Tackling Universal Design for Learning To Make Teaching Easier
Imagine you’re hosting a party with one goal in mind: Everyone who attends enjoys a drink. To make sure you meet this goal, you whip up a batch of egg creams with milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup. There’s one for everyone who’s coming to your party—but it’s the only drink available. Will you meet your goal by offering just one option? What about lactose-intolerant guests or those who don’t like fizzy drinks? Will they enjoy the drink you provided?
While this analogy might sound silly, it illustrates a phenomenon that happens in classrooms all the time when educators use one-size-fits-all solutions to teach their students. Luckily, with frameworks like universal design for learning (UDL), teachers can branch out from that cookie-cutter instruction to meet the needs of all their students.
What is universal design for learning (UDL)?
Universal design for learning is a research-based educational framework designed to improve and optimize teaching for diverse learners. It’s so important that it’s mentioned by name in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which lays out the way national and state governments can help students succeed in school.
UDL focuses on flexibility and goal-setting to ensure that all learners have the options and choices they need to work toward grade-level standards. Without this flexibility, many students don’t have pathways to help them access learning with their peers.
But UDL is more than just a curriculum framework. It’s also a belief that all students are capable of learning and reaching grade-level milestones. With intentional instruction methods, educators can help all students succeed.
3 principles of UDL
CAST, a nonprofit education research and development organization, created guidelines to help educators implement UDL in their districts, schools, and classrooms. These guidelines fall into three categories: Engagement, representation, and action and expression.
Engagement
The engagement UDL principle looks at the brain’s affective networks and why students learn. The idea is that there isn’t just one way for students to engage with content or activities that’s perfect for all learners. Instead, students need a variety of engagement opportunities during a lesson or unit to connect with the content. Some ways teachers can spark engagement include:
Promoting student choice and autonomy in lessons
Making lessons relevant and valuable for students
Minimizing distractions while students learn
Creating an accepting and supportive classroom environment
Representation
The representation UDL principle focuses on the brain’s recognition networks and what students learn. Each student perceives and understands information differently. This happens because of their preferred learning styles or differing abilities like blindness, deafness, or dyslexia. The more ways teachers can differentiate content and activities to share information in multiple ways, the more accessible it becomes to their students. Some ways teachers can promote representation using the UDL framework include:
Offering audio and visual options for giving and receiving information
Promoting understanding across languages, especially for English language learners (ELLs)
Illustrating points through multiple forms of media
Activating or building background knowledge on all topics
Highlighting patterns or relationships among texts, media, and ideas
Action and expression
The action and expression UDL principle focuses on the brain’s strategic networks and how students learn. Showing what you know is an important part of learning. Educators assess their students to discover what they’ve learned and where there are still gaps in their knowledge. But a final summative exam or a standardized test isn’t the only way to collect this information.
Students demonstrate their skills differently based on certain factors like movement impairments, language barriers, and things like executive function disorders or anxiety. When teachers provide varied ways for students to display their knowledge and skills, they get a better idea of what students really know, not just how well they can take a test. Some ways teachers can vary action and expression methods with UDL include:
Adding performance tasks as a type of formative assessment
Varying the ways students can respond to and navigate content and activities
Providing access to tools and assistive technologies
Teaching students how to set goals
Providing in-the-moment responses to help students monitor their progress
Benefits of using UDL frameworks in the classroom
According to the Pew Research Center, 15% of the PreK-12 U.S. public school population during the 2021-22 school year was considered students with disabilities. In that same period, over 10% of the K-12 population of U.S. schools was considered ELLs. That’s a quarter of the school population alone that needs at least some type of assistance in the classroom. Adding UDL frameworks to your curriculum can accommodate diverse learning needs by:
Making learning more accessible in general education classrooms so all students can learn together.
Giving students more than one way to interact with content and activities to help them identify their strengths and improve their weaknesses
Reducing stigma by providing differentiation opportunities for all students, not just those labeled with special needs.
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What does Universal design for learning look like in practice?
