#093 - Dr. Chris Bronke | Does UDL Really Work in Classrooms?

Dr. Christopher Bronke is a Senior Education Consultant for Novak Education. Bronke has held numerous teacher-leadership positions at the national level including a seat on both the Carnegie Foundation Teacher Advisory Panel and the Teacher Advisory Council for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bronke designs and delivers presentations on assessment theory and design, standards-based instruction, Universal Design for Learning, Deeper Learning, ELA curriculum design, intentional integration of Social Emotional Learning into classrooms and across schools, collaborative leadership, teacher leadership, and blogging to empower teacher voice and change. 

🎙️ In this episode, Dr. Christopher Bronke dives into Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and how it can revolutionize modern teaching practices. Formerly a high school English teacher, Dr. Bronke shares his shift to becoming a UDL specialist, emphasizing the importance of intentional teaching, student agency, and inclusive classroom strategies. Educators will learn how to create supportive learning environments, use flexible lesson structures, and foster student reflection to boost engagement and equity. The conversation covers real-world challenges students face, especially in identifying their own learning needs, and how UDL empowers both teachers and learners. Topics include rethinking assessments, flipped classrooms, mental health awareness in education, and the value of progress over perfection. Whether you're a new teacher, instructional coach, or lifelong learner, this episode offers actionable strategies for making learning more inclusive, effective, and human-centered. Perfect for educators who love professional development podcasts with real impact.

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Chapters

04:11 Transitioning to Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
09:54 Classroom Practices: Opening and Closing Lessons
14:01 The Importance of Intentionality in Teaching
20:08 Fostering Student Agency and Self-Reflection
29:06 Identifying Student Struggles and Agency
32:06 Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Explained
38:37 Personal Journey into UDL
45:51 Shifting from Instructor to Curator
54:40 Barriers to Learning and Engagement
01:00:01 Engaging Students Beyond the Rubric
01:03:01 The Power of Universal Design in Education
01:05:56 Navigating Student Choices and Responsibilities
01:08:58 The Impact of Traditional Teaching Methods
01:12:00 Integrating UDL with Modern Teaching Approaches
01:16:02 Creating a Balanced Learning Environment
01:19:57 Embracing Progress Over Perfection

Thoughts shared on the podcast are purely our own and do not represent the views of the Anglophone South School District or the relevant jurisdictions associated with my guests.

Transcript

Lucas Clarke (00:00.514)
Alright, dramatic countdown over. Dr. Christopher Bronk, thank you so much for finally getting on the show and getting the both of us kind of getting the time to do this.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (00:09.726)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here and I think this is gonna have to be one of those good things come to those who wait, I think, know, two months in trying to schedule. It's gonna have to be great.

Lucas Clarke (00:21.196)
Yeah, I hope so. think we'll let the UDL gods guide us, I guess. to start us off, guess, I know that your association with the group with Katie Novak with the Universal Design for Learning is kind of how we came to connect in the first place a very long time ago. And so I guess the first question that I think is broad enough to capture both your background and what you're doing now is how do you describe what you do?

It's a big question, I know. It seems simple, but it's like, oh, all right.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (00:52.862)
Good, spread out the gate, hear me? Yeah, well, I mean, guess in kind of a little bit of context, this is my first year working full time for No Back Ed, but I had been working part time for four years previously while also working in a public school. So this, the start of this school year that's now somehow in March was my first year not being in a full time job in public school. So I did 20 years as a high school English teacher.

The last 12 of those, I was a high school English department chair. And in that role where I met outside of the Chicagoland area, that person, like I taught one class a day. And then the rest of my day was sort of the full administrative load of evaluating teachers, overseeing curriculum design, professional development, budgeting, scheduling, all of that sort of stuff. So yeah, it is, it's very unique. And I've learned that even more so as I've traveled the country. I think most places like a high school department chair might be

Lucas Clarke (01:40.044)
really as a department chair.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:49.418)
a stipend on top of their just full-time job or maybe kind of the inverse of mine where they get one release period and teach four. yeah, we would teach, some of the departments would teach two. It was all based on the size, like the number of teachers that you oversaw. But for my 12 years, I taught one class a day and then did all the administrative stuff. So then those last four years of that work, I was doing work for NoVac Ed part-time. for those four years, most of what I was doing there was when I

Lucas Clarke (02:09.304)
Wow.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (02:19.114)
call kind of the one and done professional development sessions because I didn't have a ton of time where I could go invest a full week at a district or anything like that because of still working. So I would go to places and do a lot of times like an August kickoff or like a back to school after winter break sort of thing and just do a full day workshop around universal design for learning. And that was kind of primarily what I was doing. Now that I've moved into this role full time and have the ability to do,

have ability, but am doing this on the regular. There's still those sort of one and done PD sessions, but the work that we do ranges so widely. Like for a quick example, last week on Thursday and Friday, I was at a middle school in California and I was working full days with the English department and then full days with math department. And this was like the third time I had been working with them. So they were kind of deep into the work and we were.

rolling up our sleeves and lesson designing and redesigning and planning and all those sorts of things. And then, know, fast forward to like this week on Monday, I'll be in a school that is, this is like my fourth or fifth visit with them on a long-term strategic planning. So helping them think about how best to implement universal design for learning. And sometimes for some schools that doesn't even mean that it's quote universal design for learning. Like they want their focus to be on

learner agency and having students own the learning. And we just happen to be at UDL happens to be a good vehicle for that. So we're thinking through strategically, how do we roll that out across this year and beyond? So part of my work on Monday, we'll be sitting down and looking at next year school calendar with them and saying, okay, we have this many hours of PD and we have this many hours of team meetings and how are we going to spend that and do that? And then Tuesday, I'll be at essentially like a

office of education where teachers from that region can choose to come to PD. And so it is all over the place, but at its core, what we're trying to do is support the implementation of universal design for learning in the hopes that more students have more success.

Lucas Clarke (04:29.762)
Beautiful and I so a lot to unpack there and I'm very excited to get into the weeds with you here on UDL here over the next little bit. But first, as you were saying like what you did as a department chair is just like screaming sense to me. Like it just it doesn't really like I mean, I've always hear like all the VP. They were a math science teacher, but now they're going to go evaluate like the grade 12 English teacher.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (04:33.48)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (04:46.46)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (04:56.598)
I get nothing they wouldn't have things to offer different, I guess, advice or knowledge to pass on. But to me, I mean, you're taking a load off of the administration by actually giving subject specific expertise of the person who's actually also still teaching in that building. Because, again, even though I'm still very green in my career, I like to say I in my second year teaching.

I was considered a department head because I was just the most seasoned teacher for social studies in my building in the high school level. So I'm like, okay, but now like they're obviously and realistically, I shouldn't be evaluating other teachers in my second year. I'm still barely like knowing what's going on. But I guess like the idea of that type of system does kind of make sense. Like we didn't get anything. It was more so you're the honorary person people are gonna bring questions to because you've actually done it for a year, whereas anyone has done it for none.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (05:26.63)
Thank

Dr. Christopher Bronke (05:38.445)
Right.

Lucas Clarke (05:52.142)
That was definitely still very cool to do that, but I feel like what you are saying where you're actually kind of given like we're not saying okay Chris we're gonna make you a VP but we're actually kind of dive into the deep knowledge you've cultivated over these last 15 years and you're gonna focus solely on the subject. So to me that doesn't sound sounds like a great idea honestly.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (05:55.21)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (06:09.928)
Yeah, it was awesome. I loved the job, you know, 12, I did it for 12 years. It's the longest, you know, work span, you know, that I had. spent, you know, of my 20 years, 12 of them was in that role. over half

I thought a pretty good system too because we didn't alienate the administrators, the VPs or the APs, whatever term you want to use. They still did observations too, but they were doing theirs as more of the casual, drop in for 10 minutes randomly here and there just to check in, see how things are going, say hi, spend a few minutes in there. And then I would do the much more.

formal that we would think of with the pre-conference and asking some of those questions and diving into the art of specifically teaching that discipline, which as you just said, was a really, I mean, for me, selfishly, it made me such a better teacher because most of my job was just learning from other teachers. I I got to be in the classroom 30, 40 times a school year or something.

Lucas Clarke (06:50.338)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (07:00.11)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (07:17.802)
You see a lot of things, you you see some things that you want to steal directly. You see some things that you're like, I could use that in some way, or form and play around with it. You see some things where you're like, that wouldn't work for me. And I'm not sure it's working for you. Let's have a chat about that. You know, I mean, and I was blessed. You know, I really, the 22, 23 teachers or so that I got to lead over those 12 years were all really good, passionate educators. And so we were always pushing to go from, you know,

Lucas Clarke (07:29.856)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (07:47.654)
steal the phrase, right? But from good to great. mean, we were never, I was never in like tasked with having to have a conversation with like, if this doesn't get better, we're gonna have to let you go kind of thing. You know, which I see that now in my current role, right? I'm in so many classrooms, right? Like I'll go see a teacher and I'll have to have a conversation with an admin. Like I think you need to be in there a little bit more often and see what's really going on. Cause you might want to take a peek, you know? And I also see brilliance, you know, too, right? But for those 12 years, you know, it was really fun to be able to

Lucas Clarke (07:57.825)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (08:17.608)
teachers on taking things that are already working and just keep pushing them to make them better as much as we could. And that was a fun, fun, fun thing.

