Udl

Most classrooms are designed for a student who does not actually exist.

The average learner, in the statistical sense, is a fiction. Look at any real classroom closely and you find an enormous range. Students who process information best by listening, students who need to see it written down, students who need to move their bodies while they think. Students who panic with time pressure, students who only work well under it. Students who have perfect vision and students who have partial sight, students with fluent English and students for whom English is their second or third language, students with a diagnosed learning difference and students who are struggling silently. A curriculum designed for the notional average learner serves almost nobody perfectly and actively fails a sizeable minority. The accommodation model responds to this by adding adjustments for the students who cannot cope with the default. The underlying default stays the same.

Universal Design for Learning is the alternative approach. It takes its cue from the architecture world, where somebody eventually noticed that buildings designed with wheelchair users in mind from the start ended up better for everyone, not just for wheelchair users. Wider doorways, ramps, clear signage, benefit parents with pushchairs, delivery drivers, elderly people, people carrying heavy things. Applied to education, the same principle says you should design lessons with multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, multiple means of engagement, from the outset, not as an afterthought for the students who cannot manage the default. When the design is universal, fewer students need accommodations, because the thing was never hostile to them to begin with. This is harder to plan and better for almost everyone. When was the last time you used something that clearly had you in mind from the start, rather than being accommodated into something built for someone else?

Last week's Act opens by saying theory and craft are not the same thing. This week we look at what happens when a classroom is built for a learner who does not actually exist.