What is Universal Design for Learning or UDL?

Whether you know the term Universal Design for Learning or UDL, it can help achieve your goals. Your goal of engaged students with an enthusiasm for learning. Your goal of improved understanding and performance. And your goal to stop feeling ineffective and overwhelmed at reaching your most struggling students.

The reality is with teaching in the COVID era, you don’t have time to learn a new way of planning. If you are an educator, you already know a lot about UDL. Similar to the goals of Backwards Design, Universal Design for Learning seeks to meet every student by rethinking goals, methods, materials, and assessments. Let’s unpack U-D-L first.

UNIVERSAL means that the curriculum can be understood by every student, even though each student is unique and brings diverse life experiences, learning challenges, and attitudes.

UDL and Neuroscience

Neuroscience has discovered that LEARNING requires tapping into 3 parts of the brain for

• RECOGNITION – the content, or what, of learning,
• SKILLS and STRATEGIES – the how of learning, and
• CARING and PRIORITIZING – the motivation, or why, of learning.

So, in order to learn, students need not only knowledge, but skills, and enthusiasm for learning. You knew that already through your own lived experience. You can surely describe that ‘perfect’ lesson where one (or all) of those broke down and learning fell flat.

UDL helps you intentionally address all 3 in the planning stage – the content and how you present it, the learner’s skills and self-efficacy, and the curiosity and motivation needed to learn.

Do you feel like this might be more EduBabble and teacher shaming? How can teachers possibly meet the UNIVERSAL LEARNING needs of so many unique students?

Here’s where DESIGN comes into play!  Take heart!

UDL for Accommodation

Universal Design has been used in architecture and engineering for years to design accessible buildings, products, and services like ramps and automatic doors. Many accommodations address physical disabilities and are often retrofit after the fact. A principle called the curbcut effect means that wheelchair ramps can help not only people using a wheelchair but also people with bikes, strollers, and even Amazon delivery robots.  But how much more functional are these supports when planned for in the first place?

UDL checklists can be used to measure the accessibility of existing courses and materials to retrofit accommodations. For example, adding closed captions and transcripts to videos serves more than just hearing impaired learners. Research shows that 40% of learners use captions when they are in distracting locations, have auditory processing challenges, like multiple modes of input, or just want privacy.

UDL has 3 principles, 9 guidelines, and 31 checkpoints, which sounds completely crazy if you are a K-12 educator. Here’s an example of what not to do to illustrate that throwing in ALL OF THE THINGS without planning for learner diversity is not effective.

UDL Gone Wrong

As a university professor equipping teachers to teach during COVID, I scoured the Internet for ways to help them survive. If you are a teacher, you were probably doing the same thing. 

I’m also a K-12 teacher, so this quest was for myself as well as the teachers in my course. My local school district had a team of curriculum directors develop canned courses for our LMS. Their heart was in the right place and they used the principles of UDL. But In August, when teachers downloaded their courses for the year they were flattened by UDL gone wrong.

Our district had all the right motives and had read all of the books on UDL. They included multiple page, color coded student checklists for every week to encourage student self-management. They had multiple ways of presenting information. PlayPosit videos with embedded questions. PearDecks with embedded video, audio, and comprehension questions. PDFs to annotate using Kami. Discussion boards. Flipgrid video posts.  All. The. Tech.

They created daily LMS folders for each assignment – nested inside each topic – nested inside each unit…you get the idea. Every assignment was linked to Google Drive. Students only had to click through the folders in the LMS, open the document outside the LMS in Google Drive, make a copy, rename it, claim it, DO it, and click 4 or 5 more places to turn it in. 

Have you figured out by now most teachers needed a therapist (uh…I did), and most students just stayed in bed?

You may recognize this scenario. I share this experience not to make you relive nightmares, but to say that UDL has awesome ideas, but it’s more than a checklist to follow.

Allow the purpose to inform the technology, not the other way around. Moving from an essential idea or process to the tool that makes that possible lets you explore the many options and streamline the path for students.

How to get Started with UDL

Now that we have an idea of what doesn’t work, lets look at how we can start small and make a big impact on instruction.

1. Consider the purpose. Maybe students were recording ideas on Post-Its, forming groups, and organizing Post-Its on chart paper to share.  The purpose isn’t to learn a dozen new EdTech ways to move virtual Post-Its. The bigger goals are individual sense-making, collaboration, and presentation. Start there and allow the purpose to inform the technology. Maybe a breakout room, a discussion board, or if you still love Post-Its, a Jamboard or Padlet.
2. Streamline the tech tools. Feedback from students, parents, and teachers clearly indicates tech overwhelm. Use a few tools and explicitly teach students how to use them. Many students are using cell phones or have poor Internet connections. Or are sharing computers and do not have the time or mental bandwidth to learn new tech tools. Simple trumps flashy.
3. Be forgiving. Of yourself, and your students. Research confirms that the pandemic has shortened everyone’s fuse. Give yourself a break. Realize that you cannot possibly have perfect lessons to meet the needs of every student in retrofit mode. Rethink the purpose of assignments, simplify the tech, and keep it simple for your sake and theirs.

Inclusive Instructional Design

In the next post, we will look at Inclusive Instructional Design (IID) and how it is more than retrofitting assignments. IID is rethinking our approach before we break ground and getting the input of our most important stakeholders, our students.  There’s light ahead for all of us!

Universal Design for Learning is often a method or way of doing, whereas Inclusive Instructional Design is a way of thinking.

I’m writing this post on International Accessibility Awareness Day, the third Thursday in May. You can join the movement for digital accessibility at the Global Accessibility Awareness Day website here.