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>>Dr. Maravene Loeschke: We're ready to get started here.
And I want to welcome you.
I always, when I was a faculty member, found this to be one
of the most exciting days of the year at the faculty
conference because we all got together.
We got to see people from other disciplines, sit at
tables with other people and then come away with and start
pilots and start discussions and thinking.
It's just - always was very exciting.
So I thank you for coming out today.
It's a full day of a lot of tough thinking and great
discussion.
And you could be doing something else, and I am just
so thrilled to see this number of people here.
I also want to say that we're so pleased to have Dr. Rose
with us.
He's an inspirational leader in higher education, and we
thank you so much for being with us.
I want to talk for a second about the Office of Academic
Transformation.
We were the first university to do that in the system.
We did it before the system did it.
And we are often running in a way that is noticed, very
strongly noticed and used continuously as an example at
the system level of how a university can take a look at
transformation while building on the traditions of the past,
which is why the title of this conference is just so
exciting.
Typically, transformation can mean fast track into the
future without taking a look at what already works and
using that to build the transformation upon.
And that is very clearly what this Office of Academic
Transformation has been about.
I met with the chancellor just yesterday, and the very first
words out of his mouth were how pleased he is that we have
that and how far ahead we are of so many other institutions
in this work.
So I thank all of you for that.
I thank all of you who put together the conference.
This is an enormous amount of work for someone and a lot of
people, and I just want to thank you all for that.
There are, as you well know, 10 major initiatives for us
moving into 2020, and this conference touches four of
them.
The excellence, obviously, in academics, the internship, the
importance of the internship and the internship for
students.
Remember, our goal is that every student will have at
least one internship or experiential experience, and
it is something we want to measure also in a way that is
meaningful so we can understand what a good
internship is.
The leadership development, obviously that we're committed
to here.
This conference touches on that and also innovation and
entrepreneurship.
So it puts together four of the 10 in a way that keeps us
on track with our strategic plan.
So throughout the day, we're going to be discussing
everything from content on cell phones, which is a
session that I'm really interested in because I'm
trying to get students off cell phones, and now we're
going to put them on cell phones.
I want to hear about that one.
But the other thing I really like about the way this
conference is put together today is that we are honoring
and taking advantage of our own faculty research.
There's an issue going on right now that I'm dealing
with with System, and the chancellor and I are very
passionate about this, which is that Towson is more than a
comprehensive institution.
We are not a Research I institution, but nor are we a
solid comprehensive.
We are a hybrid that sits in the middle and uses research
in a very specific way, and it is very important to our work.
So this kind of a conference helps tie us together as we
are able, Tim and I, to put together an argument for why
some things for Towson have to change because we are no
longer clearly one or the other.
And we need to be - we need to be funded and considered to be
what we really are, which is a blend of that, in a healthy
way, putting students first.
So thanks a lot for being here.
I look forward to being with you.
I can't stay all day, but I look forward to being with you
most of the morning.
And again, thanks a lot.
I truly appreciate you.
One of the things I'm discovering as I'm out and
about and even spending four days with the football team,
which was an experience, what is coming out of this is that
Towson is clearly seen nationally on the move.
And it isn't about football alone at all.
It is about many other things that are happening here that -
we're going to hear about some of them today - that are
making a difference on a national level and then
funneling back to Towson in ways that we are getting more
and more applications from better and better qualified
students as time progresses here this last year.
It's significant.
And so we want to ride this in a way that's useful to the
national conversation but way more importantly than that is
useful to these student in our care for these four to six -
hopefully four - years.
So thanks a lot, and I'll be with you and enjoy being with you.
(APPLAUSE)
>>Dr. Timothy Chandler: Good morning to you all.
Welcome to London.
I thought I did a nice job on that for you to help you
experience what it's like.
I hope you've all got the appropriate coat with the
appropriate maker's label inside it, that well-known
London Fog label.
This is going to be a terrific day.
The size of the audience, I think, has surprised our
keynote speaker just a little bit.
He wasn't quite prepared for this kind of welcome, which I
know you're going to give him.
I'm not going to say anything more than this.
You've heard from the president.
You know where we're going.
You know why we think this is important.
We're delighted that you're all here to help us work
through these issues of universal design and the kind
of things that can really help our students be successful.
And by success, I mean achievement.
I don't just mean the glimmer and glitter of success.
I mean the substance of achievement.
So with that said, I'm going to ask Jane to come up here
and get this show on the road.
I want David Rose to have as much time as he possibly can,
and he's very kindly agreed not just to speak to us, but
to speak with us.
And that is a terrific honor and privilege for us.
So, Jane, would you please come up and get this show on the road?
(APPLAUSE)
>> Dr. Jane Neapolitan: There's no step there for grandmas,
so I have to be a little careful about that.
Good morning and welcome.
Yes, this is a fabulous turnout that we have here
today, and I know that you're going to take away so many new
insights about big ideas, about teaching, learning, and
how they can be applied to help all students become successful.
First, I do want to thank some people, the co-chairs of this
conference, the people who really were the architects,
Audrey Cutler and La Tonya Dyer please stand up.
(APPLAUSE)
>> Dr. Jane Neapolitan: Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
>> Dr. Jane Neapolitan: And it could not
have been done without the planning skills of Mary T.
Casterline, who is our event planner for the Provost's office. Mary T.
(APPLAUSE)
>> Dr. Jane Neapolitan: I also would like
to thank the committee.
Would you please stand?
This has been months in the making.
Where are you folks?
Stand up if you were on the planning committee that
includes faculty, chairs, librarians, and technical
folks from OTS.
We also want to thank Jeff Schmidt, who is the associate
vice president, for helping to sponsor today's event.
We couldn't have done it without the cooperation of
OTS.
And also I want to thank David Marino - you're going to see
some of his work, he's doing the video recording right now
- and Tiffany Henly, who did all of the signage through
graphic design.
OK, there. So I hope I covered everyone.
(APPLAUSE)
>> Dr. Jane Neapolitan: I'd like to tell
you a little bit about Dr. David Rose.
It certainly is an honor to have him here today.
He is a developmental neuropsychologist and educator
whose primary focus is on the development of new
technologies for learning.
In 1984, Dr. Rose co-founded CAST, the Center for Applied
Special Technology, a not-for-profit research and
development organization whose mission is to improve
education for all learners through innovative uses of
modern multimedia technology and contemporary research in
the cognitive neurosciences.
That work has grown into the field called universal design
for learning which now influences educational policy
and practice throughout the United States and
internationally.
Dr. Rose also teaches at Harvard's Graduate School of
Education, where he has been on the faculty for almost 30
years.
And last night, over dinner he disclosed that he does have a
waiting list of students to get into his class.
In the policy arena, he was one of the authors of the
recent National Educational Technology Plan, has testified before the U.S.
Senate, and helped to lead the development of the National
Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard.
Dr. Rose is the principal investigator on a number of U.S.
Department of Education and National Science Foundation
grants and is currently the principal investigator of two
national centers created to develop and implement the
National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard.
