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"The stresses and realities of teaching suggest that we will not, or can not, do a bottom-up design for every lesson every year. But if we start by designing one unit or project with a wide variety of needs in mind, we begin building a resource we can build upon and adjust for new learners in future years."

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Reach all students with digital media

When Alice Mickland, a fourth-grade teacher at Grover Cleveland Elementary School, looked at her class roster, she was immediately struck by the diversity represented on the list. While the genders were balanced, several students were immigrants from other countries; three students had identified special needs in math, reading, and language; one student spoke very little English; two others were identified as gifted and talented; a group of others were identified as having basic skills deficits; and another student was visually impaired and required special equipment to see and read. Alice was overwhelmed by the combination of students and was uncertain how she would be able to help every student master the content and skills in the district and state standards.

The good news for Alice and other teachers is that embracing the tenets of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can help them achieve daunting tasks like the example above. UDL provides an approach to teaching and learning that enables teachers to reach all students in their classrooms despite the great diversities that exist. The first step in a UDL approach is to take a close look at the roster and find out as much as possible about the students: their needs, how they learn best, and what their strengths are. In the second step, teachers learn and implement UDL principles and practices into their teaching to address the learning needs of all students in their classrooms.

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) began developing the UDL model in 1984 in response to the needs of physically disabled students. CAST began by designing and building appropriate schools and classrooms. Over the years, as more and more special needs students were included in "regular" classrooms, the model evolved to address both the physical needs and the learning needs of all students. UDL is not a panacea for diverse learning; rather, it is a framework for us to keep all students in mind as we plan learning experiences.

Flexibility Is the Key

UDL is as much a way of thinking as it is a way of acting. It requires a fundamental shift away from the idea that teaching and learning should be uniform. A "one size fits all" approach is the antithesis of UDL thinking. In the UDL model, the teacher and the curriculum must be flexible enough to accommodate diverse student needs, a polar opposite to traditional thinking that requires students to bend to the needs of the curriculum.

Students in today's classrooms are culturally and ethnically diverse, and learners often have a wide range of ability. The UDL model seeks to transform classroom learning by embracing and capitalizing on these differences rather than marginalizing them. UDL suggests three areas that teachers look at to modify their instruction: representation, expression, and engagement.

Representation

Ideas are presented in multiple ways. This differentiation provides students with flexible options for learning the information being introduced. For example, in addition to reading the information as text, students might see the same ideas presented as a video, podcast, or slide show.

Expression

Students have many options for expressing their knowledge. Using authoring programs allows students to combine media forms to construct new meaning from their ideas.

Engagement

Teachers engage students in many different ways to capitalize on their various abilities and strengths. The availability of student authoring tools enables teachers to design work in more flexible ways than in the past.

The Power of Digital Media

Flexibility and diversity are essential to reaching students with different needs, and digital tools are ideally suited for the task. Computers, the Internet, digital cameras, and authoring software are a few tools teachers can use to tailor experiences to student needs more than traditional media.

Digital media are inherently supportive of the UDL approach and can easily be implemented into instruction in the areas of representation, expression, and engagement.

Representation

Students can share information through multiple forms of media and present information in ways that appeal to more than one mode of learning. Using digital media, some students might listen, while others read. Still others might benefit from rich color and the emphasis that digital media can place on key ideas.

Digital media allows content to be presented in different ways-text, sound, video, and animation. Content can also be easily presented at different levels of understanding.

Expression

Use of digital media promotes connections and interactions. For example, after reading a story, students can email the author or go to the author's site to learn more.

Learners can select from many formats to represent what they know and communicate it to others.

Engagement

The array of digital media is plentiful and ever-changing through software and Internet sources, so the supply of resources continues to grow and remains current rather than being static and outdated.

Students use many of the same tools for classroom work that they use outside of the classroom every day, making learning and classroom time more relevant to their lives.

