My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
Candace Cortiella: So it will vary both by the intensity of the content or the challenge of the content from grade to grade as well as individually by student needs?
Dave Edyburn: Yes, I think so. [Another factor is] the student history of how much failure, and what have we done [to help]? We probably don’t want to jump to compensation for a second grade reader who’s struggling, but certainly for ninth grade readers, it should be a very different answer.
And hopefully along the way, we’ve made some minor adjustments so that the child is still able to access and engage and get some information from text that, left of his own devices, he wouldn’t be able to access.
Candace Cortiella: So, we’ve been hearing a lot recently about something called Universal Design for Learning, or UDL for short. Can you help our listeners understand the difference between UDL and AT?
Dave Edyburn: Wow, that’s a very timely question. I would say assistive technology has been dispensed on an individual basis. The child has to fail, somebody has to notice and make a referral. We do an interdisciplinary evaluation and try to make some recommendations about appropriate AT might be to help that child. We might actually purchase something and use it.
And all the while, the child has been moving on. The classes are going on and [he’s experienced] more failure, and this whole process has been a distraction in the sense that the school goes on. Because of this, AT is really designed for a low-incidence population. So I’ve been very critical of this model in terms of saying, “We need a different approach for high-incidence disabilities like learning disabilities because it’s not just one child like that in the school. There are a hundred.” And so that model doesn’t scale.
And so, about ten years ago, there came about a concept advanced of what you call Universal Design for Learning and what this involves is understanding diversity. Rather than letting children come in to my classroom and fail, I plan for those differences before they walk in the door. I don’t know who’s coming through the door next hour but I know that some kids don’t read at grade level, some kids struggle with writing. So the question becomes, “How can I make the classroom different, both the environment and the instructional materials, to support those diverse learners?”
The goal is not only to reach the students who I know have disabilities but to reach another group of students who don’t often get a lot of help, and who struggle on tasks. But [they] don’t struggle to the extent we make a referral.
So it’s kind of a different paradigm between these two ideas. The assistive technology is reactive. You have to wait till [the student has] a performance problem and they’ll try and get you an individualized solution. Universal Design for Learning is a proactive approach to the question, “How do I understand differences [among students] to make the curriculum and the classroom different before they get here?” And hopefully, by embedding the support, I made it more acceptable for you to use them, but I’m also helping other students who would likely struggle, but I didn’t know and it would take a while for me to know.
And so UDL is a very exciting paradigm, a difference, and a shake up for us. There are a lot of questions about the relationship between UDL and AT? Are we really giving up assistive technology? If I do Universal Design for Learning, does that mean nobody needs assistive technology? I don’t think that’s the case, but sometimes that gets lost in the translation.
But personally, I’m very hopeful that the UDL model will help us serve us high-incidence disabilities like learning disabilities much better because we know [students’] characteristics and can provide those supports from the classroom and make them available to everyone, which will help many students because they’re [delivered] proactively, we’re not going to give kids the time to fail.
Candace Cortiella: So the Universal Design for Learning movement actually has its roots in the universal design concept that was born in the field of architecture. Correct?
Dave Edyburn: Yes, that’s true.
Candace Cortiella: And that was again, as you said, to stop retrofitting buildings and public places in order to provide access for people with physical or sensory disabilities for example, and to build those accommodations into the architecture from the beginning.
Dave Edyburn: Yes. I mean the best examples of that that you mentioned are the curb cuts. That by providing those for everyone, it’s not just people with wheelchairs that can benefit, it’s kids on rollerblades and bicycles and parents with baby buggies and things -- that understanding disability and the special needs of a person with disability made a better design for everyone.
An example of sensory UDL is we have control panels on our computers that are built into the whole operating systems, so if you need the text enlarged because Grandma can’t read the email from her granddaughter, we can zoom the text on the whole screen to get it to a comfortable size.
And so the idea here is that as we start to understand and appreciate differences, we can make these supports available to everyone. Now it’s just a matter of knowing when I need it. How do I access it? How do I turn it on? Which again is probably a very good cost model in the sense that we’re doing it upfront so we’re not paying retrofitting cost later, which is not as satisfactory because it’s delayed, costlier, etc. That metaphor is very important as we think about curriculum and student performance.
Candace Cortiella: Is today’s high-tech world beginning to diminish the need for assistive technology, specifically for students with learning disabilities?
Dave Edyburn: That’s a very timely question as we think about how the world is changing around us. I think it goes back to the question about does assistive technology and Universal Design for Learning. My sense here is that traditional assistive technology may cause a stigma for students with learning disabilities because in middle school and secondary school, they don’t want to be different. So this individualized approach has never proven itself in the sense of being able to deliver timely interventions that help kids do the task we’re asking them to do in school.
So I think Universal Design for Learning has great promise in terms of trying to build in digital supports, both into the curriculum — and again we’re going to need to see more digital curriculum — but as we have these flexible learning environments, the digital supports would be available for everyone.
I think part of the challenge is things that were formally special [are now mainstream]. A good example is something called word prediction. When I type the letter T, the computer thinks I maybe spelling the word “the” as the most frequent “t” word. And so we would provide that on the screen and if that’s that word I want, I can press one key and it auto-completes.
Last fall, Google released a product like that where they have word prediction for everyone. And so now is that a special education product? Is that an assistive technology anymore because now Google has it and we can all use it? And I think that’s a very interesting challenge to our paradigm that assistive technology is special only for some while we have to engage in these very elaborate evaluation models to get you the right stuff as opposed to being supports built in much like we find in text messaging that uses word prediction on our cell phones.
So I think this is both the peril and the promise of what we’re talking about — that it requires us to have a very insightful [understanding] of where an individual struggles and then knowing how to build solutions that provide that support. And then it really doesn’t matter what we call it. The emphasis has to be on, “Can you do the task? Can we make this easier for you and make you more effective, save you time?”
I think parents would agree that this is not the experience they have when they try to help their child with homework. It’s difficult. It’s a battle. We don’t have the right tools. We’re constantly struggling. It’s not a positive experience. So I think that illustrates how much more we have to do in terms of trying to find the right tools, and get them to the right individuals, and get them to a point where they would be willing to engage in reading, writing — tasks that they normally find difficult and would like to avoid.
Candace Cortiella: Thank you for spending time with us to discuss this important area.
Dave Edyburn, Ph.D., is a leading expert in assistive technology (AT) for students with disabilities. Dr. Edyburn is the founder and editor of Special Education Technology Practice, a journal for technology practitioners, as well as many other products focused on using the power of technology in special education and to improve educational opportunities for children, youth, and adults with disabilities. He is also a professor in the Department of Exceptional Education at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
This transcription was made possible by a grant from the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation.
