UDL: Test Your Knowledge Quiz

Because UDL is a framework versus a curriculum or a checklist, it allows for freedom and creativity in both lesson and environment design. UDL helps teachers make informed choices about everything from what posters to put on the walls to what strategies, resources, and tools they will use to teach a lesson. This is very different from structures that ask you to perform a specific list of tasks or tell you to design lessons with a narrow scope.

UDL is a framework, which means it is an organized collection of big ideas that lead to providing options. CAST provides a graphic organizer that they call The Guidelines, which are organized by three areas: 1) the principles, 2) the guidelines, and 3) the check- points. The principles of Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression name the three overarching groups.

To create a UDL-designed environment, you need to understand and act on six different areas: learner variability, access, flexibility, goals, rigor, and choice (Nelson, 2019). Learners learn differently.

The design of UDL is such that it can be applied in any instructional setting. No matter your subject area, you make instructional decisions. The UDL framework’s connection to how we learn versus a connection to a specific set of theories or types of practice allows it to be used in all settings.

Although UDL grew out of accommodating the needs of learners with disabilities, the continued review of neuroscience and classroom application has clearly identified UDL as a viable and helpful framework to use in any classroom, especially an inclusive general education classroom where learners of all ability levels are present.

When we think about recruiting the interest of our students, we can get stuck on the aspect of entertainment, but recruiting interest has more depth to it than simple entertainment.

When the learning environment is structured to help students get what they need, you can begin moving them toward the ultimate position of a resourceful, knowledgeable, strategic, goal-setting, purposeful, and motivated learner (Meyer et al., 2014).

Consider all of the ways students can communicate to us what they know. When we allow students only one way to demonstrate their knowledge, we risk not realizing what they have learned and what gaps may still exist.

The learning environment, whether face-to-face or digitally based, needs to be designed so that learners know they can learn there, feel welcomed while learning there, and are given opportunities to express what they have learned there. The learning environment includes the physical location where learning is taking place and the relationships that occur in that place. As such, the learning environment can directly contribute to barriers to learning.

Outside of specific templates and tools, a design cycle initially designed by Rao & Mao (2016), and updated by Torres and Rao (2019), provides overall guidance to educators as they design their lessons. The cycle lays out the phases an educator should move through when thinking through the design of a lesson.

Click here to see the full design cycle graphic.