What is Universal Design for Learning (UDL)?
All educators want every student to learn. However, all students do not learn in the same way. If you are a child with a disability, learning obstacles can be very real for you. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a way, using computer technology, to create a classroom or educational environment to allow all types of learners to succeed in regular classrooms with minimal use of assistive technology (AT).
A good explanation of Universal Design for Learning, and its roots in architecture, can be found at:
http://www.schwablearning.org/articles.aspx?r=490
This site explains the basic idea behind UDL, that UDL has several core principles:
1) Multiple methods of Presentation
2) Multiple options for Participation
2) Multiple options for Participation
3) Multiple Means of Expression
UDL has many implications for students with disabilities.
An article entitled “Universal Design for Learning in a Digital Multimedia Environment, found at:
http://216.139.220.43/index.aspx?page_id=147
http://216.139.220.43/index.aspx?page_id=147
This article reveals how UDL can provide a helpful framework for students with disabilities:
The “universal” in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) does not imply one optimal solution for everyone, but instead underscores the need for inherently flexible, customizable content, assignments and activities, and assessments characterized by:
The “universal” in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) does not imply one optimal solution for everyone, but instead underscores the need for inherently flexible, customizable content, assignments and activities, and assessments characterized by:
Multiple representations of information—as there is no single method for
the presentation of information that will provide equal access for all learners
(Recognition Principle);
Multiple methods of action and expression—as there is no single method of
expression that will provide equal opportunity for all students (Strategic Principle);
and
Multiple means of engagement—as there is no single way to ensure that all
children are engaged in a learning environment (Affective Principle).
The article, Universal Design to Support Access to the General Education Curriculum, found at:
describes several ways UDL can help students with disabilities. For example, ·
- Using multi-sensory methods of receiving and expressing information can make curricula more accessible for students with and without disabilities.
- Providing adaptable materials and media that allow students to choose and customize formats suited to their learning needs in a number of ways.
- Using multiple media such as video and audio formats in order to provide a variety of ways to represent a concept and to allow students to access the material through their different senses.
11 comments:
Blog #1 response to CS_KL
The purpose of Assistive Technology (AT) is to design tools/products that give additional accessibility to individuals with physical or cognitive disabilities. When considering the purpose of AT, Lewis and Swanson make a valid point that NCLB does not make AT a critical priority (www.naset.org/resources4specialed). Although standards to control the quality of AT products are being developed by NIMAS, the reality is that many schools systems are still struggling with issues of funding.
Although funds are scared, schools need to be vigilant about how to parcel out the various funding resources available through alternative programs. Ten years ago, few schools had internet access; affluent districts were twice more likely to have it than those schools serving the low income schools, whether urban or rural. However, in 1997, Congress approved the E-Rate program as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Education and Library Networks Coalition (EdliNC, NEA, 2008) The E-Rate program was launched through collaboration between the U.S. Government and private companies’ sponsorship, such as Best Buy, Cox Communications, Verizon, and ENA (a leading Managed Internet Service Provider). Through E-Rate, companies have provided deep discounts on telecommunications services to schools and libraries according to the state’s income index. As a result, many schools in various states have taken advantage of E-Rate supported connectivity by installing state-of-the art technology. For example, Roane County School district (West Virginia) gets an 80% discount rate, allowing it to connect its entire classroom with T1 lines. The money that the school saves from E-Rates has made it possible for the district to save money and to lower its student-to-computer ratio five to one. As a result, Roane has made significant improvement in all of the state exams (reading, math, social studies and science). Over the past decade, this school district has received over $400,000 in E-Rate funds (www.edlinc.org/resources).
Although Assistive Technology is often synonymous to IDEA, funding is not guaranteed. School systems and parents need to develop skills in locating alternative funding sources, what to do when applying for funding, how to use it, places to contact for more information and locate software and equipment that is appropriate for the learning needs of children. In spite of the dismal funding from IDEA and NCLB to school systems, it is essential for educators to become sophisticated in their quest to make technology possible for children with disabilities. E-Rate is just one example of a funding source that could enable the presence of more hardware and software in schools, especially when attempting to educate students with disabilities so that they can develop effective competitive skills in the 21st Century job market (www.pluk.ortAT1).