With the increasing prominence of UDL as a field within
education, Dr. Rose has become a frequent keynote speaker at
national and international conferences and now in
Maryland at Towson University.
He is also the co-author or editor of numerous books,
including "Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age:
Universal Design for Learning," "A Practical Reader
in Universal Design for Learning," "The Universally
Designed Classroom: Accessible Curriculum and Digital
Technologies." I think there's definitely a theme in his
work.
Dr. Rose has also participated in many of CAST technology in
media development projects and has worked as a consultant for
Houghton-Mifflin, Scholastic, Tom Snyder Productions and
EBSCO publishing, among others.
He's also testified before the U.S.
Senate's Appropriation Subcommittee on labor, health
and human services and education and regularly
advises state departments of education on policies related
to the education of students with disabilities and
designing universally-designed educational systems.
Dr. Rose was recently honored at the White House as a,
quote, champion of change - very fitting for today's
conference - for leading education efforts in STEM for
students with disabilities.
With his CAST colleagues, he has won numerous awards
including the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for
innovation in education and academia, Tech Museum of
Innovation Award, LD Access Foundation Innovation Award
and many others.
In 2004, the George Lucas Educational Foundation's
Edutopia magazine named him one of education's daring
dozen.
Dr. Rose holds an BA in psychology from Harvard
College, a Master's in teaching from Reed College and
a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
It is my distinct pleasure to introduce and welcome
Dr. David Rose.
(APPLAUSE)
>>Dr. David Rose: But I'm very delighted to be here.
You may not know it, but Towson is really far ahead of
most universities in the country in its recognition of
universal design for learning as an important part of what
it does.
And so I don't feel like I'm coming here to tell you things
but to share a little bit and hopefully to continue the
learning I gained from working with you.
Liz Bergquist is someone we've worked with for years and
years and years, and she's a much better teacher and
educator than I am.
So I'm kind of intimidated to be here amongst all of you.
I'm sure there are many of you that are better teachers than
I am.
But I did want to take the risk - Jane had suggested I do so.
So - oh, I need - thanks.
I - so I'm not going to do my sort of regular talk for the
most part.
I'm going to do a little intro 'cause I know there's quite a
mix.
Some of you are - know as much about universal design for
learning as I do.
Some of you, I'm sure, have no idea what that is.
So I need to mix a little bit of that up in - at the
beginning.
So I'll do an intro on what universal design for learning
is and what its roots are.
And then I'm going to actually spend the latter half of the
talk talking about my own teaching at the University,
which is threatening 'cause, of course, I have all my - I
have all the faults that you have as a teacher.
But we thought that would be a better thing to do than to
talk abstractly.
So I'm going to talk about my course - about a course I
teach at Harvard and how I teach it.
And some of that may be of interest to you.
OK.
Let me get back to the - I'm going to uncharacteristically
start with Slide 1.
OK.
And can everyone hear me way back in the corners?
Great.
OK.
And I think for the most part, if you don't mind, I'm not
going to stand behind the podium.
OK.
Is it still all right if I'm pacing around?
OK.
All right, fine.
I have just a little bit of Tourette's and a lot of ADHD
myself.
So it's better - we'll all be better off if I can move
around, all right.
So the - I'm going to do two things in this intro part of
the talk - talk about universal design for learning
- where it comes from.
And it has two main sources - advances in the modern
learning sciences, understanding how students
really learn, and secondly, capitalizing on advances in
modern multimedia.
And it's those things together that allow a field like
universal design for learning to emerge.
So I want to start first with some talk about what's been
happening in the learning sciences.
And I think everybody's seen these kinds of images now.
They're just gorgeous images of what our nervous system
really looks like.
And you'll note that what these images now can show,
that we never used to be able to see, is that this is an
image of what is called the connectome, which is now the
way in which neuroscientists talk about the human brain.
A connectome, like the genome, you understand what a genome
is for your biology.
And the connectome is a underlining structure of your
nervous system.
And it's largely, what are the connections between the parts
which is what makes you you, OK, and makes us human.
So what is interesting to neuroscientists is, what is
this connectome like?
What is the way in which you're connected?
And those connection patterns are as unique as your
fingerprints or as anything else you can imagine.
You're not connected internally like anybody else
in this room.
You're all very quite uniquely connected.
And we can now get images of it and look at what your
connectome looks like.
And this is just another slide just so it's, of course,
beautiful images, too.
Is it possible to dim the lights just on cue once in a while?
Is that hard or easy?
No one. OK.
Probably hard if it's - doesn't so - Can people still
- a way - I'm just worried the people in the back can't quite
see the images.
Can you seem them?
OK, you're nodding.
All right. OK. All right.
So you can see how beautiful these images are of what your
brain really looks like.
It's not primarily - the interesting things about your
brain is not primarily the number of neurons.
There's animals that have more neurons than you do.
It is this wonderful, rich way in which the parts are
connected that makes human brains be very smart.
And it's changed our view of what human variability really is.
When I was in college and graduate school and lots of
you, too, we studied variability like this - that
there was a mean for something and a distribution around that
mean and we talked about things like IQ.
And to a neuroscientist, something like IQ is just a
really hard thing to figure out what we could possibly be
talking about 'cause when you look at the connectome, the
nervous system, there's nothing that speaks out as
supporting any notion that there's some kind of IQ thing,
there's some kind of general standardized intelligence in
the human.
So neuroscientists would never talk about things this way.
And so I'm going to use some personal anecdotes to talk
about the way neuroscientists would tend to think about it.
So this is - I'm going to talk about me and my wife.
Ruth, my wife, is the one on the right.
And Ruth and I have different connectomes, just like
everybody here in the room, and there's some parts - that
I'm not going to, I would never talk about in public,
but some parts I'll share with you.
Ruth has perfect pitch.
Now in an audience this size, it's common to have someone
with perfect pitch.
Is anyone here who has perfect pitch?
Yes. Way in the back.
Two over here. Fabulous.
Ask them to sing later.
So Ruth has perfect pitch like both of you, and what that
means is that if you play a note on any instrument or a
car horn or anything Ruth recognizes - oh wow, fabulous.
Thank you.
Ruth recognizes that that's A flat or a G sharp or whatever,
and it's not hard.
She doesn't have to hum to herself or think about it.
It's just the way you recognize the color orange or
something.
All right?
And Ruth's a semi-professional singer, sings all the time,
'cause - 'cause she's good at.
So I'm not like that.
And I have what's euphemistically called
relative pitch, and that means that I can tell that something
is higher or lower, and most of you have relative pitch.
You know when a note is higher than another one, but that's
very different than knowing it's an A, OK, which is what
Ruth knows.
All right?
And we know something now about the neuroscience of
perfect pitch.
In fact, there's been some, some of you may have heard
there's a lot of - a lot of stuff came out this week.
So here's the area of cortex where people recognize pitch.
These small areas here.
Auditory cortex.
