UDL Center's List: Guidelines Examples and Resources

This video offers an overview of strategies to develop students' vocabulary.

Why UDL?
"Providing options that define vocabulary and symbols" for students is a valuable UDL strategy. This video shows concrete examples of developing students' vocabulary skills.

This video highlights the importance of explicitly teaching academic English to English Language Learners. "Promoting cross-linguistic understanding" is a valuable UDL practice. This video offers examples as to how to support students' vocabulary and grammar development around specific content areas.\n\n

This video gives an overview of the beginning reading skills that need to be assessed.

Why UDL?
The UDL Guidelines stress the importance of monitoring students' progress. This video highlights ways to monitor students' beginning reading skills.

ESOL Online has a helpful list of strategies for activating prior knowledge that are useful for multilingual or monolingual classrooms.

Why UDL?
The strategies listed on the ESOL site, such as concept maps, KWL charts, and graphic organizers, are effective examples of ways to activate and supply students' background knowledge.

Tagxedo is another fun way to create word clouds. This tool allows you to create a T-shirt depicting clouds (although there is a fee for this).

Why UDL?
Creating word clouds in Tagxedo provides additional practice with new words as well and can be used to help student visually see conceptual relationships between words.

Tufts University and Boston Arts Academy team up for a day of engineering and art. Organized through collaboration between Tufts School of Engineering and its M.A.T. program, BAA 9th graders spend one day each spring at Tufts making connections between the performing arts with the concepts introduced in the Museum of Science Engineering curriculum that the students have recently completed.

Why UDL? "Illustrating key concepts non-linguistically" is a valuable UDL practice. In this video, watch to see how concepts in design are expressed through dance and theater.

"The AIMing for Achievement DVD includes content on a variety of topics that are important to the provision, selection, acquisition, and use of accessible instructional materials...The DVD contains interviews, supplementary information, and illustrative scenarios that increase awareness and knowledge that support timely provision of accessible instructional materials to students who need them for educational participation and achievement, including legal issues, a student-centered decision-making process, an overview of specialized formats, a review of multiple sources from which to acquire specialized formats, and an overview of which students can receive materials from each source, as well as detailed discussions about technology and other supports for using accessible instructional materials."

Why UDL?
UDL Guidelines highlight the importance of providing students with options for perception as well as options for physcial action. This DVD provides a wealth of information on how Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) reduce barriers to curricular content for students with print-disabilities.

See an example from Gateway School in San Francisco of a school committed to helping students understand the way in which they learn rather than focus on learning "disabilities." Students gain understanding about their strengths and weaknesses as learners.



Why UDL? The UDL Guidelines stress the importance of developing students' self-regulatory skills. This video shows how building students' self-awareness helps them to set effective goals and to develop self-assessment and reflection skills.

Geometry students at Mountlake Terrace High School design a state of the art high school for 2050 in teams as a culminating project. Students receive guidance and feedback from a local architect who eventually judges the students' projects.



Why UDL? Connecting learning to students' own lives is an important UDL strategy. Relevance, value, and authenticity are enhanced for these high school students by developing their math skills through a real world problem.

In this video, watch how Dr. Dawn Tamarkin, Professor of Biology at Springfield Technical Community College in Springfield, MA, incorporates UDL principles into her Introductory Biology course.

Why UDL?
Dr. Tamarkin creates "tactile cells" in order to make examining cells through a microscope more accessible to all of her students. These "tactile cells" are excellent examples of "providing alternatives for visual information."

atch this video for a great example of UDL in a classroom that requires no technology. A teacher in Anchorage, AK demonstrates his strategies for creating a collaborative environment for learning.



Why UDL? Fostering collaboration and communication is an important UDL strategy. Watch students share ideas, practice discussion, provide constructive feedback, and work in groups.

This video profiles a student at Sherman Oaks Elementary School and discusses the merits of embedding student choice into lesson plans. The video also discusses how a teacher can support and guide independent learning.



Why UDL? The UDL Guidelines highlight the importance of providing students with individual choice. Encouraging Omar to choose his topic for the California History Museum project gives him a sense of empowerment over his own learning.

Watch this video of 7th graders at ASCEND School in Oakland, CA. Their study of the conflict in Iraq as the war began in 2003 led to in-depth understanding of the war and the emergence of critical thinking skills in the face of complex, real, ongoing issues. Students communicated with pen pals in Iraq and staged a public demonstration in support of these friends. This peaceful protest won the attention of media around the world.



Why UDL? The UDL Guidelines stress the importance of making learning relevant to students' lives. By focusing on an issue that is meaningful to the ASCEND students, deeper, more authentic learning takes place.

Students practice conflict resolution and peer mediation at a K-5 school in Brooklyn, New York.



Why UDL? Fostering collaboration and communication is an important UDL strategy. The peer mediation and conflict resolution activities featured in this video are great examples of building a community across grade levels.

This article reveals how one teacher in Maryland incorporates blogs into his lessons in order to promote students' reflective skills.

Why UDL?
Blogging is an excellent example of an activity that can be used to support the development of students' self-assessment skills.

In this article, the author describes the use of "Learner Diaries" in order to "see each student as an individual with individual needs and abilities" and "to develop a 'one-to-one' relationship even with large classes of students."

Why UDL?
The use of "Learner Diaries" in the classroom is an effective way to develop students' self-reflection and assessment skills.

"Essays written by teens about issues that teens face might help build students' self-esteem and their ability to 'triumph over trouble'."

Why UDL?
This lesson is an excellent example of an activity that can be used to scaffold students' coping skills and strategies.

"At this San Diego school, administrators place equal emphasis on the social, intellectual, psychological, and physical needs of their students."

Why UDL?
This video reveals how the O'Farrell School scaffolds the development of students' coping skills and strategies.

Learn about "an elective class in Seattle's AS-1 school where students from every grade come together to discuss and resolve their differences."

Why UDL?
Guiding students in their development of conflict resolution skills is an effective way to scaffold coping skills and strategies.

"Focus on Effectiveness" offers research-based strategies on providing feedback to students.

Why UDL?
The strategies offered in this article will help educators to increase the mastery-oriented feedback that they give to students.