I Was Using Universal Design Before I Knew What It Was: A Teacher's Journey to Naming Their Practice

For those of you who have been following my essay journeying, in my between careers time, to wrap my head around this monumental career change that I’m in the process of you’ll notice that some of my titles and essay concepts talk about “I was doing x before I could articulate what I was doing, not only in the context of teaching, but also that of Instructional Design for adults. Any current or past educators will understand this concept to the core of their beings. For ten months a year school teachers, especially those of us in traditionally underserved schools, move at such a fast pace that we often are not only not able to name our practice, sometimes we aren’t even aware that we are practicing. 

For example, early on, after leaving the classroom to figure out what comes next, I was doing some research on how a teacher can transition into the corporate marketplace and what of our skills and knowledge can transfer. One video that I was watching talked about how important it is for teachers to unearth all of the skills and knowledge, because often we do tasks and come up with systems that companies value, but that were simply a blip on our professional radar before we moved on to the next crisis. For example, I once served on a hiring committee for a new assistant principal. I’d completely forgotten that I’d done so and immediately moved on to trying to figure out how to teach my new Teaching English as a Second Language course having had no formal training. 

In my second year teaching I was feeling really overwhelmed by the large number of Special Education, English as a Second Language, and 504 accommodation plans that I had to read and make plans for. In the schools that I was teaching in 90 or more percent of my students had some sort of accommodation plan. After reading through all of my accommodation plans a pattern started emerging for me - many of the accommodations were the same. I approached our Special Ed. Director and asked her how she felt about my simply applying accommodations to the whole class. So, every student got things like copies of notes beforehand that they were taught to annotate, extra time for assignments when needed, or audio accompaniments to texts when needed. Of course, I still read through all of my IEP materials and added accommodations or modifications where necessary. However, my model allowed me to have certain common accommodations in place so that I could more easily manage my other student needs. After talking this over with my SpEd Director she recalled a training that she’d gone to wherein the moderator had suggested that everyone has some learning challenges and could benefit from accommodations. It was at that moment that I crystalized my model of Universal Design Principals–long before learning the term and principles. 

For the whole rest of my career I was lauded by supervising administrators for my home made UDPs and told that they’d never seen a teacher do such a thing. It’s ironic and odd to me, from this vantage, that in the six states that I lived in, over 20 years, I never heard of UDP and apparently no one in my professional realm had either. As the years went on, successfully reproducing my model, it occurred to me why this concept appealed to me so much, aside from saving me precious time in designing and planning my accommodations. When I was young I was intelligent and highly successful in school, until I wasn’t. It wasn’t that my intellect changed, it was that my circumstances at home became such that it became challenging to focus on what I needed to focus on in school. I would have benefitted tremendously from many of these UDP accommodations. As my teaching mentor Marilee often says, “We teach what we need.” 

The thing about my accommodations, and why my administrator’s educational instincts pegged this as superior teaching, is that my universal accommodations served every student at various points. At this point in history, with screens, sports, and even after school jobs, have you encountered an overtired teen? Right, it’s nearly endemic. Even our own 13 year old, who has two parents who are educators, is in so many sports at the beginning of the school year that he’s riding the edge of exhaustion. We all know that sleep deprivation causes challenges with focus, concentration, and executive function. When I offer every student an audio accompaniment to texts the accommodation serves neuro-typical but sleep deprived students as well. So called regular education doesn’t only create barriers to learning with students who get legally mandated accommodations, it also creates learning barriers to every student who doesn’t always fit into the narrow category of a so-called normal learner. People are dynamic organisms that change constantly. So too should their learning environments accommodate those changes. With built in accommodations learners are allowed to be human and waver in and out of the so-called normal range and are still able to have a more optimized learning environment. 

Flash forward to my interim career period, wherein I was working on building an eLearning module for my website after completing an Articulate 360 certificate. Since leaving teaching

I’ve been working in a setting wherein my assistant is a person living with ADHD and Autism. I haven’t ever had any training and had very limited experience interacting with or teaching/training people living with Autism. However, what I did have was two decades of experience in facing new challenges and assessing what accommodations would work best to support my challenges. For example, I once learned a strategy for English language learners to create an outline of a lesson that they could annotate during my lesson. Going forward I would just make a stack of copies of these outlines and leave them out for any student who felt like they would be useful for them. So, I adapted this concept and anytime I had to train her on something new I would type up a bulleted outline that I would print and she would take notes on and then keep them in a binder–she is a person who prefers pen and paper as a learning medium.  

So, along the lines of the teacher transition to other industries advice, from my research, I decided to capitalize on this new area of adult training that I taught myself by creating a module that addressed my vision of assessing and addressing accommodations needs. At one point I was working with one of my LLM AI thinking partners and asking it for a term that I could use to capture this teaching/training concept of mine. It said that it sounded like I was talking about Universal Design Principal. Upon researching the topic I discovered that what I’d been doing was a fully crystalized and codified practice since the mid-1980s. 

Once I’d made this connection I asked my AI thinking partner for a good corporate scenario that involved a neurodivergent employee and used my accommodations challenges solving skills to come up with some strategies that could be used to resolve the challenge. I then had my AI partner cross reference my solutions with Universal Design Principles (UDP), saw that they fit the model, and modified my language to fit the UDP model–a concept that has become all too familiar to me since leaving the classroom - unearthing my knowledge and skills, articulating them, then finding out the Instructional Design principles that they match, and calibrating my language to fit them. For example, while teaching I would, as a matter of course, follow up any lectures with notes from any direct teaching lectures. This way students who were absent or not functioning optimally that day, for whatever reason, would be less likely to fall behind. In my corporate workplace module this translated into - post-meeting written follow-up with action items, to reduce the need for clarifying emails later. 

In spite of my administrator’s lauding me as exceptional for this and others of my practices, I’ve only ever seen myself as working hard to manifest myself as how I think that should be standard. I find a great deal of comfort in learning that, in the context of Universal Design Principles (UDP), I’ve been standard for this whole time and didn’t realize it. I had approached this project in the context of thinking that I was addressing the needs of exceptional people as well. However, viewing the project through the lens of UDP I realize that it isn’t just me that isn’t exceptional, it is also the neurodivergent that are not exceptional. When Instructional Designers, whether we be teachers, trainers, or corporate IDs, design using UDP as a standard we are creating a standard that allows all of our learners to develop on a more even field, making it more likely that all of them can achieve excellence. The ROI is obvious - the more learners that have an opportunity to achieve excellence the stronger a class or team will be. When the team is strong the company has a greater likelihood of achieving excellence as well. 

People are dynamic organisms that change constantly. So too should their learning environments accommodate those changes. 

Whether you are a classroom teacher or an Instructional Designer we have an obligation to ourselves, our learners, and our communities to take the time to be able to reflect on our practice and name our strategies. It not only gives us an intellectual platform from which to grow, but it also yields an incredible ROI in the context of making people feel better about themselves, having a better outcome from learning, and becoming a stronger community together, rather than an exceptional group of individuals.