And we now know that there's something different about
Ruth's auditory cortex, not everything in her brain, all
of these parts are going to be quite, as it turns out quite
different, but her neurology is different than mine in that
she's hyper-connected, and she has an asymmetric plantum temporale. OK.
And I'm just going to explain what that means.
It means when you look at her auditory cortex there, she has
more connections.
It's rich and thick with connections.
More than I have, OK.
That's what hyper-connected means.
Over, hyper, more than usual.
And asymmetric just means that hers is different on one side
than the other.
You and I tend to be symmetric.
Our auditory cortex look about the same on both sides.
And in Ruth's, that's not the case.
So those are two things that you can actually look at her
brain and go, wow, that would be a good brain for perfect
pitch.
And in fact, this slide just came out a week ago showing,
literally, that's - with the connections, when you have
perfect pitch and that's what it looks like for me.
It was kind of a little light - light connections and
really, really heavy connections for Ruth.
So that's what makes it possible, and for you two in
the back, that's what makes it possible for you to have
perfect pitch.
Why is Ruth's plantum temporale like that? OK.
And I just want to say it quickly, this is something
that would be worth spending a whole lecture on, just that
there's, of course, a notion that she must've been born
that way.
And in fact, there's a genetic component to perfect pitch.
There are syndromes - children that I've worked with who in
fact - Williams syndrome is an example.
Williams syndrome children have a greatly elevated
perfect pitch.
That is, you'll see perfect pitch much more in them than
you do in people who don't have Williams syndrome.
And in many ways, that's a gift they have that you don't
have and I don't have.
OK.
So they have perfect pitch.
And there's other ones like that, and it's genetic
syndrome much like Down syndrome.
So it's clearly something where genetics plays an
important part.
But it's also true that perfect pitch is different in
different cultures.
The amount of perfect pitch you see is different by
culture.
So cultures where language uses pitch as part of its
meaning, you'll find many more people with perfect pitch.
Why is that?
Because the culture shapes the nervous system to be a nervous
system that's good that has the right connectome for this
culture.
And if pitch is an important part of the culture, then your
brain will adapt to that.
So it's not just genes, and in fact, it's not just the
environment but it's that wonderful combination that
you've heard about many times that we grow up in this
wonderful dance between a genetic propensity and a
cultural propensity that shapes who we are.
Both of them are equally important.
So to get perfect pitch you need a bit of genetics and you
need a bit of culture. OK.
And so Ruth had both.
Her family played a lot of music and liked it and so on. OK.
In my work, I like to - our work began, at least, around
students with disabilities.
It's a bit more broad than that now, but - so perfect
pitch is a great way to understand what disability
really is.
And so I want to contrast the difference between Ruth's view
of perfect pitch and my view.
So for Ruth, who grew up with this wonderful capacity she
sees me as a horribly disabled person. OK.
And worse, because of that genetic component, I passed on
my disability to our children.
So Ruth's view of happy marriage, this was before we
got married, was out of the movie "The Sound of Music,"
where you would have six or eight children, and you'd be
in a Volkswagen bus - this was back at Reith (ph) -
and we'd be singing in 8-part harmony.
And that was her view of what families did.
So it was a bitter, bitter, near divorce, when she learned
that I would never have that ability and, of course, worse
when our children showed up.
So we don't sing in 4-part harmony or 8-part harmony or
anything like that.
So to Ruth, she has a whole disabled family, and it's
quite striking.
But in fact, what I want to be talking about is that context
is what actually defines disability.
And so in some contexts, like her singing groups, she sings
in Boston Symphony Hall, she is gifted, if anything.
She's terrific.
But there are contexts in which she looks to be the
person that has the disability.
And I'm going to describe one, which is, we go to a church
together in Lexington, Massachusetts.
In our church, we don't have too many people with perfect pitch.
OK. So I want to describe what happens.
So I go to - we sit next to each other in church, and so
when we start to play a hymn, what happens?
For me, it's my only chance all week to sing, and I think
that's what you should do.
So I sing loud and very well, frankly.
But not actually perfectly on pitch, that you understand.
I had that little area there. OK.
And - but I'm oblivious to it.
I'm, you know, and you're oblivious.
You don't even know you're not on pitch.
So - so what does Ruth do? OK.
She sees the note in the hymn book.
Should she sing the note or should she express her
affiliation with me and sing what I'm singing? OK.
So who knows.
But anyway, the people around her, they're not really - when
she sees an A in the hymn book, they're not singing A
really either, OK.
So this is getting complicated.
But the worst thing is that we go to this really, really old
church, and the organ was built in 1880 or something.
And as some of you know, organs drift, OK.
So it is no longer playing A when they press the A key.
It is playing, all the way, of full steps, playing a G.
So - so here's Ruth.
She sees the note in the hymn book she knows exactly what to do - 440.
Just beat your tonsils 440.
But the people around her aren't singing 440.
The organ isn't even playing 440.
So you know what?
Ruth is very disabled as a singer in our church because
in our church relative pitch works fabulously.
We don't care too much, and the organ's not right.
And nobody cares and everybody enjoys it.
So Ruth, and all people with perfect pitch, will often call
it their disability or their nuisance or something like that.
Is that familiar to you? Yeah.
They're saying yes 'cause there are times when it's just
awful to have perfect pitch 'cause the world is not, you
know, people change the keys of great songs.
They play it too slow, it's not right, all sorts of things
make trouble. OK.
So who has a disability is actually completely determined
by the interaction between the individual and their
propensities and the demands of the environment.
And we can take the same person and one environment,
and make them look gifted, and in one environment, make them
look disabled.
OK.
That's all I want to say 'cause we won't expand that a
whole lot here.
But the reason that I think you folks have asked me to
come here is because you're in the business of changing the
environment.
You're not taking people's genes, but environment does
determine who looks disabled.
And you are environmentalists.
Teachers are environmentalists. OK.
New findings also came out in November which are quite
important, and they looked at children with autism.
And what they found was in two separate reports in the most
prestigious neuroscience journals, that kids with
autism, when you look with good techniques of the kind I
was showing you, they don't look like they have a hole in
their head or there's damage or there's malformations or
things like that.
What they are is hyper-connected.
All over sensory cortex.
They are hyper-connected, like Ruth is.
And that's the difference.
So they take the world in differently, but it doesn't
look anywhere near like we used to think, that there's
something damaged about them.
They have a different connectome, quite strikingly different.
And by the way, people with autism have a much highly -
higher rate of perfect pitch. OK.
So that works. The articles didn't know that.
So we now see individual differences and quite
differently than we used to.
We used to have this kind of a medical model of - these are
broken, and these are OK and so on.
But the more you look at the neuroscience, it's very hard
to think of it that way.
We have nervous systems that are quite different, one from
the other.
And they respond to environments quite
differently, one from the other.
Kids with autism are excellent in some environments and very
poor and other environments.
Environments are key to determining whether they look
disabled or not.
And I think I want to do this fast 'cause I'm falling just a little bit behind.
But, so if you take something like reading, we used to think
of reading as much more simple than now, the neuroscientist would.
