Building Processing Space: Three Assignments That Apply UDL to Early Childhood Teacher Preparation
In my previous blog on UDL as essential infrastructure, I wrote about how verbal fluency functions as a gate in educational systems. Professional learning structures privilege immediate verbal response in real-time meetings. Teachers who need processing time, who think through writing, who require multiple passes to organize complex observations - these teachers face a gate that has nothing to do with their knowledge or commitment.
Across five institutions, I've been applying UDL principles to early childhood teacher preparation - designing assignments that use technology to create space for contemplative practice. I wasn't thinking about AI when I designed them. I was thinking about what happens when some teachers need processing time to organize complex observations into actionable knowledge, and what devices were readily available to help with that processing.
What tools create processing space for teachers to articulate what they are thinking or noticing but cannot yet put into words?
In an introductory development course, audio recording invited students to be present in a family interview without the cognitive load of simultaneous note-taking. Midway through the program, infographic design invited students to synthesize complex information visually for family audiences. In a final practicum seminar during student teaching, Padlet invited students to organize thinking across multiple dimensions over time. These tools created space for processing that leads to knowing - situated at the beginning, middle, and end of preparation, showing how contemplative practice develops across different learning expectations.
The Listening Guide Assignment (Early in the Program)
In an introductory course on understanding families, graduate students conducted a family interview and audio-recorded it with family consent - an adaptation I made to an existing assignment. They used a structured protocol with questions aligned to course requirements and certification standards - questions about family composition, characteristics, goals, lifecycle, and how families navigate change.
Multiple means of representation: Audio recording invited students to be fully present during the interview - listening, observing nonverbal communication, building rapport - rather than managing the cognitive load of simultaneous note-taking. Students who processed information better through repeated listening than through written transcription could access the family's words multiple times. Students who needed to see patterns visually could create their own organizational systems during the analysis passes.
The assignment required students to listen to the same recording four times, each with a different purpose:
First pass (General Impressions): Students noted their immediate reactions, assumptions, and questions without judgment. This pass captured what stood out before analysis began.
Second pass (Time-Stamped Evidence): Students returned to the recording with specific family system features in mind (composition, characteristics, routines, goals, supports, stressors). For each feature, they noted the timestamp and transcribed the family's actual words. This separated what families said from what students thought they heard.
Third pass (Non-Evaluative Observation): Students listened for patterns they hadn't noticed in earlier passes - repeated themes, contradictions, moments of emotion, cultural practices. They wrote observations without interpretation or evaluation.
Fourth pass (Synthesis for Action): Students organized their observations into themes that would inform their work with this family, identifying questions for follow-up and areas where they needed more cultural knowledge.
Multiple means of action/expression: Students expressed their analysis through written reflections after each pass. Some created visual maps or timelines. Others used tables to organize evidence. The format varied; the requirement was documenting the four-pass process.
Multiple means of engagement: The four-pass structure created processing time. Students who need more time to organize observations, notice their own assumptions, or understand cultural contexts different from their own have structured space to do that thinking. The engagement happens through returning, not through speed.
The Infographic Design Assignment (Midway Through the Program)
After students had built some knowledge of the early intervention system, they took an online graduate course on etiology, symptomatology, and approaches to intervention with children with disabilities. In this course, students used infographic design - an assignment I co-designed with a graduate student intern in educational technology leadership - to synthesize complex information about specific disabilities for family audiences (Gupta & Lewin-Smith, 2020).
Multiple means of action/expression: Students synthesized their learning through visual design rather than traditional written papers. This assignment recognized that some students think spatially - they see relationships between concepts through layout, color, hierarchy, and visual metaphor in ways that linear text doesn't support. Students whose strengths lie in making complex information accessible through design could demonstrate their knowledge differently.
Students selected a specific disability, researched evidence-based interventions, and created a one-page infographic for families. The assignment required them to translate technical language into accessible terms, decide what information families need most, and organize it visually so families can find what they're looking for quickly.
Multiple means of engagement and representation: The design-thinking process structured engagement through iteration - empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, revise. Students received feedback at the prototype stage when revision was still possible. The final product had to translate research literature and clinical terminology into language families could access. This wasn't about graphic design skill - it was about making decisions about what families need and how to communicate without jargon. Students engaged with the same content (disability information) but through a process that required them to examine whose perspective they were centering and what assumptions they were making about what families should know.
The Padlet Planning Journals (Final Practicum Seminar)
At the end of the program during their student teaching practicum, experienced student teachers used Padlet - an assignment I designed - to document and share their thinking across five lenses throughout their student teaching semester: cultural responsivity, technology, advocacy, wellbeing, synthesis.
