Why UDL and PBL Work So Well Together

The longer I work with students and coach players the simpler the formula becomes for growth:

1. Opportunity to learn in a variety of ways

2. Timely feedback

3. Positive encouragement

4. High expectations

5. A community of learners or teammates that challenge and support you

Here are the problems I had in my classroom for many years:

1. I taught students mostly the same way from textbook and PPT slides

2. My feedback was usually on papers or tests and came back days after

3. I rarely made time for daily encouragement or to share expectations

In order to help students grow I needed a process and framework that offered multiple ways to learn (UDL), and a learning community that would make high expectations and timely feedback a daily occurrence (PBL).

Let’s Start With UDL

UDL is Universal Design for Learning, an education framework based on decades of research in neuroscience and endorsed by the Every Student Succeeds Act. UDL is considered best practice for teaching all students in an inclusive learning environment.

The goal of UDL is to create learners who are purposeful & motivated, resourceful & knowledgeable, and strategic & goal oriented, in other words, expert learners.

With UDL, teachers transition their role to facilitator, removing barriers to learning by giving students options and choices that empower them to take control of their own learning and reach rigorous state-standards. To universally design lessons, teachers must provide multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action and expression.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can be explained in many ways, but I love the Dinner Party analogy my friend, and UDL Now! author, Katie Novak shares often in her workshops and on her blog:

I like to explain the differences by asking teachers to think about hosting a dinner party. Let’s say you have invited over thirty guests. Several of these guests have food allergies, another few are gluten-free, some are vegetarian or lactose intolerant, and your brother is exclusively Paleo. You want to be the perfect host, and you want to accommodate everyone.

Scenario 1: You decide to make individual meals for each guest so that each of them has the perfect dish. That is a lot of juggling to do. In the end, you are exhausted from all of the cooking, made a few mistakes because it is nearly impossible to get everyone’s individual meal perfect, and didn’t enjoy yourself. At the same time, you are frustrated that some of your guests preferred other’s meals when you had made a special dish JUST FOR THEM.

What I just described is the dinner party equivalent of DI. DI is presenting options, but those options are directed by the teacher. For example, you may take one group of students aside and ask them to read an extra piece of literature because you can tell they are more advanced than their peers. You ask another student to draw a picture instead of writing an essay since you know writing is challenging for him. You are presenting options, but those options are governed by you and it’s possible you haven’t chosen the right options for the right students. You are burnt out from trying to create so many individualized lessons.

Scenario 2: Let’s go back to the dinner party. Rather than preparing thirty individual meals, why not put out a buffet? Include lots of variety, but let the guests choose what is best for them, what they believe will work with their individual diets, and satisfy them. You don’t witness guests peering at other’s dishes wishing they had been made the same thing. You are relaxed and engaged. You have saved your energy for interacting with your guests, instead of wasting it preparing imperfect options.

UDL offers students a “buffet” of options. The options are offered by the teacher but they aren’t individualized for specific students. Through the UDL framework, students are intended to become self-directed learners and choose the options that work best for them, not the other way around. With UDL, students learn to take responsibility for their learning. They are learn the “why” of learning as we turn on the affective network of the brain by providing multiple means of engagement. They learn the “what” of learning as we ignite the recognition network of the brain by providing multiple means of representation. And they learn the “how” of learning as we turn on the strategic network of the brain through multiple means of action & expression.

Katie also shares that in education there is often a third scenario. This scenario is the “casserole” option where everyone is fed the same meal in one big pot. It doesn’t matter what your dietary needs are, or your taste palette wants are, when you have a casserole as your only option, that is what you get.

Pair this with the idea of one-size-fits-all lessons in the classroom. Every student, regardless of their needs (and wants) getting the same lesson, at the same pace, at the same level.

Just as a casserole would be sure to miss the mark for many of your guests, the one-size lesson would look the same in the classroom.

Developing PBL with a UDL Focus

When developing PBL units, we always start with the end in mind. What are the transfer goals? What are the standards? What do students need to understand and be able to do? How can they demonstrate those skills and knowledge?