Like, even like, they can't imagine what you mean by IQ.
But a neuroscientist would have trouble even knowing what
you mean by reading capacity 'cause there's so many
components of reading.
We used to think it had sort of two major components, now
we know, oh my God, most of the brain gets involved in reading.
Used to be thought this is the gray areas of where it is, but
now sharper techniques have allowed us to see that in
fact, when you're reading about characters, you use a
different part of the brain than when you're reading about
their goals.
Literally, your brain is lighting up and simulating
what you're reading so that if you're going to read a novel,
and there's a little more - you can get even richer, and
they literally can track and see when you're - when the
novel is describing an environment, you'll have a
very different part - an object, an object I should say.
This part of your brain will light up and say, OK.
I can recognize that object.
So you are running a simulation inside your head.
So that means kids have - kids and students your age, have
very different simulators when they read.
It depends on their background experience, what they've
already learned and so on.
What kind of simulations they can run.
So these are just some of the things that have added on to
our view of reading as being a lot more interesting and complex.
And we thought, it's not just decoding and comprehension,
it's richer, richer set of things.
And kids with autism are typically precocious decoders.
They're likely to be the best kid in your classroom at decoding.
Which people used to think that's reading.
But they're poor at comprehension 'cause it's -
they're having trouble with some of these things, not with decoding.
Kids with dyslexia learning disabilities are just the opposite.
They also have reading problems.
But they don't have comprehension problems, they
have decoding problems.
As a culture and in our schools, we've tended to put
them all in the same classroom, kids who don't read well.
And we've said put them in the remedial reading class.
But the remedial reading class is crazy for an autistic kid.
They then get stuck into decoding school which is not a
problem for them.
They shouldn't be there, and etc. So we - by not being
careful, by not understanding the nature of individual
differences, we don't teach well. OK.
Articles like - I'm not going to bother to say this.
But there's articles now that are coming out rapidly to say, OK.
It's crazy to think about reading as having one component.
And individual differences are giant across a whole lot of components.
Variation is what we have.
How do we optimize student outcomes in a place like here?
We need to understand the key sources of variability.
Well what does, then, these kind of things I've been
talking about.
That they help us understand who the learners are and how
variable they are right in our classrooms.
And secondly, we need to understand the key sources of
flexibility in learning designs.
In my case, I'm going to talk about technologies and stuff.
What are the sources of individual differences?
What are the sources of flexibility that we can use? OK.
And I'm going to divide up the connectome into three large
areas of student variation that are critical when you're
thinking about your students.
And Universal Design for Learning is based on these
three main networks.
The back half of your brain is a recognition network.
It allows you to recognize things like pitch or things
like a car or the sounds of the symphony or words and so on.
Back part of your brain recognizes things in the
environment.
That's what you do there.
So when you home, if you heard, if someone in your
family has a stroke, you can quickly find out which section
it is by some finding out are they are having recognition problems?
Are they having trouble understanding, comprehending their world?
Second part of the brain is the whole front half which is
not about taking information in and understanding it.
It's about projecting into the environment, taking action on
the environment.
And I'm going to call these the strategic networks.
They allow you to plan and act effectively on the world.
That's part of what we think of as intelligence.
So as we'll see, like, executive functions are here,
motor skills are here and movements are here.
Beautiful kind of very simple hierarchical control to allow
you to move effectively, to walk, talk, jump, play
basketball, so on.
A third area of the brain where - a third part of the
connectome, a network is affective.
And it's right at the center of the brain which I think is
important for you to - metaphorically, the fact that
the affective networks are at the middle of the brain
signifies how important they are.
They're right - they are the hardest to damage, right in
the middle 'cause it's what actually, more than anything, makes you, you.
Because these are the areas of the brain that set priorities,
that say this thing is important and that thing's not important.
This is something frightening.
That's something exciting.
That's something novel.
That's something to be avoided.
All of that is what these middle parts of your brain does.
So everything that's coming in and every time you're going to
take an action, you evaluate whether it's good for you,
whether it's bad for you.
All of those things. That happens here.
So just to review, if I damage here, you'll have trouble recognizing.
Like, you might lose vision or you can't recognize objects or
something like that.
Front part of your brain, different.
You aren't able to take skillful action on the world.
You may be paralyzed or you just may be not very
organized.
And thirdly, here.
If we damage here, what happens is you don't have good
priorities.
For example, we can make a damage in one small area and
you're just hyperphagic.
You just have to eat all the time.
And just a quarter of an inch away we can make damage, and
you never want to eat.
OK, 'cause food - the importance of food is what's here. OK.
Some of you, I know are thinking, wow, how do I get to
that little area?
But I just want to be clear, if you don't think food's
important, you will die.
That's what happens to the rats when they do it.
Yeah, they just die. OK.
So you don't want to - OK.
So I've done this so I'm going to kind of skip now, but to
say this is what the back half of your brain - it's all very
kind of systematically identifies information in the environment.
Front part allows you to plan and execute actions on the environment.
And the middle part allows you to evaluate and set priorities
for attention, action.
And Universal Design for Learning takes into account
that people are different in all of these.
Pitch was just an example to get us started.
And these are too small for you to see, but Liz Berquist
will show you how to get to the guidelines which will say
well, how do you handle individual differences here
when you are teaching?
What would you do?
And how do you handle individual differences of strategic action?
And how do you handle individual differences of engagement? OK.
And I'm just going to show how we develop the guidelines.
We would take something like - here's visual cortex - basic,
just basic sensation, perception, visual.
And we can look at the way the nervous system does that.
And you find out, oh wow, color is separately analyzed
from shape or distance or objects are - have their own area.
There are specialized networks for doing, for recognizing things.
Color is recognized in a different place, literally, than shape.
It's fabulous.
It's like a - I know it's a university.
It's like a - so this will seem like an odd concept - a
well-functioning committee. OK.
Where everybody does their part and they rarely fight. OK.
But it's a distributed system that says, OK, you take care
of color, I'll take care of shape.
You take care of the distance, I got this - I still got
shape.
OK.
But each of these are areas of great individual difference.
They are separately different so that someone may be very -
have a lot of cortex devoted to face and object recognition
and not much to color.
And you know that.
You can have someone who is colorblind but is fine about
recognizing people and things like that. OK.
And the example I gave earlier is this one.
So you can have people who recognize pitch really well
and people who don't.
If you move a little bit farther forward, objects and symbols.
That is you take all of these little blips of light and you
start to identify real objects.
And the objects, it turns out, were specialized in even
places in your brain.
So you recognize houses in a different place than you
recognize spaces.
It's like a garden that has, you know, tomatoes, and
lettuce, and all of the things that go into a salad actually
have their own rows.
And in the nervous system, houses are recognized in a
different place than faces and words in yet another different place.
It all goes together, but they're actually quite
different.
And all very different, meaning by individuals.
That some people have a large area for word recognition and
a small area for recognizing objects.
And it can literally be some people recognize tools and
houses much better than they recognize faces, for example.
