Implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in Your Classroom

There are three stages to implementing UDL in your classroom

Get to know your students
Develop student and class profiles
Plan lessons and units

By using information from student and class profiles to inform lesson and unit planning you can easily design lessons that will meet the needs of all your students without the need to spend more time adding accommodations after a lesson plan is complete.

Step One: Get to Know Your Students

Teachers use their knowledge about both the curriculum and the students as learners. We start by knowing our students in order to plan appropriate and effective learning opportunities for all students.

Survey student interests: Start with a survey of student interests.
Learning Styles: Students can take this online survey produced by the Illinois Online Network to assess their learning styles.
Survey students' perceptions of their skills : Survey how students view their own learning strengths.
Use technology to learn more about your students: This teachbytes article lists fun ways to learn about your students using technology.
Additional resources for creating student profiles, using Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles, Interests and Learning Inventories. This page provides links to a number of other tools to assess student learning styles.

Step Two: Create a Student and Class Profile

Knowing your students leads to development of student profiles, which are useful for planning purposes. We can also develop class profiles to plan for the needs and composition of the whole class.

Planning Module: This self-directed learning module developed by the B.C. Ministry of Education outlines how to plan for UDL by starting with student profiles.
Developing Learner Profiles: A resource to support teachers developing learner profiles.
Demonstration Video: Student Profiles: A teacher explains why and how to develop student profiles as part of UDL Resource, a web resource supported by the BC Ministry of Education, Department of Diversity and Equity.
Student Profile Template: View a sample student profile template.

Step Three: Unit and Lesson Planning

Teachers use their knowledge of students and curriculum to design units and lessons for UDL.

Differentiated Instruction Planner: An overview of lesson planning for UDL.
The Differentiated Instruction Scrapbook: produced by the Ontario government, this document provides a number of useful resources including a lesson and unit planning template on pages 2-4 and differentiated instruction strategies in Section 9.
Universal Design Strategies: This document lists a variety of environmental, instructional and assessment universal design strategies, which can be used to address the needs of your class.
Adapt your Approach: An article from Cornerstone On Demand that explains how instructional approaches can be tailored to different learning styles.

Consider Environmental Accessibility:

Top Ten Inclusion Tips for Teachers: Support all your learners with these easy top ten tips for creating inclusive classrooms and working with students who have mobility, vision and hearing challenges.
Accessible Play Spaces: Accessible play spaces encourage shared play among children of all abilities. These pages include lots of information and best practice guides to help you create and design accessible play spaces.