Secondary school staff may be implementing effective universal, tier one strategies in their schools. By universal strategies, we mean academic, behavioral, and social and emotional supports that all teachers can embed into the curriculum. One example of universal support is Universal design for learning (UDL). This approach includes embedding instructional supports when you teach a skill, asking students to engage with course content, and/or expressing what they have learned, and can help strengthen your schoolwide approach to instruction.
This blog is the second in a series about embedding UDL into schoolwide practices. For more information on developing buy-in for your schoolwide approach, please see Lisa Caputo Love’s blog post Developing Buy-In for Schoolwide Approaches.
Recently, my friend and co-author, Kelly Morrissey, shared a presentation for the 7th Annual CAST Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Symposium about embedding UDL into schoolwide interventions. Kelly is the Director of Personal Learning and Student Support at Maine Township High School District 207 in Illinois. The examples she shared provide ways to make your core curriculum more accessible for all learners.
Here is a link to the presentation recording, it’s only about 15 minutes long.
Summary
In this presentation, Kelly described ways to embed UDL strategies into related multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and school improvement in secondary settings. She focused on schoolwide approaches in this presentation referring to UDL. However, schoolwide approaches can include schoolwide positive behavior support, social and emotional learning, or other systematic instructional strategies. As with UDL, each of these schoolwide approaches has methods for providing an effective universal experience for all students. As described below, the UDL framework also contains considerable overlap with each of these different domains of MTSS (e.g., behavior, social and emotional learning).
Reflecting on Current Practices
Kelly asked participants to think about tier one, schoolwide strategies they have seen implemented in schools. For example, school staff can explicitly teach behavioral expectations or social and emotional learning skills. As you think about these examples, here are two questions you can reflect upon:
- What tenants of UDL do you see at play when those strategies are implemented well?
- What examples from the CAST UDL Guidelines would make good tier one strategies in your school setting?
According to Kelly, UDL and MTSS have these factors in common:
- Both are proactive – we do not wait for students to fail to provide supports
- Both are flexible enough to meet the needs of all students
- Both help all students to meet well-established goals and standards
- Both help educators guide students towards becoming independent learners
Below you will find a graphic organizer Kelly developed to help us see the comparison between the two approaches.
UDL and Tier 1: A Perfect Union!
Next, Kelly shared some examples for embedding UDL into tier one MTSS strategies.
Examples of Connections between UDL and Tier One MTSS
In the following examples, Kelly provided specific connections between UDL and MTSS. She highlighted the specific MTSS components using bold font and UDL related strategies using italics. She pulled these examples directly from the UDL Guidelines.
Flexible Engagement elements with connections to tier one strategies
- Creating clear expectations for different spaces and activities with explicit lesson plans to help students develop the social-emotional learning skills needed to meet the expectations can help recruit interest by minimizing threats (CAST, 2018) by making the space more predictable.
- Collaborating with students to develop the expectations also optimizes relevance, value, and authenticity (CAST, 2018).
As Kelly stated, “Whenever we make a space more predictable and students feel confident that they know what’s expected of them, it feels less threatening and helps to free up more of their cognitive processing.” It also reduces some emotional barriers that can make learning harder for students.
When we collaborate with students to build these expectations, it adds value and authenticity, which are also part of the UDL framework.
Flexible Representation elements with connections to tier one strategies
- Kelly highlights a tier one instructional routine called “Reading for Meaning” as an example of tier one instruction. The approach is adapted from The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core published by ASCD. This approach involves using a graphic organizer to help students to develop independence when interacting with text. In this approach, students read or state claims about an image, text, or math problem and then look for evidence to prove or disprove their claim. It’s a significant step for students to engage before building an argument, starting a debate, or writing a paper. It can also help students visualize information using a graphic organizer (an example is provided below).
Flexible Expression elements with connections to tier one strategies
- Kelly describes using a standard checklist to self-monitor problem-solving steps in mathematics as a tier one strategy. Self-monitoring can help students with planning and support executive functioning. For example, based on an error analysis of students’ work, teachers can identify common problems with computation (this approach could be used for writing or other projects as well). Next, the teacher can develop a brief error checklist that students can use before turning in their work. Intervention Central provides valuable examples, and blank tools teachers can use to create these checklists for their students. For more research behind this approach, we encourage you to check out the work of Lee Kern and Glen Dunlap, and Heather Uberti, Margo Mastropieri, and Thomas E. Scruggs.