So it's rich, rich, wonderful stuff.
A website I love, a guy is face blind.
He's actually a very strong neuroscience thinking guy.
And he tells all about what it's like to grow up, but in a
world in which you're face blind.
And that's his disability.
Not - he doesn't have trouble with color, shape, size, any
of those things.
He sees everything fine.
He can see what you're wearing and describe everything.
All of that works fine.
But you have a special area that allows you to recognize
faces, because it's so important.
And that's the part that he can't do.
And he grew up - it's a wonderful view of media.
He grew up his whole life, didn't know he was face blind
until he was 22 years of age.
And you're thinking well, how could you do that?
But he recognized people by their clothes, by the way they
walked, by their voices, all sorts of things.
And he never knew he was face blind until he was watching a
soap opera with a friend, and he said to the friend I wish
they would stop just showing the faces.
How are we supposed to tell who the people are?
The friend went, what?
And he said well, they're just showing their faces.
I can't tell who's talking.
And the friend of course thinks he's a lunatic.
Anyway so in the conversation - 'cause soap operas are
perfect 'cause they want to get emotion and stuff so they
glue right on the face.
They're just all close-ups.
And so he can't - isn't that interesting?
So he never knew he was face blind until faces were the
only thing that you can look at. OK.
And lastly I'll move a little bit more forward.
Perceiving something, recognizing the objects and
symbols, letters or objects and so on - and up in the
front, it's making sense of that.
Understanding what that object is, what it means to you and
so on and so forth.
And I think, just because I want to get to my own
teaching, I'm going to skip this video.
But it's a - I think many of you have seen "Antiques
Roadshow." And they are looking at this object and
these - I play it 'cause these two women look - and I'm going
to use the bad word - they look retarded 'cause they're
like looking at this object. They have no idea.
They found it in their attic and they brought it to this expert.
And they put it on there, and they're going I don't know
what it is.
And he's Mr. Expert.
They all have good eyes, but what he has is enormous
background experience.
And then he goes through that - if you've seen "Antiques
Roadshow," you've seen them do this.
Where they just - you just can't believe they know that much about your object.
So anyway he tells them it's an Eskimo hunting helmet, and
he tells them which island it's from and all of this stuff.
And it's worth $75,000 and all of that.
So it's - we sometimes mistake seeing for the - this
enormously rich thing we do by bringing our background
knowledge to the floor as we bring things in sensory. OK.
So here's the guidelines a little bit bigger.
I'm still straining your eyesight, and it's not
important that you understand them.
But we will talk about each of those three areas.
We need to provide options for perception.
We got to make sure everybody can perceive what we're
teaching.
Secondly we need options for language or mathematical
expressions or symbols.
If we are going to use symbols, reading, language, et
cetera in our classrooms, then we need options, because
people are going to be really different in their use of
symbols and language, for example - including
specialized vocabularies and specialized math symbols and
things like that.
We need to make sure everybody can - that everybody has an
option that will work for them.
And lastly we need options for comprehension.
That we - we need to assume that kids are coming in - I
say kids, in your case, adult students - come in with very
different backgrounds.
And they're not going to - it's like the Eskimo helmet.
Some are going to know exactly what that is, and many of them
have no idea what it is.
And there are things we can do and must do to equalize their ability to see. OK.
And I think I can skip these.
This is how we do it.
We look and we say what's the variation in the brain, and
what do we need to do for options?
And I'm going to talk a little bit about options.
We do the same - I've have been talking about the back
part of the nervous system, we do the same for the front.
When we ask kids to express themselves, what are the
things we need to provide for options?
And there's a set of - here's options that you can provide.
And lastly we look at affect, and we say what are the
options you need to do to make sure everybody is engaged?
I should say, just to take back to Autism for a second,
the very things that engage someone who is on the Autism
Spectrum - Aspergers or just even that way a little bit
like my wife Ruth - the very things that engage them are
the things that are off-putting and boring and
awful for a student with ADHD.
And converse, the very thing you do to excite and engage a
person with ADHD is off-putting and often
frightening to a person on the Autism Spectrum.
These are wonderfully rich, varied things, but it isn't
like - sometimes you think there ought to be something I
could do that would make this interesting to everybody.
And the answer is no, you can't do that.
The only way to do it is to provide options, provide alternatives. OK.
Just watching my time here.
I think I'll skip this.
The only - no, I'm going to nail this one, though, so I'm
going to go a little bit briefer on something else.
But this is a - I've used syndromes a little bit to give
you some touchstones for this, but Capgras is my favorite
syndrome of all.
People with Capgras syndrome arrive at a psychiatrist's
office and complain that their loved one has been taken over
by an alien.
And it's really a very striking phenomenon.
Psychiatrists used to go, then, into deep, deep
psychoanalytic stuff, like something really bad wrong here.
And now we know it's just a neurological thing that happens.
So anyway, if you got the syndrome, the person comes
because they described their loved one is not really their
loved one now.
It's been taken over.
It could be machines in their head.
It could be Martians have done it.
Somebody has taken over their loved one.
It's no longer their loved one.
And you know what's happening?
It's just fabulous - shows how the nervous system works
better than any other syndrome.
I've talked about these three broad systems.
OK.
So one of them is working perfectly because they always
describe it looks exactly like her.
Doctor, when you see her, you're going to think it's her
because it looks like her.
So the recognition systems work perfectly, nothing wrong with them.
And strategically, the front part of the - is working fine.
They know what to do, even.
They know how to serve a meal to their spouse.
They know everything what to do.
What's wrong is the connection with that affective system.
And what's happened is that the visual system has been
disconnected from that affective system.
And you think well, why would that do that?
Well, what happens that you don't know - and it's why it's
important to know about it for your students - is that every
second, you are evaluating.
Your nervous system is evaluating how you feel about
everything in this room, everything when you're
teaching, everything that the people next to them,
everything.
Your nervous system is evaluating that.
It wants to know, is this good for me?
Is this bad for me?
Should I be paying attention to that?
Should I be paying attention to this?
All of that evaluation is happening all of the time.
You can't stop it.
Well, what happens in Capgras is that when you see your
loved one, you recognize your loved one - I'm going to say
she, in my case - in two ways.
Recognize their size and shape and all of that stuff, but you
also recognize how you feel about them.
And what happens in Capgras is that's cut off.
And so the person says wow, it looks like my wife, but it
doesn't feel like my wife.
And why I want to tell you this syndrome is because it
shows how the nervous system values that valuation more
than anything, because it could be - you just went oh,
it looks like my wife, so it must be my wife, even though I
don't feel - it doesn't feel right.
But no, the nervous system says no.
The feelings are the critical thing.
And it says - your nervous system essentially makes up a
whole story to try to explain why, because it believes, if
it doesn't feel like your wife, it's not your wife.
So it overcomes the visual system, overcomes all of that
stuff to say it's an imposter.
It's called the imposter syndrome.
She's an imposter because it doesn't feel right.
So this is powerful stuff.
