In this article, author, Bill Wilmot, explores how school leaders can apply UDL to support personalized learning. The article explores ways principals, as instructional leaders, can create school structures and environments that help educators  focus on student learning.

How does it relate to the UDL-SICC?

This article aligns with the Leadership and Management Domain, Element 1 (D3, E1), and it explains how school leaders actively lead, support and monitor UDL Implementation across the school community ensuring systematic, intentional and sustained UDL implementation.

How might you use it?

• School leaders can use the article to reflect on how these elements exist within their school.
• Principals can reflect on how their practices promote conditions for the growth of UDL in supporting new mindsets, envisioning teachers as expert learners, and implementing structural changes.
• School leaders can solicit feedback from educators at their school to discover elements of the three areas discussed in this article, supporting new mindsets, envisioning teachers as expert learners, and implementing structural changes, and how their practices support these ideas.

This resource from the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) publication discusses how leaders can apply the Universal Design for Learning framework to continuously support personalized learning.

The members of the UDL-IRN Implementation Special Interest Group (SIG) are currently implementing, or supporting, districts in the implementation of UDL. The SIG created a process that helps educators align UDL with other effective innovations. The Effective Innovations (EI) Alignment Process is based on the idea that critical components of effective innovations intersect. The recognition of this intersection deepens the understanding and improves the effectiveness of all EIs.

In this resource, the authors review the studies associated with personalized learning, which were conducted between 2006 and 2016. The purpose of the resource is to provide researchers with a clearer picture of whether and how current personalized learning research aligns to the UDL framework. The result showed that the design features and implementation characteristics of personalized learning systems or environments described in current research could be widely mapped onto the UDL framework.

Personalized Learning has become a buzz word in education. Over the course of two years, the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities at the University of Kansas conducted research on the emergence of personalized learning in blended learning, competency-based environments and its impact on the achievement of all learners. The findings reinforce UDL as a foundational element of personalization and how both are actualized using competency-based learning strategies to improve learning outcomes.

Through two classroom scenarios, elementary and high school, Katie Novak illustrates how personalized learning through a UDL lens addresses learner variability, supports student agency, improves student outcomes and maintains the rigor of the curriculum. 

The authors combine the principles of Design Thinking and UDL in three prescriptive classroom projects within the realm of the "makerspace" movement, with implications for STEM and STEAM.   Students learn to make a stable product, use tools, consider the needs of another, solve challenges, overcome setbacks and sustain motivation. The projects also teach students to build on the ideas of others, vet sources, generate questions, deeply analyze topics, and think creatively and analytically, goals associated with Common Core State Standards.

This article describes how the Universal Design for Learning framework helps state and local agenciew think through innovative approaches to education like personalized learning. The authors suggest that UDL is a central organizing framework that amplifies the inherent benefits of personalized learning. Links to additional Personalized Learning resources are included.