UDL Design from the Bottom Up

As teachers think about how to help all students learn, UDL suggests a bottom-up design model that matches each activity and experience to the needs of the students. Using a bottom-up approach means that we are less likely to have a student's needs go unaddressed, since each student is considered as a foundational part of a lesson rather than as an afterthought. For example, a UDL-designed lesson for a classroom with second-language learners would include materials presented using audio and visual media, rather than text alone. Similarly, for those gifted and talented students, additional in-depth material from books, Web sites, and other sources would also be available.

The stresses and realities of teaching suggest that we will not, or can not, do a bottom-up design for every lesson every year. But if we start by designing one unit or project with a wide variety of needs in mind, we begin building a resource we can build upon and adjust for new learners in future years.

Digital Media Projects for All

Embracing the UDL approach means that teachers like Alice will not be designing lessons that force students to adapt to her ideas but will instead be designing lessons that are both engaging and flexible from the start.

The following example shows a UDL design for a digital media lesson that a teacher in Alice's position might consider. The purpose of the lesson is to have students demonstrate the importance of the six simple machines in our lives.

The teacher's role in the UDL lesson is to make sure all students are guided to appropriate content and are able to play a role in creating a presentation that teaches the content to others. Much of the teacher's work takes place before the project begins as she finds good Web sites, library resources, text materials, videos, and so on. During the lesson, the teacher spends time interacting with groups and individuals to help them successfully complete the task.

This project may not seem all that different from a traditional digital media project. The preparation for the project makes the difference. Multimedia materials on different levels enable many students to better understand the key concepts. Allowing students to choose the media to represent their ideas and select the methods of presentation requires skillful planning and coaching.

Universal Design for Learning embraces good pedagogy and challenges us to think about our students as individuals with unique needs and strengths. Our job as teachers is to challenge all of our students to learn new content and skills, using flexible methods that provide the opportunity for everyone to succeed.

Alice's task is still daunting. UDL does not make her job easy, but it does make it manageable by helping her think more flexibly about her practice as a teacher. As she progresses throughout the year, Alice will come to realize how just thinking differently about reaching all students will change the way she teaches and the way students learn.

by David Cochran, Ed.D.

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When Alice Mickland, a fourth-grade teacher at Grover Cleveland Elementary School, looked at her class roster, she was immediately struck by the diversity represented on the list.

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Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Loui Lord Nelson, author of the bestselling UDL primer Design and Deliver . Loui's here to share some real-world tips for getting started with UDL in your classroom.

Even if a school isn't planning to switch to a UDL approach, can an individual teacher still adopt UDL principles in the classroom? What are some practical things she can do to get started?

Begin by being reflective. Look at your lessons. What do your lesson goals look like? Are they written in a way that lock your students into using specific tools? For example, you need your fifth grade students to create a story that demonstrates their understanding of clear event sequencing. Notice I wrote "create." This lowers the potential barrier some students face when using pencils or pens by opening up the opportunity for them to use digital supports or even writing partners. UDL is all about providing options and opportunities to our learners so they can experience learning in ways that have meaning to them, thus allowing them to build their abilities to demonstrate their new knowledge and skills.

Once you've looked at your goal, check to see how you're formatively assessing your students. Formative assessment is how you investigate your instructional design and make sure it is supporting your students' growth. That's why we don't grade formative assessments. They help us navigate our next instructional steps, and when well-constructed and provide process-focused feedback, they give our students their own piece of navigation; helping them see whether they're on course or what they need to do to correct their course.

These two suggestions may not sound very "UDL" because I haven't talked about the vocabulary of UDL: the principles, the guidelines, the checkpoints. But I actually did. The principle of engagement and the guideline of providing options for sustaining effort and persistence ask us to heighten the salience of goals and objectives while varying demands and resources. The construction of that goal is key to making the lesson topic important and accessible to the learners. And the principle of action and expression through the guideline of options for executive functions guides us to enhance our students' capacity for monitoring progress. Formative assessment is one way students can participate in monitoring their own learning.

Say a busy teacher loves the idea of UDL but is intimidated by the time investment involved in changing the way she teaches. What advice would you give to that teacher so she can support every learner without burning out?

