UDL Principles
Universal Design Learning combines something that I knew a little about (Universal Design) with something I knew a lot about (learning). It makes sense that creating accessibility does not have to interfere with high level achievement. By supporting pattern recognition and strategic planning, and increasing student ownership by letting them have more choices, UDL really makes supporting all levels of students in a single class possible.
UDL Lesson
It was interesting to update a lesson I have used in class before with UDL principles. It was easy to see how more students' needs could be met with some minor modifications. For example, in the past I always assigned the format of the final product. Part of the grade depended on students meeting exact specifications. Now that I am letting the students choose format and assessment (with my input), it better supports affective and strategic brain networks.
*UDL Lesson Builder
I found many of the tools at CAST's website to be helpful, but the lesson builder was the least so. Even though it gave me the opportunity to review my lesson, it does not provide a user-friendly template. When I was an undergraduate at Southwest Texas, the same outline for lesson plan creation was used, and I always found it incredibly difficult and time-consuming. At the time, I attributed this to my inexperience.
Now that I have revisited it as an experienced teacher, I can confidently say that it is a bad template, and definitely not universally designed. It is unclear whether it should be used to plan one or several days of work. For example, the inclusion of an "anticipatory set" field implies the lesson would take one day. But there is also a field for "summative assessments," which implies the lesson takes several weeks.
I'm not sure why this template is popular at the university level, but I was relieved my first year of teaching when I realized that real lesson plans don't take four hours a day to complete.
*I wasn't sure if I should include this portion of my reflection, but I truly believe that this confusing lesson template should be revisited.