Lucas Clarke (08:27.618)
Yeah. And even as before I kind of go into the kind of beginnings with UDL here specifically, I'm honestly, dying to ask because you definitely have the, like, I feel like you kind of hit it on the head there. Like it is a blessing and it is a, it's so nice to be in a position that you can go into so many different classrooms. I've even found for myself, I'm in like a, like a,

new niche like resource role this year. That's like the first year on a pilot here in New Brunswick. And I think I've had my time with it. I've said I wanted to go back and teach history and social studies here if I have the opportunity to next year. But it's been so cool to just kind of work with adults and kind of see what they see and watch them do things that you wouldn't do and just like the different energy they bring to the classroom and varying subjects and stuff. I guess as you're

now moving throughout the country, not just within your within your own school, because I'm only gathering by assuming here with your department that you had a very, I guess, forward focused culture at your school where it's people were like, like, okay, no, like we are, we know we can improve. But as you're going into different schools, classrooms, states in the US, primarily, I believe, like, what are some of the things that you see a teacher do? And you're like,

Whoa, what are we doing? And again, I don't want to like pick on anyone. And but again, you can pick on the thing without picking on the person. So I guess what are the things that you might potentially see that you're like, okay, this is not a good or even a mediocre practice.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (09:54.643)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (10:07.902)
Yeah, you know, I think I have to go with, I mean, some of these are so niche that they're not like generalizable, right? It's like, I saw this one teacher do this one thing and you're like, okay, that doesn't represent the greater whole. But I would say the things that do sort of, if we were to aggregate what I see on the regular, for me, it's overall just the opening and closing of classes. How are we starting those first three or four minutes and how are we ending those last three or four minutes?

Lucas Clarke (10:16.366)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (10:34.861)
Okay.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (10:35.978)
I would say more often than not, I see a lack of an intentional opening and or like purposeful, meaningful closing. I saw it sort of see like bell rings, kids are, kind of get seated and a teacher's like, all right, you know, let's get it your books out, let's go, you know, or, you know, there's two minutes left and kids are packing up and I see the, you know, the classic and we've all done this like.

you know, whatever phrase you want to use. Hey, the bell doesn't dismiss you. I do stop packing up. We've got two minutes left, right? You know, whatever version of that you want to, you want to take. And I really drive a lot of my thinking around.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (11:15.454)
the organization CASEL, which is an organization dedicated to sort of codifying social emotional learning, but in meaningful ways around skill development, as opposed to like this amorphous touchy feely kind of separate thing. And they're really big on this idea of opening and closing classrooms as part of a routine that helps all learners be better. And really, if you think about it, you know, like if we have an inclusive welcome,

Lucas Clarke (11:31.959)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (11:45.518)
two, three minutes, and if it's building around what's to come, having students either self-reflect or self-assess on how they feel about the learning, either dispositionally or academically, it can build community because you can do it in ways where kids are chatting with each other about those sorts of things. And then if we end with some sort of intentionality, instead of saying, there's three minutes left, stop, or stop packing up.

Right, because even if they're not packing up, they're probably not paying attention. Right. I always like to say like the only person who benefits from rushing through a lesson to finish the lesson is the teacher who rushed through the lesson to finish the lesson. Right. Like there's you're not getting any ROI out of that. And so what what Castle Three's signature practices would sort of argue or or advocate is that we just stop and acknowledge that and give students the tools to hold their thinking to the next day. Or if you're in middle school or

Lucas Clarke (12:11.822)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (12:22.712)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (12:38.792)
younger, you know, like elementary to the next like chunk of learning or whatever it might be and just say, hey, we have three minutes left and we're not gonna finish this, but I want everyone to write down one question they have right now. You know, and then what you can start to do is that closer can become your opener the next day then too. So you come in the next day and you just say like, hey, remember we didn't quite finish yesterday's lesson. I asked everyone to write down one question they have. You got two, three minutes chat with someone next to you. What was your question? See if you can answer their question, you know, and that gives me that time as a teacher to kind of.

take that attendance or check in with the kid who misses seven out of every 10 days, but is finally here and I need a couple of minutes with them. But we're still doing meaningful things, but without it being like.

Lucas Clarke (13:11.373)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (13:22.408)
we're just starting, you know, like, that's, that's what I just see so often is like, it just starts and there's no like sort of context for it. There's no sort of, you know, pathways for it. And I think the more we can do that, colleague of mine, Dr. Ludwig, she used to call it like, and try to get teachers to be okay with this idea that it's okay to have a slow start and a fast finish, you know, like you don't have to start at a hundred miles an hour, you know, and in fact, if you think about the number of transitions that our students go through in a school day,

Lucas Clarke (13:24.269)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (13:47.5)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (13:52.286)
Like starting at a hundred miles an hour, when you're in let's say sixth or seventh, eighth period, and that kid has already been through four or five learning sequences, it ain't gonna work anyway. It's gonna be just as ineffective as trying to rush through the end of the lesson, right? And so unfortunately, I see a lot of bell rings. We start, we go until the bell ends and we finish. And so I guess if I had to aggregate together one thing, that if I had the magic wand and could get every classroom in the-

Lucas Clarke (14:01.984)
No.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (14:20.33)
country or the world to do more deliberately at Probatec.

Lucas Clarke (14:25.166)
Yeah, because even as you're talking, I'm kind of thinking too, I would always, we would do like for, I think it varies too, because I see a lot of high schools do the five period days where it's only one hour per period. In the two years that I taught grade 11 and 12 social studies, it was 90 minute periods. So that's like, that's an aggressive amount of time to do social studies in and like, you can do a killer 45 minute lecture with discussion, but that's only half your day, that's only half your class.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (14:54.698)
You

Lucas Clarke (14:55.018)
of four, right? it became very like the schools around because I moved to New Brunswick. I've taught in Alberta. I teach in New Brunswick, Canada now. And here all the high schools are five periods, one hour with like, like a half an hour slow start period, which I'm really loving actually, like the whole school itself has like a slow start to it. So like even for example, my school that I'm at right now, we like all teachers kind of

It's not like we have to be there, but it's like between 7.45 and eight, but then the actual day doesn't, like a homeroom's 8.30, then the day starts at 8.45. So there's like three, kind of like two chunks before the day starts, but then you still get your five periods in there each hour. And I've really like enjoyed just like you had the time, like you kind of know you got to be there, cause there's like semi, like quasi supervision expectations, but you're kind of just moving through the building and.

doing your thing as you normally would because teachers love to distract each other. think that's probably one of the fun parts of teaching in a sense that yeah, and I'm very much guilty as charged there. I don't know how many times I've been secretly two or three minutes late coming back after lunch because I just get caught up in a yap storm with the secretary or another teacher. again, that's where the community and the relationships are built. even as you were saying that,

I think we would do definitions for 10, 15 minutes and the definitions would be part of the lesson for that day. And that's how I always tried to do it. But even for me, I always found five, 10 minutes of just chatting with people, greeting them at the door, especially in a 90-minute period, you can still pretty much get through what you want to get through, even if you kind of not waste, but use the minutes in a different way. But I've never really thought about closing a lesson, if I'm being honest. I don't think too much about

Dr. Christopher Bronke (16:39.562)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (16:41.678)
So I guess is that kind of the, so I guess two different scenarios, like you were kind of using that in a frame where if you've got three minutes left and you're not done, like how would you, like you kind of have them write down a question to start the next day, but what if let's just say I have 15 minutes and I'm like, okay, well now, do I just pop on a YouTube video? Do I just try to maybe, and sometimes I would even catch myself like,

Like some days 90 minutes would go by and I wouldn't even notice it. And I'd be like, shoot, like let's pick it up tomorrow. Sundays I'm like, okay, I always had like kind of a backup worksheet or follow up task and kind of the order of things that I could get into. But sometimes you kind of feel a dragon out. So guess how would you respond if you were kind of evaluating me in that sense?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (17:28.872)
Yeah, I think I have two responses. mean, my first one is philosophical and that is the more I'm in more classrooms and the more I think more globally, I guess about education as a whole, the more I realize just how unrealistic of an expectation it is for our students, for us to think our students are gonna be engaged from bell to bell.

for all five or all six or however many classes a school has. Just think about ourselves. We would never be fully engaged. The school I taught in had eight 50 minute periods, right? So let's say a kid has a lunch fine and let's say they even have a study hall, it's still six 50 minute blocks of content that they're sitting through. And for us to say, from start to finish that that's the expectation, again, the only one who's benefiting from that is

Lucas Clarke (18:04.948)
I've had a few of those I've subbed in and I'm like, this is nuts.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (18:22.602)
our own sense of planning, but it's not doing anything, right? Like, because it's not possible. So my first response to you would be like, I don't know if that's a bad thing per se at times, right? I used to work for a superintendent who said that he didn't care about bell to bell teaching. He cared about bell to bell caring. And I think that that is something that we need to think about, right? Like, is it okay if every couple of weeks you have 10, 15 minutes where you just...

get to shoot the breeze with the kids and check in with them as humans and, you know, see other fantasy football team is doing or ask how play rehearsals are going and, know, like all those sorts of things, right? So I guess, I mean, that would be, you my first thought. My second thought would be, and this would be kind of like the coaching move, I would say, like if I were your evaluator talking about is that's the place and time to weave in much more intentionality around student self-reflection and student self-assessment. And those two things are huge components of universal design for learning.

Lucas Clarke (18:54.583)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (19:18.926)
And they're ones that don't have to take a ton of time, but often teachers feel as if they don't have time for. And so I think that's a great spot to say, okay, we finished up this lesson today a little early. You know, I everyone to spend a few minutes, you know, kind of just how are you feeling about the learning right now? If you had to give yourself an in-progress grade for this lesson, for this unit, what would it be? Why would it be that?