Allison Posey of CAST, Inc provides three guiding principles when bringing UDL into lesson planning and unit design in her article at Understood:

UDL can transform your classroom practice. However, there is no “magic box” of tools and resources in a UDL classroom. Instead, when you integrate UDL, you’ll notice the following:

• There is a strong focus on goals. In a UDL classroom, there is a strong focus on learning goals for students. Teachers and students talk about why those goals matter and how they support challenging, meaningful opportunities to learn. You’ll also see students creating their own learning goals.

• There is a focus on variability. In a UDL learning environment, differences in experience, knowledge, and ability are expected. Flexible options are built into lessons for all students. That allows you and your students to talk about how different tools or resources support them as they work toward the goal. It also means not all of your students will be doing the same thing at the same time.

• There is a focus on the barriers in the design of the environment. In a UDL classroom, the focus is on how to change the design of the curricular goals, assessments, methods, and materials — not on how to “fix” the students. For example, you may have asked yourself, “Why aren’t my students engaged?” UDL would encourage you to reframe the question: “How can the design of this lesson better engage students?”

Here is how UDL and PBL merge to work wonders together:

Project-based learning is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems.

Dr. Jenny Pieratt from CraftED puts it this way:

One distinguishing feature of UDL is the value placed on identifying its teaching practices as unique from what we have traditionally referred to as “differentiation”; rather UDL provides a framework for best practices that can potentially apply to ALL learners in a classroom. This to me feels pretty similar to the phrase we use in PBL: “voice and choice”.

She breaks down all the shared qualities in this graphic:

Via https://craftedcurriculum.com/how-to-differentiate-pbl-for-all-learners/

Why PBL and UDL Work So Well Together

When we think of putting UDL into action, Project-Based Learning supports this approach in many different areas. Here are some ways you can integrate UDL into your PBL design:

1. High Expectations and Goals. Flexible Paths to Achieve Them.

When we have high expectations of students, they are challenged to reach them. However, if we don’t have the scaffolds and supports for students they can be overwhelmed by chasing after the same goals as everyone else and not seeing the same growth in the beginning.

Focus on providing flexible paths and ways for students to achieve those goals. This can be more time, a different way to consume the information (read, watch, listen, explore, etc), and conferencing at checkpoints to see progress and answer questions. When designing PBL make sure it isn’t a 17-step process that every student should follow, but instead a true active learning experience that includes choices, inquiry, and a sustained challenge.

2. Various Performance Tasks That Assess the Same Knowledge and Skills.

The ULD framework makes sure we focus on providing choices in all aspects of the learning process. When developing PBL experiences, one of the best ways to do this is to provide multiple avenues for students to demonstrate their understanding (and skills). Instead of one summative assessment provide multiple paths in the PBL experience that all allow learners to share their knowledge in various ways. We do this through performance tasks, and make sure to follow up with specific feedback and teacher conferences to discuss the learning.

3. Keep the Project Plans Editable

This is a big one. When you are “finished” designing a PBL experience it can often be put aside as a paper document. Keep it online, digital, and open to edits throughout the year. Teachers need to share where they are changing, adding, and modifying on the fly for their learners. UDL allows this process to continue while still reaching for those goals shared with everyone.

Whether you are just getting started developing PBL experiences or revising an already created project, keep these principles in mind with a focus on Universal Design for Learning. In doing so, you put the student’s needs above everything else, without compromising the goals and standards in the process.

Diving Deeper Into PBL and UDL

Ultimately, we want PBL to feel as real and authentic as possible. We want the learning to be meaningful and relevant — while also being flexible and adaptable through UDL principles.

That does not mean that we get rid of deadlines. We keep expectations high and help support and guide learners throughout the process.

It does not mean that we get rid of checkpoints and benchmarks. Learners need guideposts throughout the experience - these help scaffold the learning.

It does not mean we get rid of formative and informal conversations. You get the point…

Our goal is to guide students on their learning journey, but also to be a resource on things that go well beyond content and skills (such as time management, how to reach out to mentors, getting through a rough patch, communication, etc).

In our next post in this three-part series, we’ll look at how UDL principles change the way we facilitate Project-Based Learning and what some of those practices look like in real classrooms!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.J. Juliani is the author of 8 books about learning, including best-sellers Empower, Launch, and Adaptable. He’s worked at every level of education as a teacher, coach, administrator, and UPenn GSE PLN. A.J. speaks around the world about learning, goals, and innovation.