If you haven’t yet, be sure to visit this original blog post https://blogs.iu.edu/earlyliteracy/ which shared 6 evidence-based foundational equitable principles for supporting diverse learners. Implementing these principles into your classroom provides all children equitable educational opportunities.
UDL and You!
Every teacher knows and appreciates how complicated and diverse our young learners are. It can be overwhelming to think about how we effectively differentiate for each child, while still accomplishing common goals. UDL can help!
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) involves ensuring your classroom environment, curriculum, and instruction are accessible, meaningful, and applicable to ALL children.
UDL is comprised of three overarching principles for cognitively enriching instruction: Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression. Under these principles, we want to ensure students can access, build, and internalize targeted knowledge and skills.
To promote Engagement for all learners, we differentiate the environment to maximize interest, sustained effort, and self-regulation. For example, a preschool teacher might differentiate her classroom to maximize engagement by intentionally selecting a text about dinosaurs that is compelling for a child participating in a dialogic reading intervention. (Possibilities abound!)
Representation refers to the modalities employed to represent content, including perceptual modes, language and symbols, and comprehension strategies. In schools, this is often interpreted through the lens of adaptive communicational tools, such as screen readers or audio texts. This is true, but also incomplete. For example, you can also differentiate for a young learner by providing definitions and visuals for new vocabulary – thus providing multiple modalities to represent a new concept, without any adaptive technology.
Especially in early childhood, multiple means of Action & Expression is important for accommodating differing skills and experiences. Physical action, expression & communication, and executive functions can be highly diverse amongst young learners, and require differentiated opportunities. In one preschool classroom, some children might be easily gripping and writing with a pencil, while others might be building a pincer grasp – yet we still provide opportunities for graspers to write and draw to make meaning, such as large grip crayons and finger painting!
Teaching with UDL in mind is a HUGE topic, and can be applied in many ways. Head below to deepen your knowledge!
Read More!
Head here for an article on the applications of UDL in early childhood.
The Cast UDL website is also a powerful resource for looking deeply at every UDL element.
The Interactive Cast UDL Template is definitely worth bookmarking!
Lauren Padesky is a research scientist the Early Childhood Center at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community. Dr. Padesky holds a PhD in Literacy Curriculum & Instruction, and she researches professional development, literacy coaching, and equitable early literacy practices for diverse learners.
Email her at lpadesky@iu.edu
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