It’s not surprising that lessons and activities incorporating the UDL framework look different in different classrooms. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, after all! But just because no two UDL implementations are exactly alike doesn’t mean that there aren’t some common themes that they all share. Classrooms that use UDL likely have five things in common:
All students know the goal of their lesson, task, or assessment
Students have flexible options to do their work or show what they know, intentionally designed by their teachers
Students have access to differentiated resources from the start of a lesson
Teachers work with students to help them guide and internalize their learning
Teachers are committed to expert learning for all students
Tips for tackling Universal design for learning
How do you get your classroom to look like those using UDL frameworks? Here are some tips to start rolling out implementation:
Focus on flexible materials and firm goals
All learners need options and choices to stay engaged. But having tons of choices in the classroom doesn’t mean you’re using universal design. UDL’s real power happens when you recognize barriers preventing your students from learning and eliminating them with intentional lesson design.
The first thing you can do is identify the firm goals of your lesson. Ask, “What do all my learners need to know and do?” Then, ask, “What’s preventing them from getting there?”
You may turn to your standards to help set these goals. For example, one of your anchor standards for comprehending text may be, “Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics to build knowledge or compare the approaches the authors take.” This is your firm goal. How are you going to make sure all students reach it?
Providing a printed copy of two texts in English isn’t enough. This could exclude students with visual impairments or students who don’t speak English fluently. You could eliminate these barriers by providing texts and multimedia resources on the same topic and allowing students to choose the ones most interesting to them. Newsela text sets and collections are great resources for this type of differentiation.
This standard also doesn’t mention how students have to show that they understand how the texts address similar themes. This means you can let them choose how they want to show what they’ve learned. They might choose to complete a writing prompt, make a Venn diagram, or produce a podcast episode.
Find balance with your differentiations
In classrooms where students have varying reading levels and learning needs, leveling texts can be a game changer for teachers. Reading appropriately complex texts lets students access grade-level curriculum and make progress in reading. According to educator and thought leader Timothy Shanahan, choosing when to provide different levels of text depends on the learning goal.
If your goals are to help students grow literacy skills or build comprehension strategies, providing complex texts at or above grade level in teacher-guided reading instruction and small peer groups can help. If your goals are for students to build background knowledge on a topic or read independently with fluency and accuracy, reading less complex texts at a reading level that’s just right for them could be a helpful option.
UDL is a helpful framework, but knowing when to offer a variety of less complex options and when to provide more scaffolds for reading at grade level is critical for helping all students learn and reach their goals.
Guide students' decision making
Student choice and autonomy are wonderful things in the classroom, especially when using UDL frameworks. But decision-making isn’t an inherent skill. We need to teach students how to make responsible decisions that support their learning goals. We also need to teach them how to self-assess and self-reflect to see if their choices are helping them reach their goals.
As your students work in groups or independently, move around the classroom and ask them about their choices. Questions like “What did you choose to read?” or “Why did you choose that activity?” help them make connections between their choices and the learning outcomes. It also lets you provide feedback that helps them make more effective choices in the future.
For example, if four students choose to do group work, but they’re not actually working on the assignment, that’s an opportunity to guide their decisions. You may use that opportunity to say something like, “It seems like this choice isn’t working for you today. Why don’t we check in and pick something different that will help you succeed because I know you’re capable of success.” This is what expert learning is all about!
Implement UDL best practices with Newsela and Formative
UDL helps avoid one-size-fits-all solutions and ensures that all students have access to high-quality education. Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, Newsela Science, and Formative all have resources and scaffolds to support UDL frameworks and give students the support they need to succeed. Some features most helpful for UDL implementation include:
Formative’s 20+ question and activity types, which allow students to intake information and respond in a variety of ways.
Newsela’s read aloud mode, which lets students hear written content in spoken form.
Newsela’s leveled texts, which provide all news and nonfiction content at five reading levels, including primary sources.
Newsela’s text sets, which include texts, videos, and other interactive content themed around a common topic.
Newsela’s Lesson Sparks, which provide instructional support for teaching content and lessons to all students.
Newsela’s Spanish-language content and Formative’s language settings, which allow you to adapt instruction for ELs and bilingual learners.
Formative’s real-time feedback capabilities, which allow you to adjust lessons and differentiate instruction in the moment based on students’ responses.
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This article was first published in May 2023 and has since been updated to reflect new research and best practices.