Implementing UDL: Goals, Teaching, and Assessment

Overview ¦ UDL Learning Goals ¦ UDL Teaching Methods ¦ UDL Assessment

Overview

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For UDL to become a reality in schools, we need flexible materials from curriculum developers, policies that support individualized goals, learning methods, and assessment and professional development practices that support educators in the UDL approach. Implementing UDL is ultimately the province of teachers. With true learning and engagement for each student as the goal, teachers must reframe learning goals, teaching techniques, materials and assessment, individualizing for each learner with the help of flexible learning tools and media.

No single curriculum or software program can provide all of the flexibility needed to create a successful UDL environment. This requires the assembly of a variety of tools, programs, materials, and Web sites that can be used in different combinations for different learners and for different teaching purposes. The flexibility comes in part from the collection itself, which enables varied approaches for reaching a given instructional goal and in part from the inherent flexibility of each component.

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UDL Learning Goals

If the criteria for success are the same for every student, some students are inevitably under-challenged while others cannot attain the goal. Yet increased adherence to standards-based accountability seems to preclude adjustable learning goals. Highly specific wording in standards limits flexibility. More generally worded standard statements provide teachers with the leeway to determine how that standard might best be interpreted to promote the greatest learning for each individual student. With the true learning goal in mind, teachers can adjust the required performance level, the medium for obtaining information or demonstrating knowledge, the content, or other variables when setting goals for individual learners.

For example, suppose the class goal is to demonstrate skill in research, including finding and citing sources, planning, organizing, and creating a cohesive, well-supported presentation of key ideas found. To reach this goal, a fifth grade teacher assigns his Social Studies class a five page research paper, referencing ten articles found in the library on the topic of whales. Not every student will be equivalently challenged by this assignment. Some students will be able to complete it with minimal effort. Others may struggle and achieve mediocre success or may find the assignment simply out of reach.

To reflect the true learning goal, the teacher could apply UDL to make the assignment, the methods for reaching the goal, and the performance criteria more flexible. He could keep the focus on whales and writing, and adapt the performance measures depending on the starting skill level of different students, in some cases increasing the length or the number of references, in other cases reducing both. More pointedly though, since the learning outcome is skill in "research" broadly, the teacher could encourage students to cite source material of all kinds (including multimedia sources, sources on line, conversations with experts) and to plan, organize, develop and produce a research report in one of a number of media (including oral presentations, a web site, a video or a sequence of slides with captions). Another way of broadening the goal would be to expand the allowable subject matter to include anything relating to the ocean. Such a flexible goal could encompass the skills, proclivities and interests of many more students, enabling each to find an appropriate and interesting challenge. See Chapter 5 of Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age (http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter5.cfm).

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UDL Teaching Methods

With performance criteria that are adjusted to match the skills, needs, interests and abilities of each student, teachers can vary both the methods and the materials they use to help students to meet the challenges before them. The key once again is alternatives. No one method supports or challenges all students and multiple methods and materials provide a broad enough base to enable all students to learn.

Recall the athlete working to build muscle. Physical fitness machines provide supportive structure for the rest of the body and resistance and challenge for the targeted muscle group. In a similar fashion, teachers need to insure that students are working at the right level and focusing on the right issues FOR THEM. This generally involves scaffolding or supporting some areas and providing challenge or resistance in others. Scaffolds support one or more aspects of a learning task so that attention can be devoted to learning the targeted skill. See Chapter 6 of Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age (http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter6.cfm).

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UDL Assessment

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Imagine Stephen Hawking, one of the preeminent physicists of our time, taking an end-of-unit multiple choice test in high school physics. He would fail it outright. Of course his performance would not reflect his knowledge of physics – which is extraordinary even among world-class physicists - but merely his inability to master the means of expression required by the paper-and-pencil test. Because of ALS, he could not hold a pencil to mark the items. This kind of test is not flexible enough to accurately measure learning in students like Dr. Hawking. It is also not flexible enough to measure learning in many other types of students. Take a student who is dyslexic. While his knowledge of physics might be adequate, the text in the test booklet creates a barrier. With many questions to read and a strict time limit, the dyslexic’s physics knowledge is poorly measured, being hopelessly confounded with the problem of reading text.

With UDL assessment, both of these students would find a more flexible universally designed version of the test, one that is malleable enough to more accurately test their knowledge of physics. With a universally designed version of the test Stephen Hawking could navigate on a screen and mark the answers via single switch input, the same way he now writes his books and research papers. The dyslexic student could have the questions read aloud via text to speech, and use a spell checker in composing his answers. In a UDL assessment, each student relies upon the scaffolds commonly used when learning and working in the subject area being assessed. In this way, just as the resistance is placed correctly during learning, (and the irrelevant parts of the task scaffolded if necessary) the actual learning is being assessed rather than the irrelevant parts that could impede performance on the measure but have no bearing on the student's learning in the skill or subject being assessed. See Chapter 7 of Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age (http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter7.cfm).

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