Lucas Clarke (19:25.901)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (19:41.258)
What are you still missing? What do you need? And just getting them to, you know, kind of to develop that learner agency where they can kind of think through, here's where I'm at, here's why I'm at that place, and here's what I need so that I can do something about that. My flip side, if I were coaching you through that too, is that we've got to be careful that those things such as self-reflection or self-assessment are not only done as sort of those one-offs when we have time to fill or kill.

Because that's when students don't take it seriously. I'll have teachers who have said, I tried some of the things you were talking about with self-reflection and self-assessment and we did it for 10 minutes once every two weeks. I'm like, well, yeah, I could have told you you were going to have success with it in that respect. Students need to see that you believe in it. And so there needs to be a component of it daily or if not every other day. But I think what you were describing where you have that 10 or 12.

is a place where if you have done it consistently, where you can do it in a much more relaxed and deeper way, with it still feeling as if it's part of the class and the kids are thinking about them.

Lucas Clarke (20:41.378)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (20:44.942)
Yeah, I feel like almost as you're saying that I would kind of have my like once per week, I will do this, but I'm not sure what day yet. Like it might be the second half of a week. Like maybe it's Wednesday. I'm like, you know what? This lesson is kind of going a bit short. We'll do it today. But then maybe it might be Friday. I think it's kind of like in your back pocket as and honestly, even as I hope to go, like I said, go back into a high school here next year and teach social studies. But like

I feel like an hour is so much easier to plan for and like fill. And again, I think the thing that I was missing, again, by all means, I'll always kind of crap on myself reflecting on my earlier, I guess just last year and the year before. But I guess I'm thinking like, I would kind of plan my unit and I was never really quite as intentional with the day to day part. It's like, I almost kind of knew where I was going each day.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (21:15.496)
Thank

Dr. Christopher Bronke (21:26.89)
Yes.

Lucas Clarke (21:42.478)
I, we wouldn't necessarily submit lesson plans, but I always kind of had my, like using my PowerPoint kind of as my guide. It's not like I was reading off of it, but I knew like, okay, day one, I kind of expect to get through X, Y and Z. But I always knew where I was going. So I kind of knew, so I would kind of use that as a way to read the room. Like, okay, if I had lost them, I had this assignment to do and I'd kind of pop that up earlier or whatever. That's kind of the, I guess the yin and yang I was balancing or trying to do.

but I hear this word that you just mentioned, intentionality. And I almost find, I don't really know what to do next with that word. Cause it does feel like everything I'm, like I'm not doing anything, or teachers that I know that I've seen teach, they're not doing anything without intention. But I guess why, but I'm hearing this word a lot more. Like what is kind of the next step with intentionality? Like is it a more precise?

minute by minute breakdown? it the ensuring that your assessment lines up with the curriculum? Because I see what you're saying and I understand. So I guess for an example, in my role this year, a lot of my role is in class math support. So maybe even you can help me with this. And I'm not necessarily having a problem per se. It's just that as an I'm a support teacher. So I'm not necessarily giving the general class instruction at the front of the room.

And when I'm in a classroom for math, once the lesson is taught, I kind of have my seven or eight students that I'm keeping a closer eye on. But if they're all kind of working independently, I almost feel like a bit lost, if that makes sense. And the advice that I've been given is, well, try to be a bit more intentional with your help. But I'm like, I don't really know what to do with that. I'm already there and ready to help. But like, what does that actually mean? Right. So guess, what can you potentially add to that for?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (23:35.942)
Yeah, I think it's a great point, right? mean, in theory, nothing in life is not intentional. know, mean, where these things are purely by true coincidence or accident, right? So I understand what you're saying there. I guess, let me give a quick example from earlier in my teaching career, and then I'll bridge that into what you were just saying. As I reflect, and I'm the same way you said, I'm gonna crap at my earlier self. I do it all the time. I look back, you know? And I think it's also really important to do that and say, like, here's how much I've grown.

Lucas Clarke (23:39.726)
Yeah

Lucas Clarke (23:50.508)
Yep. Sure.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (24:04.424)
And also look back and remind ourselves that even that quote bad version of ourself, kids were still learning and kids still liked me and kids still liked being in my class. And those are a lot of really important things to take with it. And that said, yes, and language, like yes, all of that can be true. And I can look back and say, man, I would have given those kids a very different learning experience knowing what I know now after 20 years than I did in year one, right? think both of those can be very true.

Lucas Clarke (24:16.014)
Fair enough,

Lucas Clarke (24:28.686)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (24:30.73)
And I see a lot of times, and I'm kind of going slight tangent here for a second, but teachers whose classrooms I'm in, where pedagogically I would like to see X, Y, or Z be different, but I know even with some of those pedagogical flaws, I can tell the kids like being there. And there's a lot to be said for that. And I think that's, I do an activity a lot of times in my workshops where I ask teachers to think about a time they really struggled.

Lucas Clarke (24:34.508)
No, that's all right. Please.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (24:58.12)
to learn themselves, like when they were a learner and they struggled. And then I give them two choices. I say, okay, in a second here, I'm gonna ask you to raise your hands, choice A or choice B. Choice A is did you struggle for pedagogical reasons? Or choice B, did you struggle for personality reasons? The teacher never learned your name or the teacher, whatever. And it's usually about 50-50, almost across the board. There's obviously some outlier schools and place where I'm at. But if I were to aggregate that over the couple of hundred times I've done that activity,

Lucas Clarke (25:15.79)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (25:27.786)
It's 50-50. And I think that's important for us to remember that you can have all the pedagogy in the world, but if you're not a good person who cares about kids, it's not gonna matter. vice versa, if you're only just a really nice human being like kids, but have no pedagogy, you're also gonna lead to frustrations, right? And so I guess all of that to say, my thinking on the intentionality has changed. And the example I would give from my own classroom is using self-assessment as an example.

Early in my teaching career, would have students self-assess every time they turned in a summative assessment. I don't know that that had the same level of intentionality as, to me that was more.

because it was an easy place to do it and because it made sense at the end of a unit. And then I look back on it now and to use these phrases, I was essentially having them do lag measure reflection in so much as they were reflecting back on how they did around something when there was no ability to correct the course because the unit was over. It's like a school who only uses standardized testing scores to see how they're doing.

Lucas Clarke (26:36.396)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (26:39.434)
Well, that's great. mean, that is an indicator, but it's always going to be a lag measure because by the time you get them, those kids are either gone or in a different grade level or, you know, who knows what, right? Where the intentionality would be, I'm having you self assess how things are going throughout the unit so that we can do something with that data so that I can better plan tomorrow's lesson or this intervention strategy or session or tool as we go as opposed to at the end.

thinking that through, then connecting it to your role in the classroom, I think it would be similar. It's just spending some of that time. It's not even about quote, being more intentional, but it's like, what are you hoping to get out of your time with the students? And I think sometimes just asking those students each, whether it's your seven or eight or not. My favorite question to ask a student when I go into a classroom, which I love being able to.

ask students questions, like you just pop in for 20 minutes, you have no idea who those kids are, they have no idea who you are, and you just go up to a kid and be like, what are you struggling with the most right

Lucas Clarke (27:39.575)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (27:45.258)
And they're not used to talking about their struggle, right? It's something we tend to either not want to admit we have, or we don't have pathways for, or we so badly want to get an A that we wouldn't admit that we're struggling or whatever, and just say, what are you struggling with right now? So that would be something I guess I would say to you that that's an intentional question. Not that you would, what you were using before, don't know, obviously, but.

Lucas Clarke (27:46.754)
like, yeah.

Lucas Clarke (27:55.597)
If you

Dr. Christopher Bronke (28:12.33)
As opposed to I see people will come into classrooms and ask the kids, like, oh, how's it going? Fine.

Lucas Clarke (28:17.398)
Yeah, like being a bit, I guess be more specific with your questioning of what you're actually trying to target, right?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (28:21.502)
Yeah, right, because always, you know, high school kids object, fine.

Lucas Clarke (28:27.148)
Yeah. Well, you're like almost forcing them into an actual answer, not just like, I'm like, like, what are you stuck with the most right now? Fine. It's like, that doesn't make sense. You need to actually give me something.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (28:28.446)
Okay.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (28:36.874)
You have to make yourself... Yeah, and even if that struggle is you're still being successful, I still want you name of the things that you're still being successful with, which one is the one that's the biggest struggle or challenge for you. Even though you've clearly found a way to navigate it, it's still there. You are just, you have learned your own learning processes and you know that this is a struggle, but I have these coping skills and some kids don't have those coping skills. And that would be what the listen for for me would be is,

Lucas Clarke (28:45.207)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (29:06.974)
who are the students who can identify that struggle but don't really know what to do with it? And that's where you can start to teach them of those skills around their agency so that in theory, this school year, next, some point down the road, the kid can identify that struggle and have the agency to know how to navigate that struggle. mean, that's the ultimate goal, how do we get kids to do those two things?

Lucas Clarke (29:28.824)
Well, yeah, because the student also and anyone may have never been asked that question before. Like, what are you actually like? I don't care. Like you might get this part, but what about overall? Like, what are you struggling with the most? And and I guess there's kind of three different worlds here that I that I kind of see that I've kind of been a part of. Like Alberta, for example, we were very strict, like end of semester diploma exams that was worth at sometimes 50 percent of their grade.

