Unlearning: Changing Your Beliefs and Your Classroom with UDL

By Allison Posey and Katie Novak

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) suggests exciting ways to design and deliver engaging, rigorous learning experiences-as a growing international movement of UDL practitioners can attest. However, implementing UDL also requires us to unlearn many beliefs, assumptions, and teaching practices that no longer work.

In this lively an

• Language: English
• Publisher: CAST, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781930583474

Allison Posey

Illustrator Allison Posey, MEd, is a curriculum and design specialist at CAST and a graduate of Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Education master's program. She is the author of Engage the Brain: How to Design for Learning that Taps into the Power of Emotion (ASCD) and co-author with Katie Novak of Unlearning: Changing Your Beliefs and Your Classroom with UDL (CAST)

Book preview

Three Teaspoons of Lemon Juice

Not an Introduction Because Not Everyone Reads Those

For a moment, just consider all the many innovations that have been introduced in your teaching career—the strategies, the frameworks, and the curriculum unveiled in professional development and never heard from again. Yeah, you know the ones. How many of those actually transformed your teaching practices?

Many of our current teaching practices work well and inspire a new generation of students to thrive in our communities; however, there are still too many students who do not succeed in school. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of fourth-grade students performing at or above the proficient achievement level in 2015 was 36 percent. According to research, 66 percent of surveyed students reported being bored in every class or at least every day in school. Of these students, 98 percent claimed that the material being taught was the main reason for their boredom, 81 percent thought their subject material was uninteresting, and two out of three students found that the material lacked relevance (Yazzie-Mintz, 2010). What would it take to change our practices so that we are able to reach and engage every student? How long would something like that take? How much would we have to change?

Consider the story of the great Captain Lancaster, shared by Everett Rogers (1962). In the early 1400s, when seafaring was booming, countless men on his ships were lost to an illness we now know of as scurvy. Many other ship crews suffered the same demise.

We can only imagine that physicians and captains were scurrying to find an elixir that would save their sailors. In the case study, Everett does not go into how Captain Lancaster happened upon a cure for scurvy, but he did. He then set up a study to test it. Lancaster had four ships headed out for exploration, so he took the opportunity to select one group for treatment. The men on that ship were lucky enough to ingest three teaspoons of lemon juice a day to ward off the illness. Every one of the crew survived the journey.

On the other three ships, the control ships, the sailors were not given lemon juice. Halfway through the journey, more than half of them died. A hundred went out. Fifty went overboard. The loss of life was so debilitating that the treatment ship had to come to the rescue. These sailors, armed with lemon juice, had to man the remaining ships just to bring them back home.

Think about the logic of this innovation. If you want all of your sailors to survive, you bring lemon juice on board. If you want many to die, you don’t. Naturally, Captain Lancaster celebrated this discovery and shared it with everyone he knew. Sadly, it did not catch on. In fact, even though some innovative sailors did replicate Lancaster’s findings, it took two hundred years for the British Navy to endorse the treatment: 1.6 million gallons of lemon juice later, between 1795 and 1815, eradicated scurvy (Tannahill, 1989).

In the field of education, we have our own experiment going. If we think of one of the statistics from the start of this chapter, of a hundred students in a class only thirty-six will learn to read at grade level. If we reflect on other schoolwide statistics, for every hundred students with disabilities in America, only sixty-one are educated with their general education peers for 80 percent of the school day.

What if we, the authors of this book, told you that we had a three-teaspoon equivalent to learning: Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL is like the lemon juice on board a ship. It is a way to approach teaching and learning to reach and engage every student in our classroom. Students who live in areas where schools or individual teachers adopt and implement UDL are on the equivalent of the treatment ship. They have access to lemon juice. Everyone else—we are setting out to sail. But we do not want change in our learning environments to take two hundred years.

As teachers, we worked states apart, yet we shared a common goal: we believed we could reach every one of our students. We believed that all students deserve to be empowered to drive their own learning journey. And we held high expectations for them. We didn’t necessarily know how to do this, we just knew that we wanted to. However, we also experienced how often teaching meant following a curriculum that was designed for a mythical average learner. We acknowledged that our classrooms didn’t work for every student, but we didn’t always know what other choices we had. Does this resonate with you?

The universe brought us together to learn about UDL as a framework that could help us design learning environments for all. At that time, we saw the power and possibility of reaching and engaging every student. Our challenge was that the transformation would mean letting go of most of what we had learned about how to teach.

From our work with educators from all disciplines, ages, and contexts around the world, we know that teachers want what is best for their students and we hear about the great lengths they go to in trying to reach every learner. We also hear consistently about the how hard it is to teach the tremendous range of students in their classrooms. The theory behind UDL resonates as a way to reach all of our students, yet it is the implementation of UDL that often presents challenges. Educators want to know: What are the first steps; what does UDL look like; how will I know if I’m on the right track; and do we know whether it works? If UDL is the lemon juice that can transform our teaching and learning environments so that they meet the needs of all students, why isn’t it being applied by every educator in the world already?

We have colleagues who have implemented UDL and have experienced exponential success: increased graduation rates, a tenfold increase in all student cohorts on state standardized tests, an increase in the number of students taking AP exams, and decreased special education referrals and out-of-school suspensions. When we see and hear of these incredible shifts as a result of UDL, we feel like Captain Lancaster probably felt and want to share UDL with everyone.

However, we have also found that sometimes, like the British government, even when teachers learn about UDL and believe in its power to transform their teaching and learning environments, many still do not change. We do not think that this is because educators are unwilling to make change, but perhaps because they may not think there is a strong reason to change, or perhaps they do not necessarily know the first steps to take. We have wrestled with this dilemma for years, trying many different approaches to teach and model UDL. We have come to understand that for all the research, brain science, and best practices that are behind UDL as a way to reach all students without differentiating learning at every turn, there is an elephant in the room. Most teachers, including us, have a hard time integrating new learning.

Why is changing what we do so hard? We came to understand that to change how we think about teaching, how we manage our classrooms, and how we develop curriculum, we must unlearn. Yes, unlearn. In a profession that spends so much time thinking about learning, the process of unlearning is what needs to happen before real change can happen.

Wait, what?

Resist the temptation to throw this book out the window or up against a wall. Hear us out. This unlearning process has been such a transformative experience for us, even as so-called UDL experts, that we want to invite you on this journey. This journey will take you along a route to design learning experiences that not only are accessible for students but that challenge them to become more autonomous and self-directed in their learning. We have seen student agency increase and engagement skyrocket when UDL is implemented. We have observed teachers transformed by UDL who celebrated their learning journeys along the way. But this isn’t just a book about UDL. It is a book that recognizes the fact that we know we aren’t meeting the needs of all students and we know that we can.

The process of unlearning as part of the learning process has been well documented. What is unique about this book is that we will support the process of unlearning using UDL. UDL is a tool that guides the design of learning environments to support the anticipated variability of our students, to help us be goal-directed and to prioritize engagement, and to ensure that every individual knows how to be an expert learner who is motivated, knowledgeable, and strategic. We will use this process to guide educators to unlearn some of their tried-and-true techniques in order to support the wide range of students in our classrooms.

If our classrooms and systems were working for every single student, we wouldn’t need to unlearn and change our current practices. However, as both research and our own personal experience suggest, the system is not working for too many. We knew this before we learned about UDL, but it didn’t feel like there was much we could do about it. When we recognized the barriers inherent in our classrooms, there was an overwhelming sense of urgency to make changes. We recognized that it was up to us to eliminate barriers and to engage every student. We even started to wonder about many of our students who seemed successful in school—how many were just compliant with the routines and not fully