The concept of universal design implies that environments and products should be usable for as many people as possible. The concept was developed as an architectural model in the early 1990’s in response to federal guidelines, American Disabilities Act (ADA). The concept of universal design, when applied to learning, implies that educational environments, curriculum and instruction be accessible to and usable by as many students as possible.
The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has essential principles that explain how it can and should impact school curriculum and instructional delivery to all students, including students with disabilities as examined in Diane and Colleen’s response to question # 2. For meeting the diverse needs of students with disabilities, implementation of the UDL principles. The principles can be stated in various ways depending on the source but they generally emphasize the need to provide:
Multiple means of Representation- Examples
• Summarize and exemplify “big ideas” to provide levels of cognitive access for complex concepts
• Clearly demonstrate the required or recommended steps to a task
Multiple means of Engagement –Examples
• Hands on tasks in cooperative learning groups, with defined goals for learning
• Pair students to provide reciprocal support for using multiple hardware
Multiple means of Expression – Examples
• Students use multimedia features to present their learning summary
• Students create a product applying knowledge gained from instruction
The UDL Model
• A strong yet flexible foundation to meet a broader range of diverse learning needs
• Accommodations needed by smaller numbers of individuals
• Modifications for a few
UDL Model illustrates the benefits of applying UDL principles in inclusive classroom settings
Reference: Schleef, L. Inclusive school communities: Accessible learning environments for all (2007). Retrieved: 2/10/08 (www.closingthegap.com).
UDL requires us to change our thinking as school leaders.
While we recently viewed a set of webinars that talked about some of the tools that UDL employs it is not just looking at specific tools, or technology but it IS a matter of us changing our thinking as educators moving away from traditional schooling and strategies.
UDL asks us to move away from thinking about our students as "cookie-cutter" and “standardized” students - students that leave our K-12 systems more alike than when they entered. Instead, UDL is based on the importance of individual student differences. Too often the “standard movement” overshadows our curriculum and instruction and we fail to take advantage of the unique characteristics that individual students bring, and mainly we fail to prepare them for their future.
Most of our schools place the disabilities with the students we teach because our entire system of IEP tracking asks us to standardize these students so that all can be taught in the same way with the same accommodations and modifications.
UDL brings forth a strategy that the school ALSO has the disabilities. Our curriculum and instruction is the first place to look for the disabilities. We should analyze our curriculum against the strategy of UDL so that our students are not placed at a disadvantage. One way is to look at the issue of accessibility.
In 2001, Congress passed the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act, designed to establish a common file format that publishers can use when creating digital material. The National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standards (NIMAS) are under development with leadership from the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) Stahl (2003) predicts that a common file format will benefit publishers, agencies, and individuals charged with producing accessible texts. Schools also will benefit by being able to obtain digital texts from publishers in a much more advantageous manner and in a format that will not be restricted to one specific type of technology. By using the strategies of UDL, curriculum writers can more easily add navigation, audio, and other multimedia elements to digital text, making our instruction much more responsive to individual needs and differences of our students.
As Diane and Angie noted, UDL is intended to create educational opportunities that have integrated differentiation as part of the central presentation, so through intention, educational experiences created through a UDL framework are already more accessible to all students and require less teacher effort to individualize the experience. As was discussed last week, the supports employed to assist students are only as good as the individuals responsible for implementation, and for so many reasons, many classroom staff do not have the training, time, or expertise to make the required changes to curriculum and instructional delivery to effectively meet the needs of all learners.
