Thank you to Dr. Laura Gonzalez with Integrative Community Studies for authoring this week’s teaching tips!
Although we all define and enact teaching in different ways, there are some common goals that unite our work as instructors. For example, we hope to create an accessible and engaging learning environment that offers something for each student, we hope to promote content acquisition and overall development, and we seek to document or demonstrate that growth (for ourselves and our gradebooks, but also for the students themselves).
How can we keep improving and refining our teaching to meet the needs of new generations of students? We’d like to (re)introduce you to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and in the next few Teaching Tips, we will expand upon its usefulness and benefits (https://udloncampus.cast.org/home).
Some people think of UDL as the guidelines that help us create online materials that are accessible to all (e.g., videos with captions, high contrast slides, text that is screen-reader friendly). While UDL does encompass those points of access, we’d like to turn your attention to its pedagogical applications. How can the foundational principles of UDL help you optimize access to each learning moment in your classroom? Let’s start with the idea of “multiple means.”
In UDL, we want to create learning experiences that allow each and every learner to engage fully, regardless of any particular attribute of that learner. Again, the focus is on crafting a learning environment that removes obstacles and barriers for all, not on making accommodations for one particular learner. This means designing many different ways for students to interact with course material, also known as “multiple means.” Let’s explore:
- Multiple means of engagement – Does your learning environment motivate students to explore what is relevant to them about the topic? Does it foster collaboration among students, leaving no one out? Does it provide feedback for learners about how they are engaging and encourage them to persist when challenged?
- Multiple means of representation – Does your learning environment allow students to access content in a variety of formats and ways? Does it encourage learners to connect new material to their existing knowledge? Does it support many ways of making meaning of the content?
- Multiple means of action/expression – Does your learning environment vary the ways that learners can respond to demonstrate their knowledge? Does it support choices of tools used for completing assignments? Does it teach them several ways to organize and express their ideas, so all learners can find one that works for them?
In the next newsletter we will explore the benefits and costs of using universal design, and we encourage you to keep thinking about how to create “multiple means” of learning in your course!