What stood out to me most in this week’s research meeting with my professor was the change in dynamics that had apparently been slowly happening over the last 6 weeks. Our relationship changed from simply teacher-and-student-in-a-different-room to two researchers working collaboratively towards one goal. While I recognized she’ll always have authority over me, it’s gotten to the point that our conversation is much more casual. Now I even feel confident enough to challenge her ideas and bring up my own, which I really wasn’t comfortable doing until previously.
In addition, I noticed she started referring to the work we were doing as “our research” when it had previously been “my research” or “the research.” This specifically confirmed that I had a place in this process and comforted me, and also got me more excited to keep going.
I was cleaning the tail end of the most recent interview from the Implementation Leadership Team (ILT) meeting this week, and was fascinated to hear about their journey to full implementation of this school wide initiative of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Some of the milestones they mentioned along the way (many of which we will search for in other interviews to develop a code) were becoming a full inclusion school, which involved having all services for students with special needs, IEPs, and/or 504s provided inside the classroom and not outside the general classroom, separate from other students, and switching the educators’ mindsets about UDL.
This conceptual shift was especially important as shifting the idea of UDL from something only used with students who need extra support in special needs classrooms to something that is used to target those students while providing the support to all students in the general education classroom is one of the pivotal aspects of the theory. These and more concepts are fascinating to me, as they’re what lead to the real discoveries that lie at the end of this process.