Design and Deliver

Planning and Teaching Using Universal Design for Learning

Excerpted from Design and Deliver: Planning

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Loui Lord Nelson, Ph.D., is a consultant specializing in universal design for learning (UDL). She recently completed a 1-year postdoctoral fellowship through Boston College and CAST. She has focused on K12 professional development and systems change design and is conducting research in both areas. Prior to this experience, she was the Coordinator of UDL in Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation in Columbus, Indiana, for four years. Loui began her career as an eighth-grade collaborative teacher in Indiana and then expanded.

THE VOCABULARY AND MYTHS OF UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING

Using the UDL framework made it possible for me to do a better job at what I was doing, but to make it so that students could find a way to connect differently than they had before with their learning experience.

Framework

UDL was not designed to be complex, but because it is a framework and not a checklist, some might find it overwhelming. In Chapter 1 I described the concept of a framed by steel girders. It is on that frame that the roof will sit and the materials for the walls will hang. If the framework is not solid and shifts, then the roof could fall in or the wall materials could crack. That building’s framework is tested over and over by gravity and the use of the building.

The framework of UDL, designed by researchers at CAST, was conceived using brain research (Rose & Meyer, 2002). That research was grouped into the three continuous review of the research and teachers’ daily use and investigation.

Learning Environment

As mentioned previously, teachers use the UDL framework to design both lessons and the learning environment. In Chapter 1 I introduced the concept of the learning environment as your teaching space or location. When most of us think of teaching, we think of being in a classroom. We think of a specific location. UDL asks us to expand our concept of both where learning can take place and what needs to be available for learning to take place. A learning environment includes the physical location where learning is taking place, the resources available to the students, and the design of the lesson.

To implement UDL, a teacher must go beyond the basic decision making of "what topic will be my focus for today." Instead, the teacher considers the environment in which the students will learn and uses the UDL framework to design that environment so students have access to the tools, resources, and strategies they need and so that they can achieve to their greatest potential.

The Lesson Goal

The goal is the heart of any lesson. All activities, resources used, and products produced should be grounded in that goal. A UDL goal has one quality: The “how” tends to be left out (Coyne et al., 2009). The goal should state what the students will learn, but when a teacher leaves out the “how,” it leaves open the possibility of how the students will learn that topic. The same is true for lessons that include assessment.

Access

Access can also refer to a student simply being able to connect to the information being taught, and keeping the “how” out of the lesson goal or broadly defining the goal makes choosing flexible resources even more important. Underlying the selection of flexible resources are the broader concepts of access and barriers. Access considers how the students connect to the lesson, how the topic is taught, and how the students express themselves. Based on UDL, access means that

• students are given a reason to emotionally attach to the lesson;
• students know they will be given a variety of opportunities to use, watch, touch, smell, maybe even taste something that will help them understand the topic better; and,
• students will have multiple opportunities to meaningfully and successfully demonstrate that they understand that topic.

A popular cartoon demonstrates physical accessibility and how it benefits everyone. By shoveling the snow from the ramp first, the building is instantly made accessible to everyone standing there. The cartoon suggests that the adult needs to change his mind set to view the ramp as a way for all students to access the building rather than as a specialized support specifically for students using wheelchairs.