But again, you wouldn't get the grades back until two months after the students were gone from your care, I guess. And so you're like, okay, yes, maybe I can be a bit more intentional or add some pedagogical variety to the way I taught this Cold War cartoon that they didn't necessarily, you know what I mean? But that seems very vague in terms of how I reapply or reassess my practices for a new set of kids when I had classes of 38 at some point and then

Dr. Christopher Bronke (30:15.85)
You

Lucas Clarke (30:27.982)
the next semester I teach the same course and it has 15. So like, there's not really that much valuable feedback after the fact as a teacher, I guess. And that regard, I guess there is some. But now in New Brunswick, so I'm not sure how familiar you are with like the varying curriculums, especially here. And I'm sure the states probably vary in some sense. But New Brunswick in Canada is

And I say that because there's like a New Brunswick, New Jersey. I think that's like very close and it always kind of gets confused with it. We completely revamped and I say we because now I'm a year in and I'm a part of it where it's like the holistic curriculum. There's almost there's very little emphasis on kind of product marks. It's all about like assessing the process of what the students and how they are as a student, which I find very interesting. And I guess the point where I'm going to here is

Dr. Christopher Bronke (31:04.234)
There you go.

Lucas Clarke (31:22.35)
it's almost always assumed that the reason a student is not necessarily succeeding academically is because of some form of like lingering mental health association. And so I guess where I'm going with that is, I guess how would you respond to that? Like, that counts of what you're like, am I kind of giving a generally accurate? Because I think what does work for me,

in a sense of being a newer teacher is also not a lot of teachers teach in very different jurisdictions early in their career. And that's just kind of something that I'm noticing of just being in a very, both sides of the standardized spectrum, if you will.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (32:06.654)
Yeah, I'm looking for something on other screen. I'm probably saying I'm listening too. just want to, there's a resource that I might want to reference here in a second. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'm to tie that back to or into universal design for learning because I think your statement about, you know, that it's some sort of underlying, you know, mental health situation, you know, it doesn't have to be a concern per se sometimes, right?

Lucas Clarke (32:10.734)
Yeah, you're all good. You're all good.

Lucas Clarke (32:29.656)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (32:33.256)
I think that ties perfectly into what I believe or what has become my love around UDL is just the overarching idea that if we practice UDL, we are practicing it because we have bought into and believe deeply that variability is the rule and not the exception.

I will break that down in sort two ways because I think like one of the ways is when we think about variability, we have this idea.

It's easy, think, for some teachers to say, yeah, I get that because I know that Johnny is different than Susie, right? We've had differentiated instruction as a concept for years. You can go back to the concept of learning styles and you know, you have the auditory learner, the kinesthetic learner and everything, which has been debunked in some respects that there's no research to support that a student when learning in their preferred quote learning style learned any better.

Lucas Clarke (33:29.326)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (33:37.194)
Essentially what came out of that, and this is where I'm gonna then tie it to variability, is all of us are all of those types of learners, and it's our individual variability that changes how we are in any given moment, any given day, any given period, any given subject, with any given teacher, with any different class environment and those sorts of things. And so, yes, we do have, I don't think it's a surprise and it's documented out there, right? Like an increase in quote, mental health concerns. Whether you...

Lucas Clarke (34:04.398)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (34:05.898)
Whether one believes in that or one just believes they're being more reported than they were in the past or one believes kids are just soft these days, however you want to play it, spin it, think about it, Factually, there is something there that teachers are having to navigate more than they used to. And all I'm kind of saying, what I would say is that whether those students have documented mental health concerns or not, it's the same for me in terms of whether they have like an actual documented individualized education plan.

Lucas Clarke (34:13.802)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (34:35.624)
they all have variability. And on any given day, they can be completely different than who they were yesterday. From period to period, they could be completely different. Post lunch, pre lunch, depending on what time of the day, all of those things. And so I think our job then becomes finding pathways that have more flexibility that allow students to sort of tap into the ups and downs of their variability. I think about one of the things that I've...

had to really adjust to in this new role is that I have a lot more freedom in terms of when I can get things done. I don't have to have a lesson every day, so to speak, right? You know, I don't have grades due at certain times. And so I've had to learn how to tap into my own variability of when I know I'm highly motivated and might produce way more work than one 50 minute class period, you know? And also, you know, when I'm...

very not motivated for whatever reason, mental health or not, and can't produce even half the work that is expected of me in a 50 minute period. And I think what we're trying to do with universal design is think about how we can have more student led learning experiences that have more options with more flexibility, that break out of the mold. And this is the phrase that I've been using a lot lately when I work with districts, traditional school tells students what to do.

how to do it and by when to do it. And when we do that, we're only supplying students with pathways to practice compliance. They're either going to do that thing the way you want it done by when you want it done, or they're not. know, where as if I'm building much more flexible, you know, learning pathways with choice and options and flexibility in terms of when you work and where you work, I'm not only preparing you for, you know, life after school.

I'm saying to you, I respect your variability. So if you wanna put in where I'm using variability, if you wanna use what you said, your mental health status, fine. We can call those synonym-ish, synonym adjacent perhaps. But essentially what we're saying is, I respect the fact that on any given day or some days, you're not gonna be in a place where you can focus for 30, 40, 50, 60, 90 minutes. And I am also gonna be that way as a teacher.

Lucas Clarke (36:35.352)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (36:43.331)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (36:55.945)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (36:59.71)
You know, there are gonna be certain days where things in my personal life make it harder for me to focus than they did. You know, it's a human thing. And so I guess long story, probably too long, if I were to sort of like wrap this all up, right? This idea that I think we do have increased mental health concerns. I don't think that's a bad thing because I think we're more aware we have better tools to know when students need more help. But at the end of the day, diagnosed or not, know, notated or not.

Lucas Clarke (37:00.206)
Hmm.

Lucas Clarke (37:09.985)
No, that's not it.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (37:29.775)
all humans go through all sorts of variability and we have to navigate that for everyone in our classroom with or without quote mental health concerns.

Lucas Clarke (37:39.736)
Absolutely, and I'm sure you're aware of George Coros, who I know is pretty close with Katie Novak, and I've seen their work, but I had him on the podcast about four or five months ago, and he just said straight up, he's like, people don't like being told what to do. He's like, I hate being told what to do. And he said, why do we expect that everything we assign to students is going to be any different when you can actually offer them some choice? And I guess, so.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (37:58.494)
You know

Lucas Clarke (38:08.696)
We'll kind of get into a bit of the weeds here. And I don't typically on this podcast, I almost kind of as a rule, don't like, like I have my screen of questions here, but I hate actually reading things. But for this, I want to like read some specific things about like what UDL is or claims that I've seen and criticisms of it, just to make sure we're kind of following that line of thinking. But I guess the first part is how were you introduced to UDL?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (38:31.582)
Yes!

Lucas Clarke (38:37.964)
and what made you convert in a sense, if you will.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (38:41.928)
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. know, I like, one, I like being on this podcast. I'm enjoying having this conversation with you quite a bit. So thank you for having me. But I like that you didn't ask me if there were any questions I had in advance. And some podcasts that I'm on, they're like, if you have any questions, you want, and you know, and I love kind of not knowing what's coming and let's just chat and be honest about things. I'm glad you asked that question though, because my story around

Lucas Clarke (38:49.538)
Yeah. that's great. Yeah. Of course.

Lucas Clarke (39:04.033)
Yep. Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (39:10.1)
how I became so immersed in UDL, I think is extremely unique because I started university design in my classroom before I'd even heard of or knew what UDL was. So like I came through it honestly by trying to solve a problem. I woke up one morning in the summer about gosh, seven or eight years ago. And I truly like my wife would agree with this. It annoys her in I think loving ways.

Like I'm really truly that like education nerd that never stops thinking about teaching and learning. Like I just love it that much. You know, right? And I know there are some people who like they're great teachers and when the day is over, they come home and they can separate and I don't and I'm okay with that, you know? So it was a summer, was, you know, woke up one morning, I was doing some reflecting and I said to myself, you know, I don't think anyone in this world is gonna argue with the fact that education has a whole host of horrific

Lucas Clarke (39:39.128)
You

Lucas Clarke (39:43.32)
Yeah, what's that like?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (40:07.978)
inequalities and inequities. However, very few of those are directly within control of the classroom teacher on a daily basis.

But I started thinking to myself, there is one that I am guilty of that I do have control over. And that is, if a student has to do work outside of my classroom, my 50 minutes, my 90 minutes, to be successful in my class, I have created the inequality. I have created so that students who have better home conditions,

students who don't have to work a job, students who aren't athletes, whatever, fill in the blank, but I have put this into a spot in their life in which the variability of their lives now can create inequalities. And so I said, I'm gonna spend the summer finding out how to create my class so that they do not have to do homework. Now, if a student wants to, because their variability.

But I'm going to build the pathway by which they know students, like if they came to class every day and were working most of the time, most of the days, most of the weeks, they could and would be successful.

About a hundred hours later that summer, I had completely redesigned my class so that that was successful. I didn't know it, but what I had done is completely universally designed my class. So that's one track that's happening in life. The other is that Katie Novak, who's now my boss and author, I think she's on 16 books around universal design for learning at this point. She and I had been friends for many years before that. We actually met like 14 years ago or so.

Lucas Clarke (41:49.73)
Okay.

Lucas Clarke (41:55.128)
Okay.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (41:57.802)
when we were both doing some pro bono work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And we had just stayed in touch casually as friends. We'd run into each other every now and at a conference here or there, or send each other a text every once in while just to, know, how are things going, how's life? And again, I knew UDL was her thing. She had probably at that point just had her first book out, but I didn't even know what it was still. I think in my mind, I was probably, as many people do, still confusing it with backwards design.

Lucas Clarke (42:02.594)
Okay.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (42:26.9)
with UBD, right, universals and some similar acronyms. And I'm like, yeah, I'd probably do some of that, whatever. I don't need to talk to Katie about this. And then one day, Katie and I were sitting down and I was telling her about my class and she's like, Branky, that is the, like a blueprint of universal design for learning. Like what you're doing is exactly what we'd want to see on the most grand scale of like every single day and every possible way it's university design. That also then is how I started working for her.

