Picture the last time a student in your class failed to access the core content of your lesson — not because they lacked ability, but because the format didn't fit how their brain works. The text was too dense. The instructions were too abstract. The only way to demonstrate understanding was a written test that required skills that weren't the actual learning target. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is the planning framework designed to fix that problem before the lesson starts, not after the student falls behind.

A UDL lesson plan is not a stack of accommodations bolted onto a standard lesson. It is a lesson designed from the outset with learner variability in mind — built for the full range of students in your room, including students with IEPs, English language learners, twice-exceptional students, and everyone else the traditional "average student" model leaves behind.

What Is a UDL Lesson Plan?

Universal Design for Learning is a research-backed framework developed by CAST, the Center for Applied Special Technology, that draws on cognitive neuroscience to explain why no two students learn the same way. The framework has been refined through decades of research into how the brain's affective, recognition, and strategic networks each govern a distinct dimension of learning.

A traditional lesson plan asks: What will I teach, and how will I teach it? A UDL lesson plan asks: Who is in my room, what barriers might this content create, and how do I remove them before class starts? That shift from reactive to proactive is the entire point.

As Understood.org explains, the ultimate goal of UDL is not simply content access — it is developing expert learners who are purposeful and motivated, resourceful and knowledgeable, strategic and goal-directed. That's a significantly higher bar than "everyone can read the worksheet."

Anticipate Learner Variability and Remove Barriers

Most instructional barriers are design problems, not student problems. A video without captions is not a problem for students with hearing loss — it is a problem with the video. A lab report template requiring five paragraphs is not a problem for students who struggle with written expression — it is a problem with the template.

The first move in building any UDL lesson plan is auditing your own materials. