Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice

by David Gordon, Anne Meyer, David H Rose

Overview

In the 1990s, Anne Meyer, David Rose, and their colleagues at CAST introduced universal design for learning (UDL), a framework to improve teaching and learning. Based on new insights from the learning sciences and creative uses of digital technologies. UDL can help educators improve and optimize learning experiences for all individuals. In this book, Meyer and Rose, along with David Gordon, provide the first comprehensive presentations of UDL principles and practices since 2002. This new look at UDL includes contributions from CAST's research and implementation teams, as well as their collaborators in schools, universities, and research settings.

This book includes new insights from research on learner differences, how and how human variability plays out in learning environments; research-based discussions of what it means to become expert at learning; first-hand accounts and exemplars of how to implement UDL at all levels and across subjects using the UDL Guidelines; dozens of original illustrations and access to videos and other online features at http://udltheorypractice.cast.org

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989867405
Publisher:	CAST Professional Publishing
Publication date:	06/01/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	453,333
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Anne Meyer, EdD, is co-founder of CAST, a nonprofit education research and development organization. Building on a career-long interest in the intersection of curriculum design and educational psychology, particularly affect and motivation in learning, Dr. Meyer is a primary author of the principles of universal design for learning (UDL).

David Rose, EdD, co-founder of CAST, is a developmental neuropsychologist and educator whose primary focus is on the development of new technologies for learning. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 1976. He has won a Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Innovation in Education and the Council for Exceptional Children's Lifetime Achievement Award.

David Gordon directs CAST's publishing and communications programs. He is the editor of several books about education and the former Editor of the Harvard Education Letter. He received a National Press Club Award for his education reporting. He was an Associate Editor at Newsweek magazine.

Read an Excerpt

Universal design for learning

Theory and Practice

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By Anne Meyer, David H. Rose, David Gordon

CAST, Inc.

Copyright © 2014 CAST, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9898674-0-5

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CHAPTER 1

Re-Envisioning Education through UDL

In 1984 — the year we founded CAST — education, technology, and society were about to undergo enormous changes. Apple had just introduced the Macintosh, the first mass-market, user-friendly personal computer that offered a graphical user interface, display options, multimedia, and networking.

Microsoft took up the challenge, vowing to provide the software that would make it possible to put personal computers in every home in the world. The nascent Internet was just beginning to serve as a means of communication and document exchange, primarily in university and government communities.

At the same time, the landmark report A Nation at Risk, commissioned by the Reagan administration, decried the state of education in the United States and urged massive reforms to guarantee greater educational opportunities for all. This, in turn, coincided with a burgeoning civil rights movement to grant individuals with disabilities access to all areas of society, including education. The aspiration to provide all individuals with full and equal educational opportunities had been thwarted by the limitations of existing technologies, prejudice and low expectations — and other barriers that impede societal change. Now, as new technologies promised to be powerful agents for change, and society had become more open to diversity, it began to seem possible to turn the aspiration of free and appropriate education for all into reality.

When we were forming CAST in the 1980s, we envisioned the new technologies as learning tools that could be radically different from the medium of print. Because digital tools offered flexibility in how content was displayed and acted on, we believed that they could be powerful levers for students who most needed better leverage — students with disabilities. We had met each other at a children's hospital clinic where we were members of a multidisciplinary team of diagnosticians evaluating children with learning difficulties. Coming from this medical model, our early work focused on the problems of diverse learners, those "in the margins" who struggled with learning. We didn't question the diagnostic findings, but we were dissatisfied with our recommendations which seemed to have limited effectiveness.

Sensing the promise of technology, we sought to find, adapt, and even invent technologies that would help students with disabilities overcome the barriers they faced in their environments, especially in schools. The idea was to provide tools that would amplify areas of strength and support areas of weakness, specifically chosen and set up for each learner. A simple example of such a tool was the word processor and spell checker, which, for a learner who had great ideas but had difficulty with handwriting and spelling, could enable the writing of a coherent paper even as the learner worked to shore up those areas of weakness. Our work let us see first-hand the barriers these students faced and helped us to design solutions that helped them overcome the barriers. But much of our work took place outside of classrooms, in our offices and our Learning Lab. Integrating these tools into students' and teachers' lives at schools was a big challenge.

Over time we became restless with our initial approach. The more we followed our "patients" into their classrooms, the more we became convinced that our future lay not in helping students overcome the barriers they found there but in helping schools and educators to lower or eliminate those barriers. In the future that we imagined, more students would thrive in their schools and fewer students would have to be referred to clinics like ours and labeled "patients." The new technologies could go beyond changing students. They could change schools.