Lucas Clarke (42:28.253)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (42:32.916)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (42:52.654)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (42:55.336)
because it was kind of like, she's like, hey, you wanna take some of this on the road, so to speak, do some webinars for us and show some of your class. I was like, yeah, sure. So my story, long winded as it was just now, I apologize, it truly was trying to solve a problem that had nothing to do in my mind with anything that was or wasn't universal design for learning. so then since then I had designed between when that course got

Lucas Clarke (43:07.658)
Not at all, please.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (43:24.446)
redesigned and when I resigned from teaching last spring, three different high school English courses that I worked on that got completely universally designed where there was all sorts of choice and freedom and flexibility. Mine was as far as there were no due dates until the end of the semester. Kids could turn in the work as early as they wanted, as late as they wanted. It was all just...

I just want you to get it done. so for some, know, going back to the initial problem about homework, some kids showed up every day, worked hard every day, and truly never had homework. Some kids literally did no work in my class the entire semester and did it all outside of class because that's when they preferred to do it. And both kids were able to be equally as successful once it was all said and done.

Lucas Clarke (44:13.87)
Well, and even as you're like the part that I've kind of noticed for myself, OK, if I go back, let's just say next year, they're like, you know what, Lucas, we want you to teach all grade 12 all day. It's like the expectation that I'm going to have them, like you said, bell to bell focused. But next year they go to university and they have three 50 minute lectures a week and maybe two hour ones. like, well, what am I? not actually like I'm not really preparing them for anything. So realistically giving them a bit more freedom with.

I think we put a pressure on ourselves to like, if I'm not at the front of the room talking all day, that I'm not doing my job, which I think is just a defense mechanism that I think a lot of newer teachers, think still fit. Like I had the conversation, with Robert Barnett with the modern classrooms project there just last week. And we're talking about like how we're evaluating teachers. And again, like still, if I get evaluated, it's someone's going to come into my room and see how I talk in front of the room.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (44:59.934)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (45:12.46)
You know what I mean? That's still kind of the reflexive way that that is what we assume teaching to be. So I guess the first question, I guess you have anything to kind of add to that?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (45:22.664)
It's interesting you mentioned that because when I started doing these changes in my own classroom, you know, I was, as I mentioned earlier, like I was observing English teachers, but someone still had to observe me, right? Like I still had to be held accountable. And it actually took, you know, significant time front loading, coaching those above me, those administrators who were going to be in my classroom so that they were prepared to like walk in. And I said, depending on what day you come in, you might literally see me not do a single thing that looks like teaching.

Lucas Clarke (45:32.141)
Yes.

Lucas Clarke (45:51.406)
I'll say look like teaching. got such a like the fact that we even have to have that conversation. It's like no you're yeah anyway continue

Dr. Christopher Bronke (45:51.752)
I might do nothing but-

Dr. Christopher Bronke (45:58.014)
Uh-huh. Yeah, so like some days students were working and they didn't need me because I had curated the right resources so that they had the right choices and they could be successful without me. I think that's great. You know, the phrase I've been using lot lately and I think just hearing you talk, I think this will resonate with you. If we do this work right, I think ultimately the goal of teacher should be shifting from instructor to curator and coach.

If I curate the right resources and if I coach you in the right times and the right ways, I don't need to be your instructor. I don't need to be your teacher. I just need to be those things. And the thing that our kids can't do very well is curate the right resources themselves because they don't have the training and the discipline. They don't have the research skills. don't, know, like all of those things. But if I give them, here are the nine things that can help you be successful between point A and point B, they know how to go learn on their own.

Lucas Clarke (46:56.418)
Yeah, well, it's almost as you're definitely resonating and clicking because it's almost like saying, OK, I'm going to coach you basketball, but you're never going to touch the floor. It's like if I just if I just tell you every day how to play basketball, like you're not actually going to go get better at it. Like that's that to me is almost like, OK, that makes sense. Like you don't not. Well, like if I'm sitting on the side watching you play, well, then I can pick up on things while you're doing it. And that's when you give feedback. And that's kind of like your.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (47:10.954)
I'm stealing that analogy by the way, I'm totally stealing that for you.

Lucas Clarke (47:22.894)
qualitative grade, if you will, but that's definitely clicking with me there. And so I'm curious, so for myself, again, I only graduated university a few years ago, and my introduction, and I guess the core of my knowledge of UDL would just be multimodal representation. That was kind of the number one thing that was kind of laid into me of, it's pretty much giving the student choice an assessment.

Like sometimes you might do, like for example, if I'm doing like Alberta education, grade 12, like everyone has to write the source analysis in the position paper. But when it comes to the, like group projects and presentations, like to me, there was different ways you could do it. So I guess the middle school classic example was always okay. there's this Google slides presentation you can do, or you can do a comic book strip, or you can do like a live skit. Like is that

I guess, what would you add to what I've already said in terms of, I guess, how would you teach differently? Because I kind of understand the UDL in terms of like, teach my classic lessons for two or three days. Now we're doing an assignment, but the assignment is kind of given with multiple options. But I guess, how are you or is that what UDL is for? You know what I mean? I don't mean to confuse my own question, but.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (48:46.758)
Yes. It's good. think everything you said is a part of UDL in terms of that sort of stuff with the assessments and making sure that we understand what sort of standard is, if it's a content standard, students should have, in theory, endless means to demonstrate their content. Because there is not a standard that I've ever seen that says, for example, I can explain the life cycle of stars dot dot dot by passing a test.

Like we are the ones who put the dot, dot, dot by X in there, right? And so like, yeah, like you can demonstrate your knowledge of the life cycle of stars by doing a podcast or a video or a Google slide or taking a test or writing a paper or doing a skit, you can write so on and so forth. So, okay. You know, but then there are also, you know, method or performance standards where like you said, like, you know, have to write this particular paper, you know, I mean, that, that, that, needs to be a paper, right? Like, you know, where I, where I see people start to struggle or,

Lucas Clarke (49:28.269)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (49:38.958)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (49:44.298)
maybe not have success or feel like UDL doesn't quote work is when they have a method standard or performance type standard, but then they give all those different options. Like, no, if it's a presentation standard, the kid has to present. If it's a discussion standard, the kid has to present, right? So, but we can universally design the pathways by which students get to those presentations or those papers. And that's where I think, you know, I would add on to what you were talking about just now with regards to what I would say are barriers for demonstrating student learning.

Lucas Clarke (49:57.091)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (50:15.53)
that there are two other types of barriers that we're trying to work through with universal design. So one is barriers to how students get and stay engaged. And that's kind of what I talked about earlier in terms of how vital of a role things such as self-assessment and self-reflection and intentional openers and closers of classrooms come into play. When we build those routines consistently, we are going to be doing a better job of getting our kids and keeping them engaged.

Lucas Clarke (50:36.258)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (50:42.344)
Now, we also have to rethink what engagement means too, because we want engagement to be that every kid is smiling and making eye contact and nodding along with you. And while that's great and it feels good and we do want that, like the kid could also be doing that not being engaged at all, right? So, you we need to think of engagement through more of an academic and intellectual lens. And so, you know, what are you doing that ensures a kid is, you know, thinking about your class, even if they don't want to be in your

Lucas Clarke (50:45.43)
Yeah. You read my mind.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (51:09.798)
And if you are having kids do self-reflections or self-assessments, even if they hate the subject, they are intellectually being engaged. So there's a piece there. And then the middle barrier in between how we get them to be and stay engaged and then how we let them demonstrate their learning, that middle one, and this is the one that I think takes the most time, is the barrier to how they actually do the learning. So one of the things that I said to myself when I was redesigning my class is that I want...

everything that I want my students to know or be able to do to have two different ways for them to learn it. And with each of those ways, I want there to be some sort of adjustability. So for example, if we were learning about theme in literature, I might say option one is to read this article or this blog about theme.

That's one way and your adjustability with that blog is that you can have the paper copy or the print copy. You can have the digital copy and you can adjust the size of the font and all of those sorts of things, however you want. you can adjust it. It can be what's best for you. And then your other option is to listen to this podcast. This podcast about theme.

The adjustability there is that you can pause it when you want, you can pick the speed you want, you can control the volume as you see fit and want. And then when you're done, then we'll come back and we'll do sort of a learning check and see kind of where we're at and how things are going. So that middle one, you know, that barrier around how the students are doing the learning is hard because it is time consuming. You know, it's why I think this has a lot of success when you see either one of two things happening. One, a strong either PLC or grade level team.

working cohesively to split up some of that work. And or to, and more so in the last six, eight months, teachers who are getting better and more adept and more comfortable and more confident using AI to help create some of these additional resources and options in their class because it can do it a lot faster than us, quite frankly.

Lucas Clarke (53:02.146)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (53:17.518)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (53:22.188)
Yeah. Well, yeah. And because even as you're saying that, because the PLC at my school right now, where we've got about like three or four, I think, English teachers, and then I'm literacy and numeracy in my support role. So I'd be part of that. Then we also have a literacy coach that comes in from the district. And we kind of got together to plan a unit with a theme of like of survival and resiliency for

middle school. And then we each planned a week. And to me, I'm like, okay, we do this three or four times, where you only plan one week of it, but everyone's talking about the flow. It was game changer. so what I guess still to me is that so I guess I'm still kind of wondering like, let's just say, they said to me, Lucas, okay, tomorrow.

we need you to evaluate this teacher on if they are using UDL principles or not. And so I guess to me, if you are, especially if you're in a school that doesn't necessarily have like a one-to-one tech ratio and it's still very much kind of behind the times in a sense, which I do believe a lot of schools are, I guess.

