Teaching strategies, practises and organisation are essential for ACTION and EXPRESSION
Navigating in a learning environment and expressing knowledge is an important ability which has to be supported in a different way. Actions and expressions require a great deal of strategy, practise and organisation skills.
Offer choices to physical action
Many digital educational software limits navigation and interaction, providing material with which all learners can interact. Prefer materials that interact with common assistive technologies.
Vary the methods for response and navigation. Provide alternatives for requirements, selections and interacting, offer multiple means for navigation and control.
Optimize access to tools and assistive technologies. Remember alternative commands and keyboards, make sure that key guides and curriculas are accessible.
Support expression & communication
Provide modalities for expression to level the field among learners and allow the learner to express knowledge, ideas and concepts in the learning environment.
Use multiple media for communication. Offer alternative media for expression. Remember to offer art of composing, manipulatives and interactive web tools.
Use multiple tools for construction and composition. Remember to provide multiple tools for a task, teach learners to use tools that are an optimal match between abilities and demands. Offer learners for example:
spellcheckers
text-to-speech software
softwares to calculate
mapping tools
web applications
Build fluencies with graduated levels of support for practice and performance. Provide different feedback, models to emulate, different mentors and support independence- and skills-oriented scaffolds.
Highlight executive functions
Executive functions help learners to overcome impulsive, short-term reactions and set long-term goals, effectivity strategy, monitor their progress and modify strategies. Help learners to scaffold lower level skills to require less processing capacity and scaffold higher skills and strategies to more effective form.
Guide appropriate goal-setting. Providing different methods and tools for goal-setting, it is an important skill to set challenging and realistic goals.
Support planning and strategy development. Embed “show and explain” -moments, templates and think-alouds. Help learners to implement strategies and engagement them in decision-making.
Facilitate managing information and resources. Working memory is very limited, it is important to provide scaffolds and aids to keep information organized. Provide resources for information organization and guides for note-taking.
Enhance capacity for monitoring progress. Remember to monitor progress in different ways and offer formative feedback that is explicit, timely, informative and accessible. Guide self-monitoring and visualize progress, provide models for strategies and use examples of performance examples.
What to consider in providing multiple means for action and expression?
“Students have different perspectives and strengths in how they best demonstrate knowledge (written, oral, practical, alone, in collaboration with others). Applies to exams, work requirements, assignments and feedback. Therefore vary what assessment method you use (assignment format, tools and technologies, available resources).”(20)
In an online teaching situation, give participants the opportunity to choose how they communicate. Provide also different opportunities to provide feedback during and after the online teaching activity.(21)
How to provide multiple means for demonstration?
Provide versatile tasks and assignments:(22)
Group work with shared responsibilities, co-creation and collaboration for the evaluation report and presentation
Observation tasks with written text and picture, audio or video documentations and diaries
On-site visits with group conversations and group conversations and documentation
Practical measurement practices
Shared assignments, different roles, divisions of work, peer evaluation, peer learning, peer feedback, recording group work, online functions in Zoom, Teams, Moodle and Canvas(23)
Independent assignment or group project/online course(24)
Video documentary as an addition to written report
Provide different forms of assignments/ exams and vary format of exam(27) (multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank)