WORKSHOPS 114 AND 124 on May 17
Notes taken by Judith Christensen
Conceptual Framework for Thinking about Articulating Universally Designed Post-Secondary Curriculum
UDL asks the questions why and what if:
Why UDL? The concept of UDL was developed from questions originally posed by architectural design – How do we design a building that is universal; that is, we build it once and ALL people can use it? We should do the same thing for instruction…How do we design and deliver instruction for ALL.
What if? So what if we universally designed learning? We can improve what we do for ALL students. We can improve the educational opportunities for students who struggle, students with disabilities – for ALL.
Our OBLIGATION is to prepare students to be informed citizens, to work with diverse populations, so that when they vote, they base their choices on considered research – they know how to obtain and evaluate information.
There should be TRANSPARENCY about how and what we teach. Students should know how we align our teaching to overarching goals, how successful we are etc.
Our teaching needs to reach ALL: disabled, bilingual, minority, age range, SES, gifted, etc. We should no longer restrict what we do to the middle two standard deviations. UDL does this by aligning curricula with UDI (Universal Design for Instruction) from the special education orientation and Differentiated Instruction from the gifted learner orientation.
In the post-secondary context, the question is should professors connect only to their fields of expertise or should they think about teaching in ways to accommodate a larger range of students. This is a challenge for many professors who were never taught how to teach (and many readily admit this)!
UDI “architecture” for instruction is based on the concept that instruction should need no further adaptation for all students. The side benefit is that by using this approach, non-disabled students also benefit. The main constraint is that no framework is ever complete or perfect!
Differentiated Instruction (Tomlinson):
Differentiate each of the following by (1) readiness, (2) interests and (3) learning styles
- Content: What we teach – books, lecture notes – both in terms of explicit and implicit curricula, the latter including values, collateral skills, etc.)
- Process: Formative or embedded assessment: Time to process understanding, Time to determine what students have learned, Time to adjust
- Product: Summative assessment. We all use this but do we think in terms of employing multiple assessment strategies to ensure that we capture the learning of all students? So we wouldn’t rely on one method. Don’t rely on exams; use papers, projects, presentations, etc.
Finally, UDL aims to build a classroom culture:
- Students should feel INVITED into the classroom.
- Students should have ACCESS to learning by giving them choices within the curriculum such as choices of content books, choices of articles, choices to submit drafts of papers, etc.
- Student’s learning styles should be included in your understanding of them. Use Garner’s Multiple Intelligence framework or other methods to do this.
Finally the “how” of UDL is to develop a Curriculum and Instruction Organizer. There are many examples of this to be found in the K-12 world, but this tool is now being incorporated into post secondary instruction. This tool allows you to align your course with the University and/or Department mission and specifies course outcomes, challenge level and processes.