We began creating individual versions of digital books tailored to each learner's needs. Those with reading challenges needed to have text read aloud to them; those with limited vocabulary needed linked definitions; those with physical challenges needed to be able to turn pages with a single-switch interface; those with low vision needed large buttons that voiced their functions. Soon we realized that we could make a single digital book with all of these options embedded and with a customizable interface so that each learner could find the supports they needed. This led to a major breakthrough in our overall approach: the realization that the curriculum, rather than the learners, was the problem. By "curriculum" we meant the learning goals, the means of assessment, the teaching methods, and the materials.

Of course, the learner and the curriculum are just two definable parts of what is really a process or interaction. Strictly speaking, considering either part by itself — learner or curriculum — sets up a false dichotomy, as if we could assess either on its own rather than in relation to each other. Success, we realized, can only occur when the learner and the curriculum interact in ways that help them both improve at the same time. We knew that most curricula are designed and developed as if students were homogeneous, and the most common approach to curriculum design is to address the needs of the so-called "average student." Of course this average student is a myth, a statistical artifact not corresponding to any actual individual. But because so much of the curriculum and teaching methods employed in most schools are based on the needs of this mythical average student, they are also laden with inadvertent and unnecessary barriers to learning.

The traditional approach to learning — as we now understand it — was dictated by the predominant learning medium of the time: printed text. After all, standardization, uniformity, and affordable reproduction were among the chief advantages of the print revolution brought about by Johannes Gutenberg's invention in 1440. Printed text made mass education possible. But along the way, as proficiency with printed materials became synonymous with schooling and with literacy, education became narrowly defined by the print medium, and the typical variability of students was seen as a huge problem.

Furthermore, the fact that curriculum was designed for the mythical average learner, adept at navigating the print environment, created significant barriers for students in the margins, for whom the print-based environment simply did not work as the single means to access and express knowledge. These students showed up in clinics, where they were diagnosed and usually referred to special education. If they were fortunate, they were able to find alternatives to print in the form of adapted, retrofitted materials. This retrofitting process was arduous, expensive, and largely ineffective: solutions were created on a case-by-case basis, hardly an efficient way to address learner diversity.

The unnecessary barriers in traditional education extended beyond those that impeded students from accessing content and expressing knowledge. Even more important in motivating our work were the affective barriers. Students coming to school with curiosity and a strong desire to learn found that fire quenched when they were stigmatized — not because of anything that was in their control but because of inaccessible learning environments.

These environments blocked learning progress and, more significantly, blocked students from falling in love with learning, engaging with their creativity, and seeing themselves as experts in the making. Many of our early clients were students whose enthusiasm for learning had been overwhelmed by feelings of incompetence and discouragement that had generalized from a few areas of challenge to a sense of being altogether inadequate. This disengagement from the enterprise of school and damage to self-esteem was a pernicious result of a rigid system, one we felt could in fact be made flexible now that digital technologies had emerged.

A New Approach to Education: Universal Design for Learning

In the early 1990s, we shifted our approach to address the disabilities of schools rather than students. We later coined a name for this new approach: universal design for learning (UDL). UDL drew upon neuroscience and education research, and leveraged the flexibility of digital technology to design learning environments that from the outset offered options for diverse learner needs. This approach caught on as others also recognized the need to make education more responsive to learner differences, and wanted to ensure that the benefits of education were more equitably and effectively distributed. Our early work culminated in the 2002 publication of Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning, the first major explication of the concepts of UDL.

The education community began to recognize that many students — not just students with disabilities — faced barriers and impediments that interfered with their ability to make optimal progress and to develop as educated and productive citizens. Advances in neuroscience that gave us a much better understanding of the nature of learning differences between individuals and within individuals over time, as well as the increased power and flexibility of networked media, provided a foundation for our ongoing work. Today, the public mindset is beginning to shift away from a medical model of disability towards a recognition that context and self-awareness as a learner both play a huge role in whether any given condition is disabling or not.

Education has come a long way in the past two decades — but there is a long way to go. First, most learners are still being educated in standardized and uniform ways. Too many individuals continue to be under-challenged, stressed, or simply disaffected because of the narrow and rigid kinds of teaching and learning that schools continue to promulgate. Second, systematic application of UDL in our schools is just beginning. We have much to learn about effective, large-scale implementation. Third, the growing field of UDL needs a stronger research base to sustain it, and a broader set of innovative tools and methods to implement it at scale.

We are convinced that UDL has enormous promise. We have seen countless discouraged, unmotivated learners catch fire when given ways to learn that are optimized for their particular strengths and weaknesses. We have seen classrooms become exciting, collaborative hotbeds of learning for all students. We have seen students with dyslexia or other "print disabilities" read and write complex material in digital learning environments. We've witnessed students with significant intellectual disabilities learn to read and improve their comprehension skills when few thought it was possible. We have seen gifted students, all too accustomed to boredom, become stimulated by challenges that stretch their minds. We have seen teachers who have recovered a sense of how important and satisfying teaching all of their students can be. And we have seen school systems become communities of expert learning.

We offer this new publication in the hope that it will stimulate genuine change and make optimal learning a promise fulfilled — not just for some, but for all. Many signs suggest that the time is ripe. In the following pages, we highlight some of those signs — key developments that suggest that UDL will become a significant catalyst for far-reaching change.

Much has changed in the theory and practice of UDL, but it is worth highlighting an important piece that has not changed: the three core principles of the UDL framework. These principles articulate the basic UDL premise that to provide equitable opportunities to reach high standards across variable students in our schools, we must:

• Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

• Provide Multiple Means of Representation

• Provide Multiple Means of Action & Expression

Over the past decade CAST has expanded and developed these three principles. The changes reflect recent research on the learning brain, significant developments in technology, and experiences in classrooms. With input from the field, we have also expanded the three principles by developing nine guidelines, each with multiple checkpoints offering specific approaches to implementation. These checkpoints are researched and applied in classrooms around the world, and this information is helping us refine and enhance the framework.

UDL itself is ever-changing, a living concept evolving as a result of ongoing interaction among researchers, educators, and learners. With the help of UDL partners and practitioners around the world, we aim in this publication to capture the state of what we have learned, enriching the ideas with multiple exemplars and models of the principles in practice. Several kinds of changes are introduced and highlighted:

• Changes in the theory and practice of UDL,

• Changes in the environment of UDL, and

• Changes in the media used to convey UDL.

Changes in the Theory and Practice of UDL

An Updated View of Goals

In our early work on UDL, we focused on learning goals for individuals. We identified inherent barriers in the way some standards and goals were worded, especially when means were unnecessarily tied to goals. For example, the goal to "write a story" constrains the medium to text, while the goal "create a narrative" leaves the door open for any number of media. In both cases, the learner needs to understand and create the key elements of a narrative, but more diverse pathways enable more learners to succeed. To be clear, we know that sometimes a text-based outcome is required, in which case "write a story" is an appropriate goal. In that case, learners can still be given much flexibility and leeway as to their paths. Options to begin with images or sounds, to scaffold writing mechanics with digital tools, and to embed other media into text provide the flexibility needed to meet learner differences.

Of course, individual progress and specific learning goals are critically important for teaching and learning. In our current view, however, we see these competency-based goals in a larger context: they are components to serve the overall aim of education — to develop learning expertise in students, teachers, and systems as a whole. This broadened scope is necessary if we are to bring about true change. Essentially, the goal of education has shifted from knowledge acquisition to learner expertise. As we discuss below, becoming an expert learner is a process, not a fixed goal. We elaborate our latest thinking about UDL goals in Chapter 2, "Expert Learning."

From Individual Differences to Variability

Our early articulation of UDL focused on individual differences. We recommended looking at each learner's patterns of strength and weakness in each of the three kinds of neural networks in the brain as they pertained to a particular learning goal. While it is true that each learner is unique, this approach was limited in two ways. First, extensive analysis of each learner in multiple classes with large numbers of students was probably not feasible. Second, the focus on the individual points in subtle ways back to the old medical model of disability or difference, and inadvertently reinforces the concept of a dichotomy between "typical" and "atypical." And third, this approach suggests that students have the same "profile" regardless of context.

Recent advances in neuroscience have provided a different understanding of individual differences, characterizing them instead as predictable, normal variability that exists across the population. Brain functions and characteristics fall along a continuum of systematic variability. Thus differences are incremental, distributed, and dynamic rather than stable and categorical within an individual. This contradicts the idea of bright lines between an idea of normalcy and deviation from normalcy, and challenges the practice of diagnosing and labeling individuals.

From a practical viewpoint, it means that a UDL curriculum designer or teacher can plan for expected variability across learners and provide curriculum that has corresponding flexibility. The lesson or curriculum should then have the flexibility and affordances to amplify natural abilities and reduce unnecessary barriers for most students, and enable teachers to customize easily for each learner. Of course there will be outliers who may require on-the-fly individualization or innovative single solutions. But with most of the variability addressed in the curriculum itself, teachers will have the time and attention to devote to this. Further, instead of seeing variability as problem, we now understand it to be an actively positive force in learning for the group as a whole. We elaborate these concepts in Chapter 3, "The Variability of Learners."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Universal design for learning by Anne Meyer, David H. Rose, David Gordon. Copyright © 2014 CAST, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of CAST, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter 1: Re-Envisioning Education through UDL,
Chapter 2: Expert Learning,
Chapter 3: The Variability of Learners,
Chapter 4: Universal Design for Learning,
Chapter 5: The UDL Guidelines: A Framework for Implementation,
Chapter 6: Designing for All: What Is a UDL Curriculum?,
Chapter 7: Learning through Practice: Voices from the Field,
Afterword,
Notes,
References,
Acknowledgments,
About the Authors,
Index,