Universal Design For Learning (UDL)

As any teacher will say, it becomes clear (quite quickly) that differentiated instruction for you class is all but impossible.  Trying to create individual learning plans is an incredibly time consuming endeavor and in my experience is a one-way trip to teacher teacher burnout. To implement said plans a similarly mammoth task. 

That being said, the kids in my class deserve to be scaffolded as they require when problem solving.  Vygotsky’s ideas around the Zone of Proximal Development and the subsequent ideas of others working in the social learning discipline address the ideas of diversity within the classroom. 

“Design learning is all about trying to meet the diverse and variable needs of all students in your classroom.” (TKI)

“Planning can incorporate students “in the margin” while at the same time benefiting all students in the classroom. Addressing diversity through the UDL lens helps teachers accommodate individual differences through intentional instructional design, while at the same time providing resources for all students in the classroom.” (Addressing Diversity through the Universal Design for Learning Lens, Pilgrim and Ward, Nov 2017 )

Our team was introduced to the ideas of Sustainable Development Goals.  They are 17 goals that are globally recognised and are promoted by the UN in a teaching resource as “ a fun and engaging way to learn about the Sustainable Development Goals and what you can do to take action to make them a reality.”

Rob Clark, from Learning Architects, introduced our team to the overall concept and then to the idea of getting our students learning about and creating solutions for these issues.  And therein lies why I thought I might try to include UDL and the sustainability goals. I thought I would try to use webquests to engage and motivate some of my at risk students in literacy.

I hoped that by creating a webquest I could focus my learners on gathering, summarizing, synthesizing, and evaluating information in order to accomplish an authentic task set - in this case the sustainability goals.  A webquest takes a problem-solving approach using a clear structure that guides the learning processes for the at risk learners (and all learners) of Room 2.

I curated information from online sources and worked with a colleague who also thought this was a good way to use a teaching tool we had used previously - but his time with the fundamentals of UDL underpinning the why were doing it.  The photos above shows some of the notes I organised.

Although I think this is a fabulous idea, it wasn’t a huge success by my standards. It requires quite a large amount of time to gather all of the online resources from the students to easily access the concept.  It is an idea I will look at during the summer holidays to use in 2020. I have a few ideas to implement something using the resources provided in recent School Kits but in a webquest format. That will hopefully remove the barrier of finding enough resources at the interest level for my students.