Mark pointed out the NIMAS and CAST, the proprietor of the Universal Design concept to learning, are actively assisting publishers to create materials from a UDL philosophy. This is absolutely the way to go since the reality is that as beneficial as a UDL approach has been, it will always be undermined by the resource restraints of school-systems. We know Gardner’s work as well as cognitive learning theorists have pointed educators to acknowledge students have widely varying strengths and needs – regardless of whether they carry an educational disability label or not (see www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent). But we still operate under a system designed for the mean (see Inglis’ 1918 Principles of Education, Conant’s 1959 The Child, The Parent, and The State or consider Horace Mann’s acknowledgements of the Prussian system and purpose of education as espoused in Plato’s Republic).
Our old educational system was sufficient when there was more homogeneity among pupils and America was an industrial society, but as we move forward in the post-industrial age, our educational emphasis needs to shift to promoting critical thinking and skill application. That’s why educators need to engage every student in their classroom at that individual’s level. UDL offers the potential to make that task tremendously easier as long as the educational publishers support the cause.
It is critical to keep in mind that UDL does not replace the need for assistive technology, as the National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC) notes on their website, but it levels the playing field and frees up resources to target specific student needs. And the potential to do this with new technology resources are endless (see Brown, J.S., & Adler, R.P. (2007). Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), 16-32, for more discussion).
Following a UDL philosophy, the teacher can focus energy on the instruction versus the modification, which numerous educators cite as a reason for attrition (couldn’t find my direct cite on that – but I know Kim has loads if you want specifics). It also holds the promise for increased achievement as CAST founder and Chief Scientist, David Rose, recently said, “A universally designed approach is the most practical way to deliver on the great promise of NCLB, not only for students with disabilities but for all students -- without exception and without retreat.” (http://www.cast.org/about/news/press/2006-08-02.html).
One thing is for sure – we can’t continue business as usual. The kids have changed, the goals have changed, the stakes have changed, so now it is time for the practice and funding to change to follow suit.
answer to blog#2 got lost into space.
Response to comments from Angie, Mark and Chris:
Educational technology is always much farther ahead of the American education system. There are many reasons cited for that in the responses of Angie, Mark and Chris. There appear to be a couple of themes that have surfaced in the responses. The first is a paradigm change for school leaders. I think it goes much deeper or higher than the school leader. The fact that our schools operate primarily on taxpayer funds is a real barrier in moving faster to technology implementation. School systems have enormous demands for their fiscal allotments. The second is that we are no longer an agrarian society and the old methods of access for students no longer are sufficient. Chris says, students have changed and our goals have changed. Now practice has to catch up. However, the problem always goes back to money. There are funding sources out there but they still are not sufficient to purchase, train and implement the extent of technology needed today for students with disabilities.
The resources for acquiring access to the technology are out there. The framework of UDL gives us direction and NIMAS supplies access for students with print disabilities.
The question becomes where and how do school systems come into the 21st century on the funding sources that currently exist?
Answer to Blog #2_MV
The Center of Universal Design (North Carolina State University) defines UDL as “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible.” UDL is a new approach to curriculum (goals, materials, methods, and assessment), believing that every learner is unique and brings to the classroom different strengths and weaknesses (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Today’s classrooms are diverse, very different from twenty years ago, housing students from every corner of the world, various socioeconomic backgrounds, and disability groups. However, the current curriculum (under NCLB) promotes the traditional curricula of “one size fits all.” As Dr. Rose stated in first webinar presentation UDL: How to ensure that all students meet AYP, that “books have disabilities too.” In the past if learning did not take place, it was the child’s fault (Rose,--- ) Fortunately, UDL is redefining this misconception and therefore calling attention to educators so that they can become more savvy in evaluating what are the instructional strategies that need changing and delivering instruction more effectively. UDL has been able to re-conceptualize the design of the curriculum by considering the diversity that each student brings (cultural, disabilities, economic, etc.) and supporting instruction that is more flexible and accommodating to the needs of diverse students (Rose & Meyer).
