.).

7. Utilize formative assessments.

How will you or your students know if and/or when they’ve gone off track unless you and they are both constantly monitoring their learning? Promote self-understanding and metacognition and prevent mis-wiring of neural networks or misunderstanding of course tasks and concepts by utilizing frequent formative assessments. Formative assessments tell instructors where, when, and how to adjust their instruction to ensure ALL learners are learning. Collect feedback from your students on how activities / course format is working periodically throughout the semester. Immediate and consistent constructive feedback helps to wire or re-wire the brain more efficiently and effectively. If you wait to return graded assignments until students are already working on the next task/assignment for your class, you have potentially missed a critical opportunity in shaping a cognitive neural schema for how to do the assignment correctly. The caudate nucleus helps learners modify future actions in response to error detection; some studies have shown that individuals with ADHD have underactive caudate nuclei, thus having external immediate feedback is critical for error detection and correction.

8. Model and encourage creativity, passion and positivity.

Positivity is infectious. But then again, so is negativity. Activate the amygdala and emotion processing areas of the brain and trigger the dopamine motivation pathway by modeling and encouraging creativity, passion and positivity. According to research, positivity can promote creativity and problem-solving (Nadler, 2010).