Systematizing is Key
Selecting tier one strategies that align with UDL principals will add a layer of assurance that the strategy will provide equitable access for all students. However, Kelly shared that for UDL to be successful, you need to connect your design to MTSS related systems.
For example, according to Kelly, you can only say honesty you are implementing a tier one strategy is to check to see if the intervention is being implemented as it was designed (i.e., fidelity). She suggested two helpful reflection questions for implementers of UDL:
- Do we all understand the strategy (critical features) and when and why we use it?
- Do we have data indicating the intervention is happening as frequently as we intend, with its critical features (e.g., walk-throughs, observation data, teacher checklists, student surveys)?
One tool you might consider for helping teachers assess the fidelity of implementation of UDL at the tier one level is the UDL Implementation Rubric that Lisa Caputo Love mentioned in her blog from this series. This tool would be helpful for instructors or instructional coaches to support and track the implementation of UDL at the classroom level. Additionally, you might consider the UDL Practice Profile tool created by Dr. Loui Lord Nelson at the UDL Approach (link) that combines UDL and MTSS components for schoolwide planning purposes (link).
Example of Tier One UDL Instructional Strategy
Earlier, Kelly mentioned the Reading for Meaning approach to provide Flexible Means of Representation. Here is an example of this strategy that Kelly developed based on her work in high schools. Using this approach, you can provide students with an article, website, blog, picture, or video clip covering similar content. In this example, Kelly demonstrated a model where students could review information about career outcomes.
The claim in the first row is that people with more advanced degrees make more money. Students in this example found data supporting people with advanced degrees tend to make more money.
The second claim was that most people work in a field they studied in college. The students were able to refute this idea based on the evidence they found in their resources. (She created this example for discussion purposes only – and it is not based on real data).
Teachers in her school use this strategy to help students develop an argument for a paper, presentation, debate, or even decide how to solve a math problem. The approach provides a structure that reduces the cognitive load for students.
Reading for Meaning Example (Silver, Dewing, Perini, 2012)
| Evidence to prove | Claim | Evidence to refute |
| Table 1 shows that people with PhDs make an average income of $80,000 versus those with BAs make an average of $40,000 | People with more advanced degrees make more money | |
| Most people work in a field they studied for in college | Paragraph 5 stated that “75% of college graduates work in a different field than their BA was geared toward” |
Additional Ways to Utilize Reading for Meaning
- Allow students to choose from articles at different Lexile levels on the same topic or other claims with various levels of “difficulty” to prove or disprove.
- Use images, songs, websites, directions, etc. as texts to “read”.
- Once comfortable with the routine, students can create their own “Reading for Meaning” activity and challenge each other.
Now it’s your turn to practice a schoolwide, UDL related strategy
As we stated, the Reading for Meaning process touches on elements of UDL and can make an excellent tier one literacy strategy within the MTSS framework
Choose one of the following texts:
- Website overview of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) (MiMTSS Technical Assistance Center)
- Infographic overview of MTSS (Lead for Literacy)
- Short MTSS overview from chapter one of Implementing Systematic Interventions (Bohanon, Caputo, and Morrissey, 2021)
Use the text you chose to complete the Reading for Meaning activity below: Find evidence you can quote, paraphrase, or describe to support and/or refute each statement in the middle.
- If your evidence supports the claim, enter in the left column.
- If your evidence refutes the claim, enter it in the right column.
- If you found evidence that supports AND refutes the claim, enter into each column.
You can make a copy of this Google Doc to type in the table (click “File” at the top left, then click “Make a Copy”). Or print it out (click the printer icon at the top left of your screen).
| Evidence to prove | Claim | Evidence to refute |
| The use of data is key to effective MTSS implementation | ||
| An effective MTSS team looks at data once per year | ||
| Students’ needs drive decision making when using MTSS processes |
For more training on UDL and MTSS, check out these online modules from the CEEDAR Center (link). This is also an excellent article on how implementing UDL as a component of MTSS can be useful to your leadership teams (link). You can also find additional training on UDL at the CAST website (link).
I hope these examples of connecting UDL with multi-tiered systems of supports is useful to your work. I would love to hear from you about ways to connect UDL with MTSS in your setting. Please leave a comment below with your ideas.