Multiple means of representation and action/expression: Students could choose their mode of expression for each entry - written text, video recording, images with captions - whatever helped them articulate their thinking most clearly. Students who processed through talking could record video reflections. Students who thought through writing could compose text entries. Students who saw patterns visually could use images to capture moments and add captions explaining significance. The platform made all modes equally valid.
For each lens, students posted entries addressing specific prompts:
The cultural responsivity lens asked students to examine how their own cultural background shaped their beliefs and practices with families. Prompts included: "In what ways did your culture shape your beliefs and practices with families?" and "Describe a moment when you realized your cultural lens was different from a family's lens."
The technology lens asked students to examine how they were using technology in their practice. This included both technology with children and technology for their own professional learning.
The advocacy lens asked students to identify systems-level issues affecting children and families and consider their role in addressing them.
The wellbeing lens asked students to track their own emotional and physical state throughout student teaching and identify what supported their capacity to be present with children.
The synthesis lens required students to connect across the other four lenses, looking for patterns in how cultural responsivity, technology use, advocacy stance, and personal wellbeing intersected in their practice.
Multiple means of engagement: Throughout the semester, students participated in structured peer dialogue: 2-minute pitches where they shared current thinking, partner critique where peers asked questions and offered observations, and debrief where the group synthesized learning. Students engaged with their own thinking individually through posting, with peer thinking through viewing and commenting on others' entries, and with collective thinking through structured dialogue protocols. The engagement happened across time (ongoing semester entries) and across modes (individual reflection, peer feedback, group synthesis).
One student teacher wrote about language: "When children watch me interact with their parents in a way that they would normally just see at home (e.g., speaking to them in Spanish), their entire behavior shifts. It's like 'Oh my goodness, my teacher speaks a language that I speak at home!' ...If a child is having trouble answering a question in English, if you speak their native language, why not ask them to say it in their native language? Not only does this encourage their participation, but it helps them feel supported and seen."
Another wrote about family communication: "Families also feel seen, heard, and understood when they can speak in Spanish with me and know that there won't be any miscommunication and that their child's needs are being met...I have had the opportunity of involving parents in student learning, coaching them through a math problem, and even explaining to them in the moment, why I am making specific choices in the way that I am teaching their child. The open window of communication has been amazing in getting parent involvement and just understanding the home life so that I can support that student."
The technology enabled ongoing dialogue and multiple entry points. The contemplative work happened through choosing how to express thinking, receiving peer feedback, synthesizing across multiple dimensions over time.
Applying UDL Principles to Teachers' Own Professional Learning
These three assignments applied Universal Design for Learning principles to teachers' own professional learning. The Listening Guide provided multiple means of representation through audio recording that allowed presence and repeated access to family interviews. The Infographic Design provided multiple means of action/expression through visual synthesis for students who think spatially rather than only through linear text. The Padlet provided multiple means of engagement through choice of modality, individual processing time, and structured peer dialogue.
All three used technology to create contemplative spaces where different modes of learning could be accessed while teachers built knowledge. Technology wasn't making the process more efficient - it was creating conditions where processing could happen. The assignments didn't ask students to articulate their understanding in real-time discussion before they'd had space to organize their thinking. They provided the processing space first, then brought that organized thinking to collaborative dialogue.
This was what it looked like to design professional learning infrastructure that didn't privilege immediate verbal fluency.
Why I Am Sharing These Assignments
The three assignments above come from my own teaching across institutions. I share them not because they're the only way to build contemplative capacity, but because they're what I can describe from inside the design decisions. I know why the Listening Guide requires four passes instead of two. I know what happened when students tried to use Padlet without the five-lens structure and why that structure matters. I know which assignment prompts led to deficit framing and which opened space for seeing strength.
What Happens When Teachers Are Already in Classrooms?
These three assignments - the Listening Guide, the Infographic, the Padlet - were designed for teacher preparation. They assume semesters, structured coursework, faculty feedback, peer dialogue. They create processing space during preparation when there's time built into the program structure.
But teachers already in classrooms need processing space too - and the infrastructure that makes contemplative practice possible looks different when it's not embedded in preparation programs.
More in my next blog post …
References
Gupta, S. S., & Lewin-Smith, J. (2020). Employing design-thinking to create opportunities for ECSE teacher candidate reflection through infographic design in an online course. Distance Learning, 17(2), 11-23. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1289138
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC.
