UDL Application: Rethinking Our Practice

The UDL framework shifts educators' understanding of learner differences. It challenges us to rethink the nature of curriculum materials and endow them with the inherent flexibility necessary to serve diverse learning needs. UDL also opens the door for rethinking how we teach. With the option to individualize learning supports and focus the challenge differently and appropriately for each learner, teachers must be very clear about the learning goals they set for any given assignment or unit. Only when goals are clear can we select and apply flexible materials to support and challenge each learner. Similarly, clear goals help us focus our assessment of student progress in an accurate and useful way. The UDL framework can guide these three pedagogical steps, helping teachers to set clear goals, individualize instruction, and assess progress.

Setting Clear Goals

The first step, setting clear goals, seems on first glance to require little thought. After all, learning standards spell out what students need to learn, and curricula include summaries of the material to be covered. But looking through the UDL lens, we see that goals are often inadvertently embedded in the means for achieving them. Consider this goal: Every student will be able to write an essay in cursive. Though this degree of specificity would be quite unusual, the point is clear; as stated, the goal is so embedded in the method necessary to achieve it that many students could not possibly succeed. Those with physical disabilities, spelling and handwriting difficulties, and problems with organization could not even participate.

We can use the UDL framework to rethink this goal and analyze its true intent. Do we really care whether the essay is produced in cursive? Isn't organizing and composing the essay the real purpose? Once we clarify the overarching goal, we can reword it broadly enough to include all students, knowing that supports and scaffolds will be needed to help some students participate, and extra challenges will be needed to move other students to new levels. By simply removing express reference to the medium and stating the goal this way—“Students will write an essay” —we open the door for more students' participation and success. The clear goal helps teachers determine how to choose and apply the flexibility inherent in UDL learning materials. Chapter 5 provides a more detailed discussion of this topic.

Individualizing Instruction

The next step in paving every student's path to high proficiency is to provide instruction that helps each achieve classroom goals. Diverse digital tools and materials, with UDL flexibility built in, allow teachers to provide a degree of individualization impossible with traditional instructional materials. The instructional strategies articulated in UDL's three principles can help us make educated and scientifically grounded choices from the many alternatives available. We discuss this in depth in chapter 6.

Assessing Progress

Good pedagogy also includes effective and ongoing assessment, not only to measure a student's progress, but also to adjust instruction and to evaluate the effectiveness of methods and materials. Ongoing assessment enables teachers to ensure that the goals they have set and the methods and materials they are using continue to support students' progress. As you will read in chapter 7, UDL provides teachers with the tools they need to align assessment with each student's instructional goals, materials, and methods.