Shifting Mindsets: Designing Lessons for Learner Variability

Criteria:  Incredible research and review of free and open source software that provides effective teaching tools and strategies for teachers; significance of “learner variability,” as a model, overwhelmingly enthusiastic response by teachers who used LVN tools.

Key takeaway:  The Learning Variability Navigator (LVN) is a highly praised, open-source tool designed to empower educators with comprehensive knowledge to support student learning. It integrates a variety of factors, such as personal background, health, and psychological well-being, to provide tailored strategies and resources for each student. LVN has been particularly effective in creating meaningful virtual learning experiences and supporting students with specific needs, like dyslexia. Additionally, its capacity for facilitating peer professional development activities fosters a collaborative learning environment for educators to share and learn from each other’s experiences.

Summation and Insights:  LVN (Learning Variability Navigator) is a free and open source app learning tool that provides instant access to knowledge and resources that support student learner variability.  Learner Variability/LVN takes into account needs of “the whole child,” including aspects such as personal background, health and psychological well-being, and how students learn and think.  LVN provides synthesized peer-reviewed research, learning strategies, and tools to assist teachers.  The fact that LVN is free and open source is notable, as a 2020 Digital Promise survey found that both a lack of time and paywalls (paying for up to date educational research journals) were factors that limited teachers’ ability to enhance their teaching practices.  

LVN helps teachers to consider factors relevant to the “whole child” based on research as well as strategies that can enhance teachers’ ability to design effective learning environments.  For example, if a teacher is curating a lesson that involves “working memory,” LVN will suggest outside factors that may affect children’s ability to remember well.  When teachers construct learning activities based on working memory, LVN is there to remind them that students from abusive environments or who have experienced trauma have documented problems with remembering well.  In turn, LVN can then also suggest effective strategies that take into account this “whole child” perspective, such as taking mindfulness breaks or actively creating more wait time after asking questions.  Teachers can tune LVN to help with a number of categories that take children as whole persons into account, including “socioeconomic status” and “students with disabilities.”  

The response to LVN by teachers was overwhelmingly positive.  One teacher noted that the section on text to speech software allowed them to create new resources and strategies for students with dyslexia and dysgraphia who need to be able to share their thoughts quickly.  Another interesting finding of this study, conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, was that LVN was incredibly helpful in virtual learning spaces, and provided an excellent resource for adapting successful learning strategies to online environments.  When asked if they would use LVN again, 100 percent of the educators said YES!

Finally, this study also maximized teaching educators about learning variability through creating LVN peer professional development activities. The 163 participants who used the LVN app agreed to reach out to three colleagues each. The professional development aspect of using LVN was somewhat informal, with sessions designed around semi-structured workshops and conducted between teachers who had successfully used LVN and peers with whom they were personally connected.  Activities included viewing videos to discuss, trying out the learner design tools, and creating space to come up with new ideas/how to apply strategies in classrooms.  Educators overwhelmingly stated that they had positive conversations and experiences sharing LVN with their peers.  For educators interested in teaching and reaching “the whole child,” LVN provides an empirically researched and accessible set of tools that has been enthusiastically reviewed by teachers and embraces wholeheartedly the concept of learner variability.

Resource: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED622552.pdf

Year: 2022

Author: Medha Tare, Alison R. Shell, Jessica Jackson

Primary Author: Medha Tare, http://medhatare.com/