| This qualitative study served to examine how professional development training in the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework and philosophy impacted the pedagogy of language teachers. Traditional language classrooms are teacher-centered, even as research on contemporary second language acquisition (SLA) encourages language methodologies as part of a move toward student-centered classrooms. A series of interviews were conducted with five participants, each a Grade 3--12 teacher in an urban school district. Each participant attended four professional development (PD) workshops about UDL, and a comparison of their classroom implementation and expression of the UDL framework and philosophy was conducted. The instruments consisted of 10 semistructured pre and post interview questions; field notes from 10 pre and post observations; and their accessory artifacts. Peer-to-peer and collaborative activities were found to be broadly beneficial to the learning of a language. Also observed was a change in the classroom ecosystem, facilitating a move toward student-centered lessons and activities when participants created lessons following the UDL framework and guidelines. This study results indicate that creating language lessons following the UDL framework and guidelines and deliberately integrating peer-to-peer learning activities encourages a shift in the ecosystem of the classroom to more student-centered and less teacher-centered. Additionally, best practices for language classrooms dramatically increased the amount of input in participants' classrooms, and dramatically increased the possibility of their students efficiently moving toward enhanced proficiency. The findings of this study suggest that PD workshops focused on UDL framework and philosophy positively impacts the quality of peer-to-peer interactions in the language classroom because educators have a better understanding of the UDL framework and philosophy and how it benefits their classrooms, as well as to how to create and implement lessons for the subject area being taught. A recommendation for future research is to conduct the study in general content education classrooms to examine how the UDL framework and guidelines can make an impact on both teacher pedagogy and student learning. |
