Universal Design for Learning: Watch This Beauty Unfold with K. Behling and T. Tobin

Teaching for Student Success

How can you best help ALL of your students learn when they are all different? They each have their own complex lives and life histories. Listen to Kirsten Behling and Thomas Tobin talk about bringing the principles of Universal Design for Architecture to the learning environment to help manage this seemingly intractable problem. Universal Design for Learning promises to reduce more barriers for more of your students providing opportunities for more of your students to succeed. When adopting the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Behling and Tobin encourage faculty and staff to make one change at a time. Plus One Thinking. To start, use UDL principles to change just one aspect of your course or your learning environment at a time. Don’t try to overhaul the entire course at once. The result is almost certain to be failure and frustration for you and your students. Everyone will be unhappy, you will abandon UDL, and you will go back to your old ways reassured that everything was fine before. Except of course that you were failing too many of your students. Plus One Thinking reminds me of a good friend that plays the guitar. How many guitars does he need? Just One More! Maybe that is the attitude to successful implementation of UDL principles. Incremental. Begin with just one change……….