UDL Challenge 2: Classroom Community

A response to the Challenge set Activity
created by Heather Somerville (@hsomerville)

Number of views: 194

Building Community in your Class: UDL

Designing activities to build community is important for increasing engagement and ensuring safety. My favourite way to do this is through a low-stakes critical thinking activity. I found it online once upon a time and now I incorporate it into the first weeks of class wherever I can. Firstly, I play “This or That”. It’s as easy as that, I offer two ideas on the board and students walk to one side of the room identifying whether they prefer this or that. Ideas start easy like “chocolate or candy”, “summer or winter”, and move to more complex or opinion based ideas like “group work or independent work”. In my options, I always present visuals, written, and auditory. We open the floor for discussion and students explain why they might have picked that side.

To amp this up, we then play a game called soup, salad, or sandwich. In this game, students are still moving around the room but it’s to try and categorize all foods as either a “soup, salad, or sandwich”. It’s easy and fun for foods like chilli, or hamburgers, but then it gets more complex with something like lasagna! Students begin to brainstorm, bond, and work together to decide what criteria makes a soup, salad, or sandwich. By the end of the school year, it’s always a running joke when someone is snacking to ask which of the three their food counts as!