Is it pretty much just the access to learning and the variation in assessment option, which is pretty much the root of what it's trying to get at?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (54:48.776)
Yeah, I mean, think, you know, even in the situation where, like, for example, that, you know, a school is not, you know, tech one to one, right? Like, at least, I mean, I haven't been to a school where teachers don't at least have access to a device, you know? And so in terms of their planning, you know, you could still be providing grade level support with reading, for example. I think that's another big thing that we talk a lot about in UDL is this idea of, you giving them a reading assignment to help them?

Lucas Clarke (55:03.022)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (55:18.014)
develop reading skills, or are you giving them a reading assignment to help them, for them to learn content? And if you're giving them a reading assignment for them to learn content, there's nothing saying it always has to be at grade level. You know, and you think about, you know, for some, if a student isn't reading at grade level, and the only way they have to learn your content is through reading grade level texts,

Lucas Clarke (55:31.608)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (55:46.058)
who's at fault for that lack of learning? You, Lucas, don't have to be, you can be functionally illiterate and I should still be able to teach you a lot of different content concepts. But historically and traditionally in schools, that's not the case. And so I would even say, I'll give an example from the district I used to work in, one of our most complex,

Lucas Clarke (55:50.828)
Makes sense. Yep. I never thought of that.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (56:14.684)
student textbooks was the ninth grade biology textbook. It was at like a 12th or 13th grade reading level, which makes tons of sense, right? And I don't, honestly, I don't know enough about the world of science textbooks to know like, was that the only option? Is there not a way for it to be any lower than that? Like, I don't know. I'll stay out of that philosophically. But we had the university design those reading assignments. We had to have tons of scaffolding. We had to teach students about chunking, about how to use the

Lucas Clarke (56:22.254)
Yeah, of course.

Lucas Clarke (56:35.246)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (56:43.75)
know, headlines or headers within a textbook to create questions about what's coming in terms of your reading and vocabulary scaffolds because, you know, 60 % of the comprehension issues in biology in particular were vocab based, right? And so, you know, all of these different things that go into, you know, supporting and having students in situations where there might not be a second option, right? Like the textbook is the textbook and I don't have all my students with a device in front of them.

And so I'm doing my best, I get this a lot with it, but we have a prescribed curriculum. I believe you, great, and hopefully it's a good one. And that's good, but you can still add scaffolds, you can still add additional texts, and I'll use text liberally as in just sources of information, right? Those are podcasts, videos, movies, you're filming yourself and giving that to students so that they can still pause it, fast forward it, rewind it, slow it down. I think, you mentioned the modern classroom project, the other.

Lucas Clarke (57:17.24)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (57:40.714)
or so. I worked with a teacher who was a big believer in that. He was a math teacher. So he recorded every lesson, but then he also had the option of doing the lessons live. And students had flexibility in when they were going to do that work, as a quick example. And so they had a calendar with red and black dates on it. And the black dates were suggested when you should be doing which lessons. And then the red dates were when you were going to have an assessment.

coming like that you knew on that day. So you had to have all the black ones by the time of that red one. And if you want to do them all the night before, because you had the videos and you want to sit at your house and listen to him at eight o'clock at night, you could. And if you wanted to show up to class every day and pay attention to him, you could. And if like for most students, it was a little bit of both, know, some days I wasn't in the mood to listen to Mr. Smith, you know, talk about the quadratic equations, right? And so I wanted to listen to the video, you know, so it's,

Lucas Clarke (58:12.727)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (58:38.818)
Well, no, no, because even as you saying it, because this is the part where I think I have been criticized, perhaps rightfully, as being like too chill. I know everyone in the early part of their career, like you want to kind of not be like cool, but you don't want everyone to like not enjoy being in your room as well. Because I guess to me, if I set up my classroom in a sense of I've recorded everything online,

Dr. Christopher Bronke (58:40.052)
Go ahead, yeah.

Lucas Clarke (59:08.544)
If you, Chris, you're like, know what, Mr. Clark, like, I don't sleep that well at night. So sometimes I go home after school, take a nap and I listen to your lecture at 6 p.m. Right. So to me, the next day in my classroom, Chris, if you come in, but your head is down and then the admin comes in and they say Chris's head is down. Like I genuinely and wholeheartedly like I don't care.

Like I don't care if they're like still, not that I don't care, maybe that's the wrong word, but it doesn't bother me that like, okay, Chris's head is down, but I know he's gonna do the work later or I'll know he'll come to me when he has questions, because we have that relationship. Is that kind of where you're at with the admin coaching part? Because again, I also understand the administration front of like,

Dr. Christopher Bronke (59:36.732)
No, no trouble.

Lucas Clarke (59:56.268)
I guess it's not your job to keep the students engaged bell to bell. I think that needs to be the new, or needs to be the adjustment and the norm. I guess how would you respond to that?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:00:01.994)
You

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:00:05.514)
Yeah, I think I'll give you a quick little response and then I'll give you a quick little anecdote that is one of my funniest teaching stories of 20 years ago. My response to that is what I always used to say to the teachers that I went and observed. And again, there was 22, 23 of them over the course of my time there. And that was, I don't have to see everything that this rubric says I have to see, but you better be able to answer the questions I have about why I didn't see it.

Lucas Clarke (01:00:12.354)
I love it,

Lucas Clarke (01:00:32.494)
Fair enough, that makes sense.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:00:33.694)
And if you can, that almost means to me you're as good or better of a teacher than I seeing it all the time. Because the teacher who I'm seeing all of the things on the rubric all the time, I don't even know if they're actually doing what's right for their kids. They're just doing what's right to this rubric, right? But if you can say to me, you know, in the post-conference, I say, okay, Lucas, that kid had his head down for most of the lesson. And you're like, yeah, he's going through a rough patch right now. We're working through some things. I've talked to the counselor, so if the counselor knows.

But I also know that he gets his work done at 6 p.m. and right now he's getting a B plus in my class. That's a damn good teacher. That's what I wanna see, right? And I'll take this to the nth degree and a quick little story. I'll try to make it as quick as I can. Okay, I appreciate it. So the very first year that I moved into having a full university design class and had it with no deadlines until the end of the semester and all this freedom. It's always gonna take a lot of coaching.

Lucas Clarke (01:01:06.86)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (01:01:15.394)
Yeah, no, please don't no rush at all, Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:01:29.194)
because that's so foreign to the kids. I have this one student, early October comes around, she really hasn't done anything. So I make the first contact home, contact the counselors, I'm like, hey, no one's in trouble, there's no late penalties, there's still plenty of time, but just wanted to let you know, because this is a sort of non-traditional way of doing school, I felt like I owe it to you as a parent so that you know Susie's fallen behind in English. And they're like, okay, appreciate it.

Comes to the first week of November, still not much work going on. I talk to the kids, know, rinse, recycle, repeat, right? Comes to the week right before we leave for Thanksgiving break. I, know, American Thanksgiving, you know, somewhere like the Thursday, late November, we would typically still, right, you got the alliance plan, you got all those things. And I would, we would always have school usually like that Monday and Tuesday of that week. And then we'd have Wednesday through Friday off.

Lucas Clarke (01:02:05.185)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:02:14.208)
Yep. Dallas Cowboys play the Giants, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:02:27.944)
And so that was a really good time, even before I made changes in my class. A lot of teachers would do a lot of like individual conferring with students on those two days, because attendance was typically kind of crap anyway, and you all those games. It was perfect, So I'm doing this individual conference with this student and I say to her, I'm know, Suzy, I'm starting to get worried. You know, when we get back from Thanksgiving break, we've only got like three weeks left in the semester and you're going to have...

Lucas Clarke (01:02:38.146)
Yeah, I think that's the way you should do it personally, but not not every day is created equally and then the academics calendar. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:02:57.93)
17 weeks of work to get done in theory, right? If you think about it conceptually, and she goes, Branche, I've never seen a student so like confidently look back and it was great too. Branche, I got this. And of course I'm like, yeah, I'm sure you do. Cause you've said it every time I've asked you while you're behind so far. She goes, no, hear me out. She goes, you have my parents really concerned. So they're like on me for getting work done. We have family coming in from out of town.

Lucas Clarke (01:03:01.272)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (01:03:13.558)
Okay.

I got it, I got it.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:03:26.442)
who are staying with us all Thanksgiving break, and I cannot stand that family. But my parents now are so upset that I'm so far behind that they have basically grounded me to lock me in my room and get my English work done. She's like, I'm looking forward to it. Eight hours a day for three days, I don't see the family, I'll get my work done. And she's like, I actually like reading and writing. So the thought of like doing it in like a longer chunk of time.

is much better than sitting in a hard chair for 50 minutes once a week. Like, I was like, that is not the kid that I thought I was designing like this for, right? I was designing it for the kid who can't have that sort of a luxury to be able to be successful. And it turned out that when we universally design, all sorts of things come out of it.

Lucas Clarke (01:04:02.059)
Yes. Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:04:13.89)
But in a sense, I don't mean to give you another maybe Lucas I'm here, but it's like universal design becomes university design. Cause that's almost what university is where it's like, okay, you do your lecture, but then you're spending most of your time independently working on your projects. And if that's not as good as the basketball one, but that's kind of what it seems like.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:04:30.78)
it works. Well, and here's what I would say too, and one of the criticisms that UDL sometimes gets is around the idea of giving students choice. And I hear one of two things. One, we're just trying to make this like easier for the kids. And my response to that is if you're making it easier by lowering the standard, that's on you, because the standard is the standard and that shouldn't change.

