There are three overarching areas of consideration in CAST’s Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines: Engagement, Representation, and Action and Expression. The focus of this first article around those three areas will be on Design Multiple Means of Engagement.
That focus area calls attention to three key elements of this section, with the word “design” emphasizing the idea that achieving academic goals requires attention to how teachers design, or architect, learning experiences. “Multiple means” highlights the importance of teachers providing multiple opportunities, not just one undifferentiated option, for learners. Finally, in terms of “engagement,” teachers must thoughtfully consider how students will actively engage in the learning.
Within each of the UDL Guidelines’ overarching areas of consideration, there are three subcomponents: Design Options for Access, Support, and Executive Function. Each of these sections allows for opportunities to leverage technology as a way to achieve identified outcomes.
Access: Design Options for Welcoming Interests and Identities
Here, student access to the learning is addressed, and teachers are called on to design options for welcoming varied interests and identities. The introduction to this guideline on the CAST website states, “Creating a learning environment that welcomes learners’ whole selves is a critical step to ensuring learners are able to access and engage with the learning process.”
To do this, we need to allow students choice and autonomy in the learning experience, while also making sure that we optimize relevance, value, and authenticity. These two concepts go hand in hand since one option will never fit all interests in a classroom. By providing choice and autonomy in the learning experience, students are presented with a greater likelihood of finding and forming connections that matter to them.
This guideline also calls out the need for joy and play in the learning process. For students to fully engage, learning needs to provide some degree of joy, which elements of play can help bring about. Finally, learning designers need to address biases, threats, and distractions, so the learning space feels safe to all learners and encourages them to take risks and try new things.
One strategy for providing options that welcome varied student interests and identities is to implement a choice board, which offers multiple pathways for students to choose from in order to reach a targeted learning outcome. Choice boards work great when designing blended learning experiences that offer both offline and online activities. Regardless of modality, it’s important that all activities on the choice board align to the learning targets. The advantage of using a choice board is that you can give students a greater degree of choice and autonomy in the learning process. Students get to pick the learning activities that most resonate with them, which can make the learning more personalized and motivating.
A second option is to design a project-based learning (PBL) experience. In its simplest form, a PBL experience asks students to identify and solve a problem relevant to a common learning target in the classroom. Because students have a high degree of involvement in identifying a problem within that context and then choosing the path they will take to achieve the learning outcome, they have considerable choice and autonomy, which can greatly increase their level of interest in the process and provide them with a pathway that resonates with them.
Support: Design Options for Sustaining Effort and Persistence
This guideline focuses on supporting student effort and persistence as they engage in the learning process. Since all students may not arrive in your classroom with the skills necessary to persevere through obstacles and challenges, teachers must consider ways to support them throughout the learning process. The introduction to this guideline states, “To sustain effort and persistence, effective learning designs consider options for creating goals that are meaningful and purposeful, offering scaffolds and supports in service of challenging goals, fostering collaboration and belonging, and offering on-going, action-oriented feedback.”
We see a focus on community and collaboration within this guideline. The more we foster connection amongst students, the better equipped they’ll be to support each other. This can be done using your favorite community-building activities. If you can set up the learning activity to require collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning, you’ll be adding a potential community-building component into the learning experience.
Another important aspect of this guideline is the necessity of offering action-oriented feedback. Feedback is critical if students are to learn from their trials, mistakes, and efforts. There are a few important conditions to keep in mind in order to make feedback action-oriented. One is to make sure that feedback is frequent, timely, and specific. Another is to remember that feedback must be substantive and informative, rather than comparative or competitive. It’s beneficial for students to look at their own performance and explore how it can be improved, instead of dwelling on how they compare to their classmates.
While this guideline focuses on a very human element of teaching and learning, technology can still be effectively integrated in a couple different ways.
First, when designing collaborative learning experiences, consider having students work together in their creation efforts using some form of technology. Many digital creation tools allow for collaboration, with multiple students working on the same document or creative space at the same time. If students are sharing a device, be sure that they take turns being the driver and also build in requirements for all members to be providing input.
Second, consider exploring AI tools that can provide students with feedback on their work. MagicSchool and SchoolAI both offer student-facing tools, where you can customize a personalized student AI-feedback experience. These tools may still be in their infancy, but they already offer great potential in the area of personalized feedback.
Executive Function: Design Options for Emotional Capacity
The third section of Engagement targets the area of executive function and calls for designing options to support and develop emotional capacity in learners. This task involves helping students recognize emotions, manage thoughts and behaviors, and empathize with others.
Perhaps the most actionable element of this section is to promote individual and collective opportunities for reflection. Not all students will have the skills to do this on their own, so it can be very beneficial for teachers to intentionally design reflection opportunities. Because students learn and reflect in different ways, it’s also important to offer choices and options with this.
While this type of reflection can and should be rich in offline, face-to-face opportunities, there are effective digital options that you might consider as well.
The first is to use a survey tool, such as Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. These types of tools probably work best for individual self-reflection, but you might also consider having groups collaboratively complete a survey. If going the collaborative route, separate spaces could be included within the form for each member to offer feedback individually while also having a group entry. This can help get to both individual and collective reflection while providing you with valuable insights and data.
Another way that tech could be leveraged in this area is to design digital graphic organizers that allow students to represent how they are feeling in a variety of ways. For younger learners, you might consider something visual, like an image of a mountain for each skill area. Then, you could have students move a virtual climber up the side as they track their personal growth in developing targeted skills. For older students, you might use a scale where they place themselves on a linear continuum. Digital platforms often provide the advantage of allowing students to share their thoughts and feelings using a variety of media formats, including text, audio, video, and links.
To build on these ideas, review the UDL Guidelines on the CAST website and explore the Engagement section for yourself. As you do, consider the tools and strategies that you have in your own teacher toolkit and reimagine ways you can use those tools and strategies to offer multiple means of engagement for access, with support, and in the development of executive function skills.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Culture
- Relational Capacity
- Student Agency
- Break Down Barriers
Extend Your Learning
- UDL Guidelines 3.0 (CAST)
- CAST (official website)