And as teachers, we are always dealing, every instant, with
kids' affect, their evaluation of what is going on.
How important is this compared to other things their nervous
system would be - like to be doing?
And this is a study that one of my students did that was fabulous.
She just looked at kids who had reading disabilities.
She looked at them affectively, measured their
physiological arousal levels in a variety of ways.
And what she found was that just getting ready to read,
knowing you're about to read, put them into a high state of anxiety.
So you need to know that some of your students are not in
the same affective state.
They walk into your classroom.
They've had a bad history.
Things have gone poor for them in school before.
They don't read well.
Their nervous systems - and, literally, she had no overlap
between - regular achieving kids would be this anxious.
Everybody was doing the same test.
The kids who were poor readers had a high - there were no
overlap, completely different population.
They're sitting there being anxious.
So some of your students are in your classes, when they're
not bored, as they are in mine, where they are divided
up by who's anxious and who's not.
Some people have had histories that make them find your
environment potentially dangerous.
And they don't even know that.
They can't even tell you that, but if we measured them
physiologically, we would say wow, that person's anxious in this classroom.
So design is really critical. OK.
And we take advantage of modern technologies, new
media, because - it's not the only thing to do.
I'm going to talk about things that I do that have nothing to
do with new media.
But new media are much more flexible than traditional
things like print and blackboards and even slides
that they provide a foundation for flexibility.
They can take the content - I'm separating out content
from the display device.
So here's a book, there's the content of the book and
there's the display device.
They are wedded together.
So it's fixed.
For everybody gets the same thing.
In a digital world, we can have the content is separate
from the display device.
Content can be in a hard drive and in your Toyota Prius' dashboard.
Content can be any - phones, all of that.
In fact, yeah, the president was talking about going to the
- I'm with her.
I don't know why.
I'm worried about the cell phones.
But anyway, so we can have content on a wide array of
display devices now, and we can display the same content
in multiple ways.
So we can take that same content which is stored
digitally, and we can make it look different visually.
And we can automatically - Google now translates into 42
languages automatically.
So you can take the same content and say do it that
way, oh no I like it better color, oh I like it in my language.
We can also go across senses.
So we can take that same thing, display it as visual
text, but we can also put it out automatically as touchable Braille.
There's refreshable Braille devices, put your finger on
it, you feel the letters.
And, of course, you know that we can have all text read
itself aloud now.
It's very common - used to be a very specialized thing, but
now everything reads itself aloud.
And you can even take that text - that same text, and put
it out as ASL.
So there's enormous capability to take the same content which
in print comes one-size-fits-all, in a
digital world says how do one want it?
Do you want it to talk? Do you want it big?
Do you want it small? You want it red?
You want it in ASL? How do you want it? Fabulous.
So that's what we're trying to take advantage of.
And just to close up the perfect pitch story, I'm going
to play one video from "Glee." So this will be a set up for that.
So "Glee" is a popular show, and I didn't know anything
about it until someone told me that I should watch "Glee"
because the producer really understands individual differences.
So in the, "Glee's," website you can go and do a karaoke
thing where you go and you sing.
But "Glee" is smart about technology and what's built
into the website - it has a button that says do you want
pitch correction?
It's fabulous.
So you go in there, and you're not on pitch.
I'm telling you, you're not on pitch.
And you know that rock star's do this all the time.
They have pitch correction, you know, that's why they
don't sound so good when they're live and that's why
they et cetera, et cetera.
So anyway you can go to the "Glee" website, sing to your
heart's content with great emotion and great feeling like
you know you can and then just press the button to say get me on pitch.
And then you can play it to your nasty wife, Ruth, and say
how does this sound?
OK, it's fabulous. OK.
So technologies are fabulous at providing very targeted
kinds of supports that we can sing to our best.
And I just - should I do this or not?
What you think?
I just want to show how powerful this can be for
teaching to have - this is my favorite - for understanding
Bach.
Oh where is that little button?
OK. So this is - what we talk about is multiple representations.
Make sure you provide multiple options when you teach.
And so here's Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." I'm
going to play a couple of snippets from it, but in a
multiple representation, which we can do digitally, but we couldn't do before.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TOCCATA AND FUGUE IN D MINOR")
>>Dr. David Rose: That is not coming through the mic, is it?
>>Audience: No.
>>Dr. David Rose: Oh.
Oh I know what's coming.
Could you put the - let me turn it down.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TOCCATA AND FUGUE IN D MINOR")
Watch this theme.
It's hard to hear it, but easy to see it.
You have to trust me, it gets better.
The piece gets more complicated and what this
wonderful multiple representation does is it
helps you understand the piece for the first time as - an
there's a rich thing - I sometimes spend a half hour
just doing this because you can really start to understand
what a fugue is and how it works and everything because
you have a multiple representation - both auditory
and visual.
We can do this with technologies.
We can do all sorts of things like this.
So in this world - let me go back to my - we tend to
reverse - tend to talk about reversing things.
When schools don't use multiple representations -
don't use the power of technologies, then we have
more kids - going back, remember to Ruth and all that
- we have more kids with disabilities.
We have more kids that can't learn - more students at your
age just as well as young kids.
And tests are the same thing.
When tests of disabilities - when they aren't
well-designed, aren't universally designed, then a
lot of people turn out to have disabilities.
So what we're trying to do in universal design for learning
is provide options.
So we have fewer people disabilities, more people
succeeding, and mostly more people succeeding at very high levels.
So now as promised, I want to talk about my course.
So these are just again, I think there are people in this
room that are much better teachers than I am.
I'm not claiming anything about being a great teacher.
But I just want to share some things I do and you can
criticize them and or think about them.
So I want to multiple representations everywhere.
I want lots of ways that students can do things.
And I'm going to skip the course website because the
Harvard - Harvard has its own website thing and it's terrible.
(LAUGHTER)
>>Dr. David Rose: So we skip it and we use a Ning in the class.
A Ning is just a social media thing.
Don't worry about whether you would use Ning or not, but I
just want to give a sense of what does it look like when
you richify by the media so that it has the - it has
people sending me messages.
So this is our main website that students go.
And you can see there's a, you know, a stream down the left
there of everybody's comments and whatever's going on -
people are writing or sending stuff.
There's things like - I can see all the members, which I
like, quickly.
Here's all the members of my class.
I mean there's many, many pages of those, but I can see them.
But people contribute photos - and of things that were
important to them in some way in the course or they've added
to the course.
They contribute videos.
You'll see that a theme that I'm going to try to develop
here is that I'm actually fairly lazy and I want things
that students can do a lot of the work.
And you've heard those things about - if the students aren't
working harder than you are, you're not doing it right.
And so I'm in, sort of, that thing.
So a lot of student contribution is happening.
There's forum - and why is a forum important?
You probably are like me, that you thought well, that's why
we have small group sessions - sections, we call them at Harvard -
and - but if you're like me, you know that there are some
students who have never said a word in your section - even if
there are 12 students.
One of them is a person we've hired at CAST.