In terms of how can UDL impact school curriculum and instruction? Educators are beginning to use the UDL concept with response-to-intervention or RTI. UDL and RTI do not view school failure as always being the child’s fault. In RTI, students’ progress is monitored over time and with the use of multiple interventions. RTI uses curriculum-based measurement as a means to inform teachers about the effectiveness of instruction, guide decision-making, and intervention; this is a major key point in the convergence of RTI and UDL. As a result, teachers use RTI to evaluate instructional decisions and the efficacy of interventions before learners are qualified as “learning disabled.” In the past, teachers (general/special education) believed that if an IEP team waited long enough, many of the low performing students would eventually meet the eligibility criteria for learning disabled (Seelman, 1998). Unfortunately, many educators are still using outdated concepts, such as the discrepancy model, and forge through the special education eligibility by the third grade. These two models are compatible (UDL and RTI) because both support access, participation, and progress for all students in the general education curriculum. These two concepts are a beginning step towards improving the performance of students with and without disabilities. Both, UDL and RTI recognize that low achievement does not always translate into a disability, but rather poor performance may reflect a curriculum and text disability. In spite of new paradigms of learning and access to technology, the achievement gap is still significant among African Americans and Hispanic students (Batsche, Graden, Grimes, Kovaleski, Prasse (2005). Perhaps changing educators’ old habits into new paradigms may be more resistant than anticipated.
I think we can all agree that UDL is a curriculum design approach intended to lower the barriers that traditionally limit access to information and learning for many of our students. It is a theoretical approach that is based on research on the brain and effective teacher practices. UDL provides a framework for seizing the potential of digital technologies and using it to make curriculum more flexible and supportive of diverse learners. Strangman, N., Hall, T., &Meyer, A., (2003). Graphic organizers with UDL. Wakefield, MA: National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. Retrieved (2/21/08) from http:www.cast.org/publications/ncac/ncac_gouldl.html UDL differs from traditional curricula that presents a host of barriers that limit many students access and participation in the learning process. However, adopting a UDL approach requires systemic or school-wide change. We understand that systemic change requires carefully planned incremental steps implemented over time. As in any change effort, the necessary components required to implement a UDL approach within a district include a technology infrastructure, administrative support, teacher training and support, a new curriculum planning model, parent and community involvement, and, as Maltilde reminds us, creative funding. I think it is important to embrace the fact that UDL in traditional schools will require a change in the way we operate.
In Concord, New Hampshire, concepts of UDL were weaved into a school district from the bottom up. A special educator describes the initial experience by focusing on one student, one teacher, and one unit of curriculum at a time. After realizing success, the entire system was infiltrated at several levels. For actual video accounts of the experience and the impact that UDL has had on teaching and learning, go to http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter8.cfm.
We further understand that a key component of UDL is the premise that learning is distributed across three interconnected networks: the recognition network specialized to receive and analyze information (the what of learning), the strategic network specialized to plan and execute actions (the how of learning), and the affective networks specialized to evaluate and set priorities (the why of learning). When we apply what we know about the three brain networks and the nature of media, we can better accommodate student diversity.
My question is what does it look like when we apply what we know? Since teachers are responsible for the delivery of instruction I wanted to share a few examples of what UDL actually looks when incorporated into curriculum materials and teaching methods. In these examples, you will see multiple methods of presentation, options for participation, and means of expression serving as the three guiding principles of UDL. See examples below:
__________________________________
Example 1
(Sorry, due to spacing it appears to be really long but just glance over it.)
–TABLE 4–
Existing UDL Elements in "As the Tide Turns: Radio Broadcasts from the Front" Lesson Plan
UDL Teaching Method Supportive Lesson Feature(s)
Provide multiple examples. The teacher provides multiple web resources for each battle.
Provide multiple media and formats. The teacher provides suggested web resources that offer text, images, and audio.
Provide opportunities to practice with supports. The teacher scaffolds the research process by providing suggested web resources.
Offer flexible opportunities for demonstrating skill. Students have the opportunity to create a graphic organizer, write a news broadcast, or produce and record a news broadcast.
