Core Growth and UDL Overview

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a way of thinking about teaching and learning that helps give ALL students an equal opportunity to succeed. This approach offers flexibility in the ways students access material, engage with it, and show what they know.  It is based on the belief that all students are variable with their strengths and weaknesses. By offering them a variety of options for learning and expressing knowledge, students are more engaged and better able to grasp new content, and teachers are better able to measure skills and growth.

Core Growth is being expanded to accommodate variable learners with the understanding that educational goals and assessment can focus on the content being measured rather than the specific ways that students might show this mastery.  For example, students can show mastery of addition to 20 in multiple ways, including reading an equation and writing or pointing to the answer, listening to an equation and telling the answer, or modeling the equation using manipulatives.  Core Growth has a growing bank of multiple options for student response so that all teachers can measure the skills and growth of the variable learners in their classrooms.

Teachers can choose to offer choices within Core Growth as a buffet of options, letting students choose how they would like to respond, or they can differentiate by selecting specific supports for each student based on learning needs.  Additionally, Core Growth provides links to Essential Elements of the Common Core State Standards, helping teachers of students with extensive support needs to teach and measure learning.

We are enhancing Core Growth with rich UDL supports by grade-level, beginning with TK and K, and working upward.  In the long Core Growth tradition of “made for teachers by teachers,” we are relying on teacher feedback to create the best assessment possible.