UDL - Universal Design for Learning

"I found myself in a classroom with nineteen ESL learners in South Boston. Our task was to guide the students through the creation of fictional characters with individualized traits and customs and, finally, to create fictional narratives about these characters. Seven of these children were not yet fluent in speaking or understanding English. Also present in the room were three Special Needs students, each with their own cognitive and developmental challenges."

"UDL assumes that the student diversity is the norm, that educators must prepare a flexible curriculum and pedagogy that meets all of the diverse students’ needs. The end result is a learning environment with high expectations for all learners."

This UDL blog for higher education, created by Dr. Shelley Kinash, provides unique insights and directions on how to universally design higher education learning environments.

"While university is challenging for every student, some learners find the difficulties nearly insurmountable. International students from non-English speaking backgrounds have difficulty understanding what their teachers are saying. Mature-aged students struggle to maintain energy levels while balancing study, family, and work. Students with learning disabilities are confused by the lengthy and complex readings. Students with sensory impairments such as blindness and deafness find many online resources inaccessible."

Link to the complete article in this blog where you will discover many more examples.

Who are Expert Learners? 

1. Strategic, goal-directed learners. They formulate plans for learning, devise effective strategies and tactics to optimize learning; they organize resources and tools to facilitate learning; they monitor their progress toward mastery; they recognize their own strengths and weaknesses as learners; and they abandon plans and strategies that are ineffective.

2. Resourceful, knowledgeable learners. They bring considerable prior knowledge to new learning; they activate that prior knowledge to identify, organize, prioritize and assimilate new information. They recognize the tools and resources that would help them find, structure, and remember new information; and they know how to transform new information into meaningful and useable knowledge.

3. Purposeful, motivated learners. Their goals are focused on mastery rather than performance; they know how to set challenging learning goals for themselves and how to sustain the effort and resilience that reaching those goals will require; they can monitor and regulate emotional reactions that would be impediments or distractions to their successful learning.