Offer choices of content and tools. Students can choose what graphic organizer to use. Some students are permitted to choose a task to complete, and along with it the tools. The lesson plan leaves open the possibility of working with a digital or hard copy version of the graphic organizer.
___________________________________
Example 2
Vocabulary Development: UDL Approach
Prepare
Read the assigned passage(s) and identify challenging vocabulary words.
Separate the words into three categories or tiers. Tier one words are basic words that don’t require much instructional attention. Tier two words are high frequency words that students do not know but need to acquire in order to have a rich vocabulary. Tier three words are words students need to know in order to understand a passage, but will probably not need in other contexts. Instruction is focused on tier two words.
Write student-friendly explanations for tier two words. Dictionary definitions often don’t have enough meaning for students. For example, the dictionary definition for a tier two word like “occurrence†might be overly complicated, but a simple definition like “something that happens†will have more meaning for students. Create student-friendly definitions by using everyday language to explain meaning.
To learn more about identifying, categorizing, and creating student-friendly explanations for vocabulary, read Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan.
Introduce Vocabulary
In the opening chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens begins to draw parallels between classes of society in France and in England and asserts that life during this time was one of extremes. Dickens uses a foreboding tone to describe the two cities, foreshadowing events that occur later in the novel.
Begin by introducing words before reading the first chapter:
• Incredulity
• Spiritual
• Favoured (you may want to explain British spelling conventions)
• Humane
Student-friendly definitions that could be used are as follows:
• Incredulity: If you have a feeling of incredulity, you are unable to believe that something has happened.
• Spiritual: A spiritual person is concerned with goodness and kindness rather than money or possessions.
• Favoured: means someone or something is liked more than someone or something else
• Humane: If you are humane, you are kind, generous, and want to do good deeds.
Record words
I think, for the most part, we have adequately defined UDL, but as Pamela and others have commented moving the concept into classroom reality proves difficult. The ERIC/OSEP Digest #E586 dedicated to UDL suggests that digital materials aren't the only way to provide accessible formats to students. In fact they believe teachers can easily provide "flexible" materials by accommodating individual student needs. The Digest stresses that good software does not guarantee they will provide the needed access. But do teachers and school staff have the time, resources, technology, knowledge, and central office supports required to understand each child's unique needs and to create the appropriate accessible materials? I think not.
Howard (2004) states "how can a teacher hold 30 hands with just two?" He stresses that the teacher's goal is simple. First, determine the basic idea that the student needs to learn. Second, decide the different ways to learn the idea. Lastly, figure out what the best way would be for the student to demonstrate his/her understanding. Sounds simple but clearly is eludes many of those who teach our students with disabilities.
Most importantly, we must remember UDL is equal access to learning not just equal access to info. NIMAS will not quickly solve the issues that exist.
UDL can impact the school curriculum and instructional delivery by providing equal access to the general education curriculum. Students of varying abilties and disabilties can benefit from the design of materials that make access to the general curriculum easier. School systems need to incorporate information on UDL as part of professional developemnet. Although some educators may be using the concept of UDL during instrucion (e.g., graphic organizers, talking books, etc.)they may not fully understand what UDL entails. I agree with Collen that the responsibility of incorpoarting UDL in instruction goes beyound school leaders. School systems, legally, have the responsibility of making sure that all students have access to the general education environment. I agree with Kim in that insufficient resources (e.g., outdated computers and limited computers), lack of knowledge (e.g., lack of professional development and knowledgeable staff to conduct professional development sessions), and time continue to be barriers that prevent educators from providing instruction that meets the needs of all students.
Some exellent comments were made, giving insight to many interesting topics. Although UDL has tremendous potential, educators also need to look at how teachers deliver instruction. UDL is only one part of the puzzle (Anderson-Inman & Horney, 2007)but it is not enough to 'turn around' challenged schools orraise student achievement. Students show the most improvement in schools where technology integrations is part of a bigger reform planthat deals with issues like content standards, teaching practices, curricula, administrative policies, home, and community involvement(sttp://www.wested.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619).
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