Requirements
Great – I Get It – So How Is This Different?
Many K-12 educators or administrators often respond that this sounds like differentiated instruction in new clothing. There are, in fact, some surface similarities. However, the two are not the same concepts.
Rose & Meyer state that Universal Design supports differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction is the notion that you differ, or alter, instruction for each learner based on his or her needs. This has grown into what is today the RTI – response to intervention – approach to classroom instruction. Based on assessment, a teacher selects the content and strategies that target a learner’s specific needs – and those needs may be different from other learners, thus the content and strategies may be slightly different for each learner.
Universal Design does not get into content selection. Rather, it addresses how one might set up the array of materials that contain the content so as to make them as flexible as possible. Universal Design for Learning is where many of the ideas we have held in education – multi-modal representations, differentiated instruction, response to intervention and performance-based assessment, use of technologies in schools, etc. – come together into one coherent framework for designing learning all the way from materials to technical infrastructures to environments to systems. UDL, asserts Rose & Meyer, is not just “one more thing” but is actually the glue we can use to finally hold together all these pieces.
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