UDL Now!

This book is filled with a lot of practical tips and strategies that work. I will be implementing several from this book and sharing others with my colleagues. Well worth the read!

Katie Novak is a pioneer in Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I read an earlier edition of this book and wished that I had read it sooner. Her ideas and presentation of this approach are focused on making classroom teaching more productive and effective. Dr. Novak has coauthored two other books (with Dr. Catlin R. Tucker): "UDL and Blended Learning," and "The Shift to Student-Led." I have purchased both books (along with the revised version of "UDL Now!") and am looking forward to the opportunity to complete reading them.

This third-edition update is a well-written resource I leave in my bag and read/review often. Many practical ideas guide teachers (and indeed all educators and administrators) on the power of expert learning, the importance of implementing UDL, and a solid breakdown of the differences between differential instruction and UDL. My favorite chapter is 'Chapter 6: Firm Goals and UDL Implementation." This chapter offers rubrics, the importance of UDL alignment to high standards, and firm but flexible student goals. What an excellent resource for everyone! Well done, Katie! You rock!

Great resource and valuable for education today

I read this along with my professional book club. Some of the members struggled to get copies (because they live outside the US in places like India or New Zealand) so an audiobook would have been helpful. Even if you don't live internationally, it is a bit ironic to have a UDL book that doesn't have multiple means of access. Perhaps they are working on it.Nevertheless, the content is solid and there are fantastic metaphors that help you to understand why UDL is vital to teaching and learning. However, I would have liked some more details and examples about assessment when you have multiple means of representation. For example, giving students a choice board with a variety of options to represent their understanding sounds great in theory, but grading a poem, a letter, or a children's book (all writing tasks, mind you) presents vastly different approaches as to how content might look. And then, as a teacher, I would likely need to create exemplars of that, which would take a lot of time. So I would have liked to have examples from a variety of grade levels (Kindergarten, 2nd grade, 4th grade, 6th grade, 8th grade, 10 grade, 12th grade) to see how that might look. I found the DI vs UDL needs more clarity and how it operates in the MTSS ecosystem of support. A case study or class example might have brought it to life. Maybe consider these points for the 4th edition???Needless to say, this is not a planning guide so if you want to be able to get up and implement this today, you probably have to read another book after this one. However, it's an excellent overview of UDL and I'd wholeheartedly recommend this to others if they are UDL curious. Our school is going to do a book study to help us reflect on our instructional practices and conduct a policy review. As an admin, I found the lesson observation protocol extremely helpful--and teachers did too, which supported the instructional coaching cycle. That alone is worth its weight in gold.