Learner Agency – Module 1 - Universal Design for Learning

The ultimate goal of UDL is to support learner agency. UDL describes learner agency as the feeling of ownership and active participation in making choices to meet learning outcomes. The UDL Guidelines inform the design of learning environments to support learner agency that is:

Purposeful - internalized self-efficacy, acting in ways that are personally and socially meaningful.
Reflective - self-awareness and metacognition to identify internal motivations and external influences that support learning and make adjustments when necessary.
Resourceful - understanding and applying assets, strengths, resources, and linguistic and cultural capital.
Authentic - building knowledge and deepening understanding in ways that are genuine.
Strategic - setting goals and monitoring learning with intentionality and planfulness.
Action-oriented - self-directed and collective action in pursuit of learning goals.

Learner agency incudes the ability to maintain emotional equilibrium, reflect on thoughts and behaviours, and actively participate in learning. It thrives in a learning environment that values all voices equally and enables learners to act as empowered participants. Educators can foster learner agency by challenging power structures, encouraging reflection, addressing biases, and creating inclusive environments. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) enhances agency by reducing environmental barriers rather than attributing these to learners. Then we can distinguish between barriers as blocks, and challenges as supported learning opportunities.

Reflect

The brain is already designed to actively participate in making choices, but barriers can get in the way. The goal is to remove the barriers, so learner agency emerges – perhaps in a process similar to the popular metaphor for Renaissance artist Michelangelo’s sculpting approach: Chip away at the excess stone until the work of art shines through.

How would you describe your own transformative journey towards agency as a learner?

Executive Function

Executive Function is a key guideline in UDL, encompassing considerations of all three principles of Engagement, Representation, and Action and Expression. First, emotional capacity is the awareness of self, others, and motivations. Educators can foster this by promoting reflection, empathy, and restorative practices. In terms of building knowledge, educators can support learning transfer by highlighting patterns, key ideas, and relationships while cultivating multiple ways of knowing and making meaning. Emotional capacity and knowledge building, as well as strategy development, comprise executive function.

Supporting Executive Function Variability3:25 min

In this video, Joanna Friend, a professor and faculty facilitator, explains how learners vary in their ability to monitor progress, plan, organize, and predict how long it takes to complete multi-step projects. She provides an example of how she embeds this metacognitive skill development into her course assignments.

Transcript of Supporting Executive Function Variability

Supporting Executive Function Variability

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>> Executive functions are the mental processes that enable learners to plan ahead and reflect on past learning experiences, start and finish a task, and manage their time. They can affect how they go about setting up strategies to learn in the present and also how to plan and organize for the future. These skills also require a learners’ ability to access and juggle many thinking skills at the same time.

Executive functioning skills can also impact how one interacts with others. They help us to control our emotions, identify and find solutions for a problem, monitor and stop our actions, evaluate our thoughts, and give ourselves direction through selftalk. These skills require multiple higher order thinking processes to help learners organize their learning path and needs. This is why it is sometimes called the conductor or the CEO of our brains.

All learners differ in their abilities to execute these thinking skills at the right time and in the right place. And it is very context-driven. Sometimes learners’ executive thinking will not be functioning the way it normally does because of stress, feeling overwhelmed, environmental stimuli, fears or just a bad night’s sleep. Sometimes it is just the way their brain is wired too, such as in the case of some learners who have learning disabilities or ADHD.

I consider this range of ability when I design assignments and learning activities. For example, if my students are given a multi-step project, I break it down into several steps so that they can begin to evaluate where their time should be allotted for each step. We also, as a class, discuss what they believe is realistic about how much time each step may take and consider what to do if we are stuck on a step. I also offer a template where they can fill out each of these steps and indicate how much time they may take and have them spend time inputting these steps throughout their agendas or calendars. Many students already use the calendar app on their phones and set reminders and notifications just like meetings or appointments.

I also encourage learners to go back and reflect on the estimated time versus the actual time it took them to complete a step related to the project. This way they can learn to monitor independently and they are building the awareness and insight needed to be able to plan for themselves for future multi-step projects. We take these skills for granted and some of us may already intuitively do this. But for many learners, they need more structure to develop these skills so that they can become life-long, independent, strategic and goal-oriented learners; key ingredients of what CAST refers to as ‘expert learners’.

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UDL and Beyond

For curriculum design to proactively provide equitable access for learners across social locations and identities, it must inevitably consider and work to counteract considerable power dynamics in educational spaces.

Inclusive and equitable learning environments that welcome diversity and difference cannot be achieved without considering and challenging the social and institutional structures that sustain the inequities we seek to dismantle. The next section provides an overview of the frameworks, contexts, and practices that, alongside UDL, are integral to creating true inclusion, accessibility, and community in our learning and teaching practices.