What Really Works With Universal Design for Learning

Wendy Murawski, Kathy Lynn Scott

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781544338682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Learn how to REALLY improve outcomes for all students How do we remove learning barriers and provide all students with the opportunity to succeed? Written for both general and special educators from grades Pre-K through 12, What Really Works with Universal Design for Learning is the how-to guide for implementing aspects of Universal Design Learning (UDL) to help every student be successful. UDL is the design and delivery of curriculum and instruction to meet the needs of all learners by providing them with choices for what and why they are learning and how they will share what they have learned. Calling on a wide-range of expertise, this resource features

• An unprecedented breadth of topics, including content areas, pedagogical issues, and other critical topics like executive function, PBIS, and EBD
• Reproducible research-based, field-tested tools
• Practical strategies that are low cost, time efficient, and easy to implement
• Practices for developing shared leadership and for working with families

1 UDL and Literacy: Providing Options for Language Success

Ruby L. Owiny Trinity International University

Anne Brawand Kutztown University

Janet Josephson Millersville University of Pennsylvania

Setting the Stage for UDL and Literacy

How in the world does Universal Design for Learning (UDL) apply to literacy? Doesn’t one just give a book or a pencil and paper to a student and voilà, they’re reading and writing? If you’re reading this chapter, chances are you picked up on the sarcasm. Of course, there’s more to literacy than that. Literacy, or English Language Arts (ELA), not only encompasses reading and writing, but also speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing, both digitally and in traditional print. Updated literacy standards (International Literacy Association, 2017) include all of these components. Besides having firsthand experience with the enormity of trying to cover each literacy component, you know the challenge of teaching to mastery! The goal of this chapter is to help that task feel less daunting by giving you tools to implement the principles of UDL.

This chapter will focus on reading and written expression, primarily language in its multiple print and digital forms. Within these sub-areas, there are several elements. Reading includes five elements: phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Written expression includes the rules of grammar, spelling, and mechanics, along with writing for various purposes and audiences.

ELA teachers must think in terms of “literacy,” which focuses on meaning. Le (2018) notes that there are multiple literacies and ways to find meaning, not just through printed text. Comprehension isn’t always clear in messages being sent and received in an increasingly complex world. So, then, how do we help our students develop this “critical literacy”? The answer lies in the Introduction to this book! Novak notes that one goal of UDL is to train students to be efficient learners and to make wise choices to meet their goals. Critical literacy provides students with the ability to seek answers to questions they have while reflecting about the world around them (Cutler, 2018), which is ultimately the goal of reading and writing.

Do you want more “bang for your buck”? Do you want to help all students in your inclusive classroom access the general curriculum and succeed? Research supports that application of UDL principles increases achievement in reading and writing across grade levels and abilities (e.g., Coyne, Evans, & Karger, 2017). The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 36 percent of the nation’s eighth graders were reading at a proficient level in 2017. Reading proficiency is defined as summarizing a text, identifying themes, making inferences, connecting texts to make meaning, and analyzing text features for comprehension (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018). We’ve got some work to do!

The word reading might conjure an image of sitting at a desk with a book on the desktop and a student bent over the book, reading intently. The word writing might make you think of a student with a pencil and a notebook, sitting at her desk, writing with perfect handwriting. Is this what you envision when you think about students participating in reading and writing activities? These are not inaccurate images, but let’s push the envelope a bit. What if reading could be in a bean bag with a friend reading a favorite blog, or writing could be a series of tweets while lying on a rug under a desk with a personal tablet? These images of reading and writing might be more in line with classrooms today. You might be asking how in the world UDL applies here. We’ll get to that! Keep reading.

Putting UDL and Literacy Into Practice: Representation

A major principle of UDL is representation, or the “what” of learning. Providing multiple ways of approaching strategic tasks (e.g., perception and comprehension of new material) guides the design of learning environments as part of the UDL framework (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014). Consider how the guidelines of representation (perception, language and symbols, and comprehension) play a role in developing reading and writing skills.

Perception

Tech Tip

Don’t know ASL? Have your students learn alongside you by using:

• The ASL app
• Lifeprint.com
• Signingsavvy.com
• YouTube!
• Signingtime.com

Encourage students to use more than one sense when engaging in literacy instruction, rather than having all instruction rely on written or oral language. Teaching literacy is a bit easier when we consider the bazillions (okay, maybe not that many) of types of media our students can access (e.g., vlogs, blogs, e-mails, print books, audio books, digital books, etc.). Text features, such as graphs, tables, pictures, and font sizes and styles, are all parts of text-based messages of various types. Here are some strategies for representation:

• USE VARYING APPROACHES TO DEVELOP FLUENCY when reading various texts (e.g., voice inflection to demonstrate emotions). Prosody, tone, and rate of speech are also important when teaching fluency. Students can record themselves to self-evaluate or peer-evaluate fluency based on the above characteristics.
• INCORPORATE AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE (ASL) for students to practice spelling or vocabulary words. It will reinforce English language skills while introducing a new language that will include students who sign as their primary language.
• UTILIZE TEXT FEATURES and other visuals such as charts and graphs to emphasize points. Allow students to use text features in their work, too, rather than requiring only narrative descriptions. Digital versions also allow for enlargement of text, enhancing details of pictures, or text-to-voice. You may even want to introduce the “Accessibility” features on most smartphones. Many individuals do not even know they are there!
• INCORPORATE THE SENSES when appropriate. Using a variety of senses to help with description, narrative, characterization, and perception can make work far more interesting. Use a variety of lighting, fidgets, and seating with varying textures, or aromatherapy during writer’s workshop or independent reading to help students engage more of their senses.

Language and Symbols

This is where literacy and UDL really get heated up! When we think about representation in terms of language and symbols, we plan for instruction that provides multiple ways for students to interact with content-specific vocabulary and symbols. This includes idioms, slang, and notation symbols, to name a few. In addition, we must provide opportunities for students to work with the way words and phrases are arranged (syntax), which is necessary for all content areas (e.g., mathematics) and various literary forms (e.g., poems, fiction, nonfiction, including content-area specific texts). We must explicitly teach those forms to our students while also teaching the structures within those forms, including tables, graphs, etc. Decoding of text, in addition to providing opportunities for students to learn in their native language, is also important. Finally, we must provide students with opportunities to engage with content through multiple media. Here are some concrete tips for providing various methods of representation with language and symbols:

• CREATE A WORD WALL FOR PERTINENT VOCABULARY in which students take turns writing the word and representing the word graphica...