A colleague asked me a really excellent question last week. How should an instructor scaffold group work expectations when there is a disabled member in the group? There are a number of ways to approach this, and how you proceed will depend on the needs of the students, your relationship with them, what if any …
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It's official! I have completed the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) Graduate Certification in College Teaching. This personal achievement is all the sweeter because of how it positions me to help other MSU students. I'm really excited to be able to pay this experience and schema forward in order to help mentor other CAL …
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Here's a doozy of a question I encounter often in my work: is it possible that any learning barriers for disabled language learners are actually erected unwittingly by language teaching strategies that we consider "best practices”? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. One example is how the visual turn has manifested in language teaching …
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Remember, when we're trying to improve accessibility and disability-inclusion in our courses it's good to aim for progress, not perfection. On the one hand, anything less than 'perfect' might be inaccessible, yes. But don't overwhelm yourself thinking you have to fix everything overnight, particularly if you don't have a lot of institutional support. If you're …
This section of my website is a blog (ish) experience. Here, you will see two categories of posts: in the news and in the know. In the news: I'll post periodically about new projects, initiatives, and achievements that I'm excited about. In the know: There comes a point, I think, especially for those of us …
My colleague Robert Randez and I are excited to be working on a commentary piece that was accepted for the 2023 special issue of Language Testing which has been dedicated to accommodations in language testing and assessment for disabled students. In this piece, we will first emphasize the importance of adopting appropriate terminology when referring …
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I, along with my colleague and friend from Philosophy, Dr. Megan Dean, recently compiled our experiences incorporating open format assessment into our undergraduate courses. In this article we wrote for the FLTMAG, we each showcase, in detail, how we have used open format assignments in our courses. We even included rubrics we have used! I …
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I was invited by the MSU Graduate School (one of my favorite campus collaborators!) to lead a session on inclusive teaching during the Fall 2021 Graduate Teaching Assistant orientation program. Here's the link to the slides from my session: Inclusive Teaching: Understanding, Navigating, and Addressing Barriers to Student Learning.
Professional development alert! I completed a two-week workshop focused on Applying the Quality Matters Rubric (offered by Quality Matters and facilitated by a QM-Certified colleague at Michigan State University). I'm excited to be able to draw upon this resource in the coming year for my colleagues in language teaching as they design their online, hybrid, and blended courses. General Standard …
I was recently invited to speak to instructors of Arabic and Russian about foreign language assessment accessibility for learners with disabilities as part of the STARTALK Critical Language Assessment Program at Michigan State University. I had the pleasure of answering some fantastic questions about accommodations and assessment fairness for learners with disabilities, and the differences …
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