There are certain memories about teaching that stay with you.
One of mine is sitting on my couch with a bag of Parmesan Goldfish and my English/language arts anthology teacher’s guide open on my lap. When a new unit was coming up, I would open that guide and start marking it up. I would highlight questions, circle ideas, dog-ear pages, and write notes in the margins so I could be more intentional about how I facilitated the lesson for my students.
I continued to do this after I learned about Universal Design for Learning. UDL simply gave me a new lens. It helped me examine the different parts of the lesson more critically and think about potential barriers so I could use what I knew about my content, my students, and my classroom to make the experience more accessible and more engaging for all of us.
I never used the guide as a script. That was never the goal. What I appreciated was having the instructional thinking organized in one place. When I took the time to really internalize the lesson, and I will be honest, I did not always do that, the lesson was a heck of a lot better.
I have been thinking about those evenings on my couch as my team and I continue to hear the same question about UDL.
What does this actually look like in my learning environment?
Many educators learn about UDL and understand the framework. They believe in honoring variability. They love the idea of being more flexible and creating more opportunities for student engagement. They are already working hard to support diverse learners. What they struggle with is not the why of UDL. It is the how.
What does it look like when you actually facilitate a lesson designed with UDL in mind?
We all teach within very real constraints. We have pacing guides and required materials. Many of us are expected to use high-quality instructional resources with integrity. We have different schedules, different content areas, and different student populations. There is not a single template for what a UDL lesson should look like. The work is not about replacing everything we already use. It is about examining it with more clarity and internalizing it through the lens of UDL.
The UDL Lesson Planning Protocol helps with that examination. It gives teachers a way to clarify goals, identify barriers, and think about flexibility without lowering expectations. But even when teachers see opportunities for improvement in a lesson, they often struggle to imagine how those design decisions translate into the flow of a real class period.
That tension is what led me to create the Teacher's Guide to UDL 3.0.
This guide is not a script, and it is not a checklist of everything you must do. Think of it as a way of organizing the evidence base around inclusive and flexible instruction so teachers can think through how a lesson unfolds. It walks through the importance of setting up the learning environment, creating welcoming routines, sharing clear objectives and success criteria, framing instruction in accessible ways, building in active engagement, designing self-differentiated learning, and protecting the integrity of assessment. As you review it, please know the goal is not to follow every suggestion. The goal is to internalize the thinking so facilitation becomes more intentional.
There is no single way to operationalize UDL because there is no single classroom. What the guide offers is a structure that is flexible enough for teachers and their brilliance to apply within their own environments. My hope is that it provides a way to connect design decisions to day-to-day teaching without lowering expectations or adding unnecessary complexity.
And if you happen to read it with a bag of Parmesan Goldfish on the couch, you will be in very good company.