SPILL it: developing a K-12 PD module on disability and language learning

I was contracted by the World Languages & International Education department of Washington State’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction to develop and deliver a module on accessibility and disability inclusion for K-12 world language teachers as part of their professional development program: Statewide Proficiency Initiative for Languages and Leadership (SPILL). Informed by the program’s facilitators scope for this intense summer professional development program (breadth over depth), I developed the following learning outcomes for my module:

By the end of this module, teachers will be able to:

1. Explain accessibility and disability inclusion generally in their own words.
2. Give examples of what disability inclusion can look like in language learning environments.
3. Identify several complementary accessible and inclusive teaching strategies that address a variety of student needs.
4. Create realistic expectations for their own access work to strike an equitable balance between student need and teacher bandwidth.
5. Draw upon several free and digestible resources to scaffold continued access work.

Beyond these learning outcomes, a goal for myself was to model inclusive practices as often as appropriate within my content and delivery for the module. Here were some of the inclusive moves I incorporated into my development (in no particular order):

1. I started by outlining my content and then moved the outline to a slide deck (I use Google Slides most often). This type of stepwise planning tends to make content clearer.
2. I fleshed out the content on the slides and animated it to keep the text on each slide manageable.
3. I shared the slides with participants, too, because providing input in more than one modality creates greater access.
4. I used the fleshed out slides to create a script. Scripts are good for practice, and practice makes for clearer delivery. Plus, scripts are another helpful modality option to deliver content to learners.
5. I chunked up the content into several short videos, none longer than 10 minutes. (Minus one meaty video that clocked in at 13 minutes). Chunking up content into smaller bits makes content more digestible and a bit easier to revisit and playback. It’s also easier to keep students’ motivation up over a series of smaller videos that have inherent and firm breaks between them (even when students have the agency to pause a longer video, it can feel draining to see a progress bar barely inching along at the bottom of your screen!)
6. I captioned all my videos so that my learners had access to multimodal input.
7. I recorded them in a platform that would give me transcript output (in this case, I used Zoom).
8. I described any images used in my slides so as not to presuppose visual access.
9. Periodically, I included professional tips related to access, teaching, and learning. Stopping along the way to share explicitly with students why we instructors make the pedagogical choices we do is incredibly important to student buy-in and learner autonomy, and it’s even more valuable in a class full of pre- and in-service teachers who could adopt some of your modeled pedagogy for their own learners.

Want to learn more? Here’s the playlist of module videos, the slide deck, and the document of video scripts. Please share these materials with the K-12 educators in your life who you think would like to know more about how to support the learning of their disabled world language students!