If you're making it easier for students to achieve that standard because you're taking some of the barriers out of the way, my response to that teacher is, I don't know about you, but I don't ever wake up in the morning and say, I hope today's extra difficult. I hope things come up in my lesson today that make it an extra challenging day. Like, we don't do that, right? Like, we are more than happy as adults and as humans to meet whatever the goal is in whatever is the least resistance possible.

Lucas Clarke (01:05:12.142)
You

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:05:27.09)
Now that doesn't mean our kids won't still struggle and have challenges, they should. So that's my first response. My other response is sometimes they'll say, well, they don't know how to make responsible choices. Like I give them choices and they don't know how to make the right choice. I'm like, well, one, who's defining it as the right choice, first of all. And then I say, second of all, they don't know how because they're never given the opportunity. They have such little practice making academic choices because they don't ever get a chance to do it. And especially that time they get to us in high school.

They have been nine, 10 year conditioned to do what is being told, how it's being told, by when it's being told. So yeah, of course they don't know how to make good choices.

Lucas Clarke (01:06:07.572)
And even to like something that I'm thinking of as you're saying this is how many times in university or in life like you're working on projects or whatever, but then a month later you see it completely differently. Like almost by not giving the deadline, you kind of give the students a chance to be like, you know what? I'm going to scrap this idea because it's not necessarily what I want to do anymore than they find what they want to do. So I think that, yeah, because everything you're saying like Chris, I'm I'm 100 % there like to me.

These kind of hard deadlines are just, they're just weird. I understand as teachers, like, okay, like IPPs, they gotta be due, they're due this day. Like, that's, those are system things you can't, like, those are, but those are tasks. That's not the work, if that makes sense. Like, that's, like, you're, like, you're still having the conversations. Like, I think there's a difference between, like, almost all of school is task-oriented. It's not, like, work and task-oriented. Like, to me, I guess,

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:06:51.173)
million percent.

Lucas Clarke (01:07:04.352)
We I would do like a big controversial issues project with my grade 12 class and it was I would give them days where I'm like, okay, today is a day and I would go from group to group each time and I'd say, you know what? Like this group can work out in the hall and I'd go check in with them. They're almost 18. Hopefully they can handle three minutes being in the classroom. Don't tell my men, I promise. But I guess to me like but then each group had to present on their chosen Friday or like a went or whatever. And so that eventually

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:07:23.626)
You

Lucas Clarke (01:07:34.252)
I think became, well, it was also funny too, because you would see the students that you knew were smart, but it was hard for them to work in a group. Like you could almost see like, okay, they're seeing their potential reality moving forward of like working with other people and not everyone's going to see it the same way that you do and it's going to end up being different. But yeah, I don't really have like a follow-up tangent with that, but.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:07:59.946)
Well, let me add on to that. Because one of the things I hear a lot as well is, oh, that won't work for my kids. Whatever that means, OK, fine. And then I get the, and then I, well, what do you mean by your kids? they're like, well, I teach in a remedial type class. And what I have found, generally speaking, when we universally design and we give students more freedom and more choice and more flexibility and those sorts of things,

Lucas Clarke (01:08:10.222)
You

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:08:28.404)
The students who thrive the most are the ones who dislike school the most. And the kids who struggle the most are the kids who are good at school only because they're good at school. And when you take the game of school out of it and truly just make it about learning and not telling the kid what to do, when to do it and how to do it, that kid is like, well, what do I do? I need to get my A, how do I get my A? And of course you work with that kid just as much as anyone else.

Lucas Clarke (01:08:38.03)
They almost need routine,

Lucas Clarke (01:08:51.406)
You

Lucas Clarke (01:08:56.589)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:08:58.438)
Those are the student, if you had to put a profile to like who's gonna struggle with some of this stuff, it's the kid who has consistently gotten A's because they've gotten good at compliance and doing what the teacher wants when the teacher wants it done. Not because they have learned how to truly go learn.

Lucas Clarke (01:09:17.826)
Yeah, and that's like the stories you hear like once they kind of move into the later stages of their career, like they almost hit a wall where it's like they don't really know how to like lead or be like a leader on creative initiatives because they've just always been, and again, there's nothing wrong with like knowing how to do something well and there's a lot of professions that will continue to serve that kind of ethic that you develop. But, and so,

some of the, again, like your kind of teaching schedule, I guess, traditional teaching schedule is still pretty much like lessons, worksheets, grades, maybe like controlling behavior from the front of the room. That still seems to be the norm, I think, unfortunately. I think you just have to develop some thick skin. Once you get some, once you get your permanent contract, then you can just be like, you know what, I'm revamping everything here and then we'll figure it out.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:10:10.826)
history.

Lucas Clarke (01:10:14.99)
But again, no, I joke, joke, but I mean like coaching the admin and.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:10:15.102)
Well, I don't know, but I don't Yeah, and I just think.

If you have the answer, if you, the educator has the answer for the why, I'm gonna circle this right back to intentionality. Maybe that's what I mean by being more intentional. If you can answer the why for all the things that are going on in your classroom, you are intentional teaching, right? Like I said earlier, like you can tell admin that's why that kid had their head down and I didn't do anything about it today. Or that's why I let that student be on a 10 minute bathroom break. Or that's why, whatever the why might be, like it, you know.

Lucas Clarke (01:10:30.124)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:10:51.848)
That's why I didn't address that student who had their cell phone out in that moment. It wasn't, I didn't see it or I just chose to ignore it. It was my intentionality around how much I know about what is going on in my classroom.

Lucas Clarke (01:11:04.749)
Well, yeah, because even I think of myself if I ever ever was an administrator in the future and I had to walk into a classroom for like a 10 minute thing. And then as soon as I walk in, I see two kids with their head down like I would never assume that like the teacher hasn't talked to them or like I would always I almost always give like any teacher the benefit of the doubt. They've at least had attempts or conversations and then maybe it is time for you to step in as an administrator with that student and some of the teacher can do. But

So for, I guess the way that I'm kind of rethinking UDL here, even kind of in our conversation, is things like the Modern Classrooms Project. So I guess anyone who doesn't really know for sure, that's pretty much like everything is pre-recorded. It's kind of like investing in both yourself and your teacher as having most of your content prepared up front. The students can kind of learn at their own pace. You are there as kind of a...

maybe not even a coach, but like a guide almost. Like you're there when they have questions with things that you've recorded. And then have you ever heard of the flipped classroom as well? So the flipped classroom is kind of almost everything is done outside of class. Then you're kind of discussing the content and doing the work in class, like all of the learning is done in a sense, like the information exchange is done out of class, but then the discussion and the work is in class.

Is UDL kind of like the umbrella for what both of those can go into? Or is it kind of a separate thing? guess how would you, like is it kind of the guide that, or the, yeah, like the umbrella that goes into these are what potential variations of UDL looks like? Or is it its own thing? Am I kind of misunderstanding that still in a sense?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:12:48.848)
Yeah, I think this is one of those like logic models, like all X can be Y, but not all Y is X. You you know, those sorts of things. So you can do a, you can have a fully university designed classroom and not use any elements of flipped or modern classroom.

Lucas Clarke (01:12:58.942)
Yes. Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:13:12.104)
You can have a fully university designed classroom that is completely flipped. You can have a university designed classroom that is completely modern classroom, or you can have tangents, Venn diagrams within that sort of thing. think, you said it as like an umbrella and I almost kind of flip it and say it's the foundation, right? Like if we think of UDL as the foundation, we are trying to say that the teacher has proactively designed the lessons, the units, the assessments in a way.

that tries to remove proactively as many barriers for engagement, for learning, and for demonstrating their learning as possible. And so you can do that in a very traditional, like we still, as a class, we're going lesson by lesson together. And you can still, you could, but for each lesson, there's two options when you get to the time to demonstrate the lesson or the opportunities, I mean, there's different assessment paths, but we're all doing it together at the same time. Or you can have variations of which, you know,

I have it universally designed and it's flipped. But you can also have a flipped classroom that is not universally designed. If the flip really only provides students with one way to learn the material, or one way to demonstrate that learning, right? So we might have elements of UDL within the flipped classroom, but it's not a one-for-one guarantee. mean, in fact, you can be very anti-UDL and use the flipped classroom.

Lucas Clarke (01:14:13.39)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:14:26.379)
Yeah, okay.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:14:38.76)
with the exception of in theory, at least there is some adjustability with the videos that they're watching in terms of the pacing, the speed, the when they pause, the volume, closed caption, those sorts of things. But if it's still just, if the only way to learn is just your video every single day, that's A, an approach, but I would not say that that's university design. So I don't think there's not an absolute yes or no. And these are, you know,

Lucas Clarke (01:15:04.248)
Okay.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:15:06.346)
I'll give like my classroom, for example, was completely universally designed and self-directed, meaning that they could work on things whenever they wanted at whatever pace and they could go in and out of units and lessons and as long as they got all the work done by the end of the semester, you could have a class that is completely self-directed that is not fully universally designed, right? So it's like, hey, you've got to get all this stuff done by the end of semester, but there's still only one way to learn everything and one type of assessment for everything.

there are some elements of universal design in so much as engagement might be higher because you're allowing them to work when and how they want, but actually learning it, if there's still just that one way to learn it and that one way to demonstrate that learning, that's not fully university designed. likewise, you don't have to have it be self-directed for it to be university designed. So there is just a lot of moving pieces that do all have tenants that work well together, but no one of them is

Lucas Clarke (01:16:02.499)
care.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:16:04.244)
going to be automatically universally designed or not, that's the designer.