We all love saving time. Using past lesson plans. Sharing resources. Leaving a professional development with ideas or tools we can use the next day. We each have our own ways of saving time. My way is to start small. Focus on one guideline or checkpoint and use that to make a change to your learning environment that you can sustain. That way, there's no extreme investment of mental-energy or physical time.

Let's say you decide to begin with the principle of representation and you focus on providing options for perception. You think about how you typically display information in your classroom and decide to make a change. I'll give a low-tech and high-tech example.

Example 1: Your school doesn't have a lot of technology. You use your overhead projector each day to provide your students with their lecture notes. You normally write with a black marker. Today, you decide to use different colors to emphasize different points and you provide your students with colored pencils so they can do the same on their papers. You have also realized that some of your students seem to miss the key concepts and vocabulary words when you give notes even through you talk about them. You decide to write those words with bigger letters. You even circle them while you're talking about them. It's a simple change that feels comfortable and you can begin to use in a variety of your lessons. Students have the option of using the colored pencils, but you encourage each of them to individualize their notes to emphasize the key points.

Example 2: Your school has an interactive white board in each classroom, but you're intimidated by the thing. Every day, you project information on it and you've recently become more comfortable in using the pens to underline information that's projected. Now, you've decided to dig into the resources that come with the software. With the help of a teacher partner, you learn about the wide collection of still photos and realize that there are plenty of examples you can use for your lesson on comparing and contrasting. You can choose to have the name of objects show up below the picture or have the students move the word so it's under the correct object. Instead of looking at a list of words, your students can see the words and associated pictures. You begin to brainstorm other ways you can use those still pictures and realize there are plenty of concrete and abstract concepts you can demonstrate with them.

These are two very small ways teachers could provide some initial options for perception. Hopefully, both teachers would move forward and expand their repertoire of options. The overall focus of this response, however, are the three points I shared above: (1) Focus on one guideline or checkpoint, (2) use that to make a change to your learning environment, and (3) sustain that change until it becomes a natural part of your practice.

What are some ways that implementing a UDL approach can actually make a classroom more efficient in the long run?

There are two pieces here. Underlying UDL is the concept of variability. That concept addresses the fact that our learning brain operates differently based on the context. Context is not only how the information is delivered but also the design of the environment. Your environment deeply influences how you learn and that environment is ruled by how you interact with it, meaning, how you feel.

Every classroom in the world experiences variability. Even if every child looked identical, they would not learn identically. Moving from that point, most teachers have students who have learning challenges, aren't reading on grade level, appear to flow along with everyone else, learn concepts more quickly than their peers, and everything beyond and in between. This is precisely why UDL suggests we design our learning environments and lessons to provide students with a variety of ways to access the skill or information and then a variety of ways to demonstrate how well they've learned the skill or information. The first part of that last sentence talked about the learning environment and that's where the efficiency comes in.

The learning environment is where you are teaching. Most of the time that's in a specific classroom, but sometimes you're leading instruction in other locations. It's still a learning environment and you still have a lot to do with it. Making learning approachable for all of your students is a great place to start. As you learn more about and begin to implement strategies associated with the engagement guidelines, your students become more connected to the learning environment and to learning. They feel safe to explore, make mistakes, receive guidance, work with others, check on their own understanding, identify ways to maintain their motivation, and reflect on their own learning. When learners become purposeful and motivated, two skillsets CAST identifies as expert learners, they take a step toward self-direction and efficiency of learning. That creates a more efficient classroom.

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Thanks to Loui for being here today and sharing her UDL wisdom with us!

Preview a reader-friendly guidebook on how to use the three key principles of UDL-Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression.

See Loui Lord Nelson's picks for best online UDL resources.

Read the post: Your first step toward a UDL-designed classroom

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"Start Small": A UDL Q&A with Loui Lord Nelson

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Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Loui Lord Nelson, author of the bestselling UDL primer Design and Deliver . Loui's here to share some real-world tips for getting started with UDL in your classroom. Even if a school isn't planning to switch to a UDL approach, can an individual teacher still adopt UDL principles in the classroom?