Teaching has always been a challenging profession. The sense of challenge is particularly acute for teachers today, who face increasingly diverse classrooms and the demands of national and state standards. At the same time, teachers in the Digital Age work in an environment of unprecedented opportunities. Brain research has shed new light on students and how they learn. Technological advances have equipped us with tremendous new instructional resources in the form of computers and digital media. Universal Design for Learning incorporates the insights, tools, and resources born of these developments into a framework that can help teachers respond effectively to 21st-century challenges.
Universal Design for Learning revamps traditional perspectives on education. Within the UDL framework, divisions between ability and disability give way to an understanding that categorical approaches to education obscure the complex and subtle patterns of strength and weakness that affect all learners. We are coming to understand that a learner's true ability lies at the junction of his or her personal capabilities and the capacities afforded by available learning media. By considering the nature of the three brain networks critical to learning and by selecting media and tools wisely, we can extend learners' abilities and open pathways to success for every one.
The UDL framework guides teachers through the process of injecting flexibility into three core elements of teaching: setting goals, selecting materials and methods to support students in reaching those goals, and designing accurate ongoing assessment. The evolution witnessed with the Concord, New Hampshire, school system offers a glimpse of what teachers, parents, and administrators can accomplish when they apply this new perspective to the carefully considered use of new digital tools and resources. In Concord, regular classroom teachers, special education teachers, and technology specialists are innovating adjustable teaching approaches. In these variable learning environments, students with disabilities are becoming successful and confident members of regular classrooms, while their classmates thrive in ways impossible in the classrooms of the past.
The Concord classrooms illustrate one approach to translating theory from various areas of brain, cognitive, and pedagogical research into effective curriculum and practice. They show that UDL can and does work. Meanwhile, the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum, the Universal Learning Center, and the Universal Learning Editions promise systemic changes in support of UDL.
Universal Design for Learning does require change, and change requires activism. Although educational reform efforts are most visible in classrooms where they are being practiced, the most successful ones extend beyond teachers and outside classrooms to involve administrators, parents, and politicians. We hope that this book will encourage you to do your part, to demand Universal Design for Learning within your school system, and to become part of a community that helps make it happen.