Lucas Clarke (01:16:10.294)
Okay, I'm just gonna pause this here. Are you running short on time or what's your?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:16:15.594)
We can maybe do like maybe one, if you have a follow up to what we just said and then like one wrap up question, something like that, maybe like two more questions.

Lucas Clarke (01:16:19.456)
Yeah, sure. Perfect. Yeah. And so I guess to kind of get into it. So restart, I know I guess to get back into the weeds a bit. So like, let's just say next year, I want to because a weird part clearly, as you may be able to tell us, I love lecturing, like, obviously not for too long, but I love just talking about content. I love getting into that. And I, I think that

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:16:45.872)
Why lot of people become high school teachers? I get it.

Lucas Clarke (01:16:47.894)
Well, I think a lot of students at times will enjoy it too, because I hope that I bring the energy to those conversations. But I think one thing I would like to change is definitely taking the pressure away to lecture every day, if that makes sense, and finding ways to have more things prepared that like, not even just on my tired days, but just for the students to have more variation in their learning experience with myself.

That to me, think screams better balance for everyone and actually a more enjoyable semester for everyone. I guess like what did you think? So like last question here, so if I'm pretty much doing lecture, like YouTube videos for specific content, group projects for presentations, group discussions, I guess like how do you make that two? Like how do you make that multiple options per day?

I guess what have you learned about that?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:17:49.386)
Yeah, well, I mean, think there's a couple of ways to dive into that. First of all is to address the idea of, and you're calling them lectures. I'm going to go ahead and change that to direct instruction. Right. And, you know, I think when we go out and do a workshop, you know, as part of NovakGav, we use direct instruction.

Lucas Clarke (01:18:00.096)
Yes, like many lessons, yes.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:18:10.142)
but we have universally designed that direct instruction. So before we do the direct instruction, we are having them self-reflect or self-assess. So they are more scientifically engaged in what's coming. During the direct instruction, we are pausing so that they can either individually kind of just take a pause and reflect on what they've just heard, or they can chat with a neighbor for clarifying something that's been said. Another thing that I say too is.

And again, I was guilty of never doing this as a younger teacher. You know, was like, all right, today's gonna be, you know, we're gonna talk about, you the background of Romeo and Juliet. You might wanna take some notes, because you're gonna need to know this. And then in my mind, was like, well, if they didn't take notes, that's on them. And, you know, so be it, right? Where now, I would say, we're gonna talk about, you know, the background of Romeo and Juliet. Here are two different note templates you can choose to use. And if you wanna do it a third way, that's fine.

But not just saying like, not only am gonna give you the scaffold, I'm gonna give you two types of scaffolds. You can take notes, know, graphically, or you can take notes, you know, with, you know, writing. You can type your notes or you can hand write. I mean, like giving though, even just those choices and those scaffolds along the way, like it's not that every single thing always is gonna have multiple options. There are gonna be, you know, a direct instruction, there's only one way to learn. But can you scaffold and then provide options within that one way of learning that makes that have fewer barriers?

Lucas Clarke (01:19:22.284)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:19:29.63)
you know, could you have your slides printed or a copy of them in front of your students while you're doing that direct instruction so that if maybe they're not, their variability for that day is not very good at the auditorial retaining, they still have that visual in front of them. Like I would have been that student. Like I was very, very bad at absorbing knowledge if it was only auditory. And so, you know, when I'm doing workshops now, yeah, and some are brilliant at

Lucas Clarke (01:19:53.423)
Mm-hmm. I am like that too.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:19:57.162)
Like it boggles my mind. love when I see it. But so like, for example, I would never go do a workshop where I'm doing any sort of direct instruction in which the teachers didn't have the slides in front of them as well. Right? So they can see it, they can follow along with it. A lot of them will make their own copy. So that's one way to take notes is they can then use the notes feature to take notes with the visual kind of like reminder when they go back to study a day later or review it. like, yeah, I remember that. Now you've got a visual cue from the slide.

They have some auditory remembrance of what you were talking about, and they have their own notes to go back to. And so you start to add those three pieces together. And so it's trying to find those different ways in that respect as well. And then it is a matter of just finding, and there's not an answer to this, but finding the balance. Like how often are you direct instruction? How often is it that they have to read something that's a text, like a word-based text? How often is it that it's a visual?

Are they listening to a podcast or watching a video? how often are they having choice within those? How often are you dictating that? Because I do think there is, I'm going to use a phrase really quickly to kind of like sum this up. And it's a phrase that Penny Kittle, she's a literacy, literary scholar that she sort of penned. And I'm going to use it. She talked about it with regards to reading, but I would talk about it in regards to learning. And she called it roller coaster reading. She thought that our students,

reading lives should be like roller coasters, both in terms of what they were reading and the difficulty of that what. And so if you think about, roller coasters go up and down, you know, if it's the topics and the choices, we need to have them be on the highs. And then there are gonna be some times when we say like, no, like you need to read this, you know, I'm thinking as like a social studies teacher, like you need to read this primary source document. That is part of our discipline. We analyze the constitution of our government.

Lucas Clarke (01:21:44.781)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (01:21:52.108)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:21:55.878)
And no podcast is gonna get you out of that. And it's not gonna be fun probably for some of you. It's gonna be hard, difficult, challenging reading. But then tomorrow we're gonna look at two political cartoons about things within our constitution. And I would say the same thing, like what is the roller coaster learning of our students' lives? How often are they engaging with grade level or sometimes even higher than grade level text? And then how does that roller coaster into

Lucas Clarke (01:21:56.066)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:21:59.318)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (01:22:05.709)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:22:11.288)
Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:22:25.012)
third grade texts or picture books or, you know, comic strips or videos or, you know, and just what does that balance look like? Because there is a time and place in school where kids need to learn how to persevere through things that are either really difficult or they really don't like. And UDL is not saying that we're trying to avoid that. We're trying to say that we've given you enough of the skills and enough other ancillary learning experiences that the full package is all of those things you love and things that you...

Lucas Clarke (01:22:42.478)
Hmm.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:22:54.576)
know, struggle with things that are easy for you and things that are hard for you. And if you think across then, not just your own classroom, Lucas, right? But think across the totality of their day, right? If every class had roller coaster learning, right? And even if it didn't, you know, if yours does, that's at least a step, right? Because we're probably not gonna get to a situation where every teacher in every school buys into everything I'm kind of selling here, so to speak today, right? You know, it's like when someone says, well, if you stop giving your students tests, how are they gonna be prepared to ever take a test again? I'm like,

Lucas Clarke (01:23:11.447)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (01:23:17.013)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:23:23.21)
got a feeling they've done enough of that already by the time they get to me and are still gonna be doing it in most of their other classes, I think they'll be fine. So I kind of leave you with that, you general like little kind of chuckle, but I think it's true. A lot of times we fail to think about, especially at the high school level or middle school and high school, that our class is only one fraction of their day. And, you know, if you think about what else is going on across their day, you know, if you don't give as many tests as you once did,

Lucas Clarke (01:23:25.411)
Yeah

Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:23:43.362)
Yep.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:23:52.33)
I have a feeling they're still gonna have taken enough tests in their lives to be just fine.

Lucas Clarke (01:23:56.43)
Well, it's as you were talking there, the the the quote from a former I feel like we all have a former professor that haunts us in a positive way. And I think like he said pedagogy. He asked us like, how would you define it? And we're all like, it's kind of one those dangerously simple questions. And it said, it's what you have the students do with the information you give them. And I think kind of your main point there about

like, okay, we're not just going to take notes, but here's your being intentional with here's two potential frameworks you can use to take those notes where it's always kind of like taking the I guess lost thinking away from them and just letting them get into it. This kind of where it seems to stem down to so Chris, this has been an incredible conversation. I get a sense that I I'm already thinking of ideas for another one down the road in the future. But the last

The last thing to wrap us up here is I always end the show with one of my favorite quotes, because I'm just a huge quote guy. it's, education is what remains once one forgets everything that they learned in school. What is it that you want students or even adults that you're now teaching to take away from their time with you specifically that they won't get anywhere else?

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:25:15.646)
Woo, I always love to see how a host ends their show. It's always fun. I guess at the end of the day...

Lucas Clarke (01:25:16.206)
Just an easy one to wrap up.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:25:27.13)
Yeah, I think this is the, because I also love quotes, although I'm going to quote myself now so that may be a little late. My biggest, one of the biggest things I want anyone I work with to embrace and when I say embrace, like it takes a disposition change, it takes time practicing this philosophy and this work and I know it myself very truly because I lived trying to figure this out and that's the idea of progress over perfection.

Lucas Clarke (01:25:30.998)
Of course. That's the dream. I'm to quote myself.

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:25:56.158)
I think too often in our learning lives or just in life in general, we're afraid to start because we don't feel as if we have all of the answers to start. And I think you're never gonna be in that situation. So whether it's trying to start Universal Design for Learning or trying to start learning how to play the ukulele or whatever, just try, just start making progress because...

Even if you do spend all that time thinking you're at a spot where now you can quote finally start because you have all the things you need you won't because you won't know what you need until you start doing it and That was the phrase I used with the department that I led I led us through a couple of you know curriculum revision and common assessment creation processes and the number of times I had to remind them like progress over perfection like we're not leaving today having all the answers But we are gonna take a step forward and we're gonna see how it goes. So

I would hope that that would be something that people would say that I kind of lead and think and work in a way that promotes and supports teachers and students and do it.

Lucas Clarke (01:27:00.13)
Beautiful. Alright, Dr. Bronk, thank you so much for coming on today,

Dr. Christopher Bronke (01:27:03.998)
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.