An ongoing theme of my contributions in class when we were talking about UDL was my concern about the distinct lack of motivation in my students. I'm sure everyone was sick to death of hearing me talk about it, but in my seven years in the classroom, this was the first time I had struggled this much with my students as a whole in terms of motivation. I speculated that my curriculum was part of the problem, but I wanted tools to increase my student's engagement and learning within the boundaries of our curriculum.
As I learned more about UDL and worked to incoporate it into my classroom, my students slowly began to wake up. They were more interested in what we were doing, they asked more questions and they remembered more about what we had done in class. I became more excited about what we working on in class and so were my students. Suddenly I had more energy and enthusiasm and so did my students. As we moved through the unit I found that I had more ideas for ways to adapt the curriculum (turn that narrative writing task into a narrative project of any type), introduce content (audiobooks! videos! cartoons! memes!), and give students choice. So, obviously, when I had a choice for how I would demonstrate my own understanding of UDL principles, I decided to work on the project that required that I create resource collections for each of the different principles. I found that the more I worked on the project, the more I discovered and considered and the bigger my project became. Instead of lists, it became annotated lists. Instead of simple links, it became linked webpages and along the way my classroom also became bigger and more considered.
I still have a long way to go in terms of my integration and understanding of UDL principles, but I am so excited to be doing this and I envision these pages becoming my own encyclopedia of tools, with more entries and more detail as I use and incorporate more of these in my own practice. I know for sure that I am a better teacher for incorporating the UDL principles and I think my students appreciate it almost as much as I do.