I never heard her, I didn't know who she was because she
was shy - didn't talk in class.
And now I've learned there's a lot of people like that and a
lot of people for whom English isn't their first language -
all sorts of reasons they don't talk in class.
So it's - so the oral forum is not working for them.
So here's just an alternative that you can get on and
there's a forum where you can get on and talk and I find a
different set of people do well in this medium.
So some people are talkers and they're great in sections and
even in the big lectures and other people are - dominate
the forums.
It's just amazing the different sets of people.
There's some overlap, but some people are just like
fabulously inventive and write and add images and videos and
do everything and never say a word in either class or section.
So providing alternatives, ways in which they can show
off - show what they know is really key.
And I just want to give you a sense of how does my syllabus look.
One of the things I try to really do is say, what's the
goal for this week?
What are we doing in lecture?
What are we going to do in a lab?
Here's the text you're going to read.
And what are we going to do in multimedia that's different than a text?
You can read text, but you can also have other ways to learn
and there's choices in all of these things.
Students have a ton of choice about how to get the information.
And yeah, I think I'm going to go out of order just 'cause
I'm running a little bit late and I want to show you - what
is - I have moved away rather dramatically just over the
last couple of years from being a lecture-dominated
class to being an activity dominated class, and I have to
say it was scary to do it.
And I know that some of you have classes with hundreds and
hundreds, and I - but I had classes with 90 - was sort of my size.
And I knew it wasn't good teaching though.
And again, you know, stuff like the flipped classroom -
well, if I just videotaped it and just - they could play at
home and do it at their leisure.
So why do we have classes together?
What should we do in class became important to me.
So it also elevated my sense of, we wanted to do things
that were more authentic, wanted to do projects.
I didn't want to multiple-choice tests and
things like that.
And so for final projects though, I wanted to show that
the students - the differences among the students were an
important value to the class.
So here is a project called Museum Link and it has four
people are on a team - most of them - they're teams of four
or five students.
But more importantly, when we form teams - and we did it
quite intentionally, we described what the outputs
were going to need to be at the end of the semester.
And they were highly differentiated outputs.
So I'm going to tell you what they had to do.
Students had to make a prototype of a lesson - and
usually a kind of a digital kind of thing.
They didn't have to, but it was kind of a little bit of a
press to do that.
They had to make a prototype, so that's one set of skills.
They also had to provide a real academic research paper
to justify decisions they made about their prototype and they
had to make a marketing thing.
I called it a multimedia brochure but I said, you're
going to have to sell your curricular project you make to
teachers - real teachers, so you have to make a presentation.
Use whatever media you want, but it's got to be a good presentation.
If you don't sell it, they won't use it.
And fourthly, an implementation plan.
Patti Ralabate (ph) came and helped the class think about,
how do you work with schools so that you can implement
things at scale?
Essentially those four things.
If you'll notice, they're really different.
Someone who can make a multimedia prototype is kind of techie.
Someone who knows schools enough to know what you'd need
to do to implement in a real school is very different.
They may have no technical background, but they know schools.
I have a lot of students who do not know schools.
Seems weird to be in an Ed School, but they come 'cause
they're interested in technology or neuroscience.
They don't really know schools.
And some people are marketers and they know how to do that and so on.
And some people are researchers.
So every team had a differentiated set of goals -
that they knew they would need a distributed expertise, just
like that nervous system I showed - colors separate form
shape - they needed differentiation.
And we made teams.
And I have to say, usually on teams, my experience has been
that - and I'm sure you've had this experience - where they
don't work very well because actually, there's one person
who's really good at it and the others just kind of go,
OK, whatever, and it gets really awful.
So in this case, they had to form teams that could handle
four very different things - which is by the way like real life.
That's the way all our projects at CAST are.
And you know what?
That helped because there were some people, like who are
dyslexic in the class for whom the research paper would've
just been horrible, but they were fabulous at multimedia
design and they starred in that.
And they all had to read each other's stuff and do it and
work together to make it a unified project, but they
could bring different strengths.
And that worked out very well.
And I just - let me think which one I'll show you.
When you take the power of each individual like that and
form them into teams around it, then you get things like this.
So this is a final project and it's gorgeous - and they do each of those things.
There's a research paper here, and that's the only boring part.
But there's a research white paper - and they'll - so that
link goes out - I don't want to show it.
It's just a traditional paper, OK.
But then they connect it to universal design for learning.
They'll show how the features of their project - these are
all slideshows, align with you DL and stuff like that, and a
research bibliography.
So this is a beautiful kind of - lets us show you our
research behind what we did.
And then they say, here's the features of our prototype.
You know, beautifully designed because they have a person
that cares about how are they going to do it.
And here's where they put their educators make learning happen, not products.
Great sense of - and here's where they take - here's what
Patti (ph) taught us.
So they said, implementation has phases and here's what
you're going - and here's how you would do this, here's how
you would implement our program.
All of this, you know, done in this beautiful way because we
took advantage of the different strengths among students.
And there's much more.
I've done a terrible job of showing that 'cause it's
actually quite amazingly rich.
So I just want to say - why am I not - why am I not advancing?
Oh, there.
I'm just counting - I'm just counting my time here.
One more thing I want to do.
I'll just slide over this.
I'll give the slides - Liz or something.
People can look at them later if they want.
I looked at lectures. What do we do in lectures?
And I'll take each of those guidelines and say, OK, what
are we going to do to make sure everybody can perceive
the information in the lecture?
And there's things that are automatic that you do, but
it's worth knowing that you can - if you have a mic like
we have here, you can adjust the audibility of it.
People can have those little hearing aids and stuff.
We have translators like you have here if we have someone
who's deaf, and every lecture is videotaped.
And that's done for a lot of reasons, but for some
students, it goes too fast with you hear a live lecture,
so they can repeat, hear it again.
We can adjust images, etc. And there's picture - picture
description embedded.
Those are kind of uninteresting.
I give out slides ahead of time because students with
language problems, it goes too fast when you're lecturing.
They can't follow it either because they have English not
as their first language or because they have language
processing problems.
So the prerelease of your slides to say here, here's
what I'm going to be talking about, gives them a chance to
look up words, to get ready for the lecture, and to take
notes and all of that.
I use lots of, as you can see in my talk, I use lots of
images on slides so they're an alternative to text and again,
the videos entirely captures the lectures so that they can
go through, but go through it much more slowly, go back and
repeat, all of those things.
So videotaping lectures is a valuable thing.
Then there's all sorts of other things I do with slides.
But I have to show you - just the one thing I wanted to show
because it's something that - and this is for the - Tim, the
provost - you know how you pay people to take notes for
people with disabilities in big lectures?
OK, that's a colossal waste of money.
So I want to save you some money, Tim.
I think you're - so here's what I do, and it works better
- works better and cheaper.
I actually require that every student take notes at least
once during the semester for their whole class.
They have to take notes.
But I ask - I have 90 students and only 14 classes, so I'll
have five people take notes on any given day.
Now you say OK, well, that sounds cheaper, but is it better?
Maybe it's not as good as a professional note taker - I
guarantee it's better.
I've done the note taking with professionals, I guarantee
this is better.
But what happens is because the individuals are so
different in your class that they take very different notes.
And those multiple views of what happened in your lecture
are what really works.
So I'm just going to do this - and it's OK if I keep going
another five minutes?
So here's somebody's notes.
This is what your English teacher thought notes would
look like.
Beautiful outline, bullet points and everything like this, OK.
And you almost have some students who do this, OK, not too many.
Anyway so - so that's one thing.
Sorry about the - I didn't turn off my e-mail.
So here's the same lecture, a different student.
Oh, they don't like all that word so much, you know, more
images, starts to capture things and brings in images
that I didn't even use in my lecture to make my lecture
better.
And it's like, you know, you could've done this and I knew
this and whatever, fabulous.
And this student I happen to know by talking with her, has
a learning disability.
And her - she captured the whole lecture - I'm not going
to show it to you.
She captured the whole lecture in three diagrams.
I spent two hours giving the lecture - three diagrams.
Beautiful, just a beautiful representation, an alternate
one that worked for her and for some other students.
This guy realized that the whole thing was done, you
know, on the web, so he included all kinds of links
throughout my talk.
He - you know, put in - oh he could've said this, there's
more stuff out there, and he linked it and his is full of links.
He said it's in a network, use it, which I started doing
better after he taught me.
Miranda, kind of a little bit different student as well.
She - 'cause I give out the slides, she took the slides
and she took her notes directly on the slides.
I never thought of it.
So she has her slides on and she just - so I'm just going
through the pictures just like I am with you and she's
writing on it.
This is not the talk I gave to you, but it's something like it.
And so all of those are her notes on the slides, which I
thought was pretty smart.
And this is one of my favorites.
Remember this is all the same class.
So this is Kim and she wrote it as an epistle to the class
- dear classmates, here's what happened.
So very much like, this is filtering through me, OK?
And I'm going to tell you, so she writes a letter like from
vacation telling what happened in the class.
And she says, you know, and, you know, I mean literally
says, you know, he got kind of boring in the middle but, you
know, it kind of picked up, you know, toward the end.
This guy - this guy I thought was paying no attention in
class because he had his cell - this the cell phone thing.
He's got his cell phone, it keeps clicking and driving me
crazy 'cause I don't know who's taking notes.
Anyway, so he's clicking away and I'm like aggravated, but
it turns out he's using his cell phone to take notes with.
He's recording everything I'm saying so doesn't have to
write it and he just writes it up later.
But I love the way starts, hi, my name is Chris - is again
very personal - in case you missed it or simply want to
relive it, here's what happened on Tuesday night.
His is kind of a letter, but it's all about him.
I'm wearing a blue shirt, it's from the state of New Jersey,
Department of Central Services.
I stole it from my mom's - OK, this is too much information
you're thinking, but then Dr. Rose enters the class at 7:02.
And he, you know - but he takes pictures of the
blackboard or whatever.
Anyway, so these are - this variety is what's true of your students.
They're just - and it's just amazing that you think of your
students as all take - sitting at the same lecture.
If you do this, you realize they were not sitting at the
same lecture.
Individual differences are so strong in the last one 'cause
this is the one that really helped me most.
This guy must have spent hours and hours doing this.
By the way, remember they only do it once a semester, so they
get into it.
His class notes are entirely done with New Yorker cartoons.
He finds a New Yorker cartoon to make each of my points, you know?
And it's hysterical.
So of course the next year I use them, you know?
This is - you want them working harder than you are.
You know, do that, OK.
And I'm almost done, I apologize.
But that's an easy thing to do.
A note taker, then the notes are there - oh, the reason it
works is you put them - it's digital, you put them up on
the web so everybody can get to them.
Not - they're not private and somewhere else, so everybody
can use them.
And let me just open up my - get toward an end here.
There's more things I do in class.
And the last - I talk about what do we do as a final project?
How do we support kids?
I'll do that in the second - I have another session coming
up, we'll talk about a little bit more detail about how do
we support students because you think, OK, he teaches at Harvard.
What support do you need? Everything.
I have the same bad assignments you have, etc.,
and we did a lot to rubricize the works so that kids had
more support - not everybody needs it, but a lot of kids
did and it made the project go a lot better.
And the last thing I'll say is on the engagement side, one of
the things that really made a difference this year was that
we did a group process rubric that everybody had to fill out
every three weeks because groups don't work
automatically.
Kids, I guess - these are graduate students - they
aren't all so good at working with each other.
They have affective issues all over the place, you know, that
makes it hard for them to study and do - and work
together and all that.
So we made a rubric which - it would be too small to show,
but that was really about making sure that they - not
me, I can't, you know, again I'm trying to do the lazy
man's guide to this - but we would stop class every three
weeks for whole half an hour and have them together fill
out a rubric about how they were doing individually within
their group and how their group was doing.
And then the key thing, they had to talk about it.
And boy did that make a difference.
So some kids on the first rubric would say everything's
great, my group is fabulous.
And then you'd have someone say, our group is terrible
because that Bill guy does everything and he doesn't
listen and so on.
And then they share.
And, oh, my gosh, you know, and by the end we had well
functioning groups.
Why?
Because we universally designed - we said, you know
what, we're going to have to provide supports for something
like group processes.
But I didn't have to intervene.
The groups themselves, just like the notetaking, there are
things you can do that will make a more universally
designed classroom.
So anyway, I'm sorry, I obviously poorly estimated my
time and I'm just going to end as we walk out with my last
slide of why it is we do this at all.
That is paying attention to the abilities and disabilities
of the great range we have among our students.
This is from "Glee." It's - the storyline - I got to tell
you one thing - "Glee," the great thing about "Glee" is
that the group it's about, the glee club, are all people who
are very different.
They're not the traditional socials Hollywood types.
They're people who have problems.
They're not perfect.
And that's the key thing to the storyline - is
understanding those differences.
That's what's good - it's a show that has some really good features.
So they're sensitive to individual differences because of that.
And a visiting choir comes to the school, acquired from a
school for the deaf.
And the socias (ph) in the school - the popular kids -
make fun of it.
Like, what are they going to do?
Deaf people come in singing?
Are they going to honk?
You know, all these stereotypes.
And the glee club, though, has a much broader sense of
individual differences and so they come to the auditorium to
hear - and you'll see it - to hear this deaf choir sing.
And watch what happens.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GLEE")
>>Dr. David Rose: So anyway, I want to imagine with you a better
world where we respect and live with people that are not
exactly like us.
It'll be a better world for all of us.
Anyway, thank you for your time.
I'm sorry I went over.
(APPLAUSE)
>>Dr. Jane Neapolitan: Well, what can I say, but I want to thank
David for everything that he does to help make it a better world.
This was a fantastic presentation - the sharing of
the research, as well as the practical application, but all
going towards a much greater goal for a equality and equity
for all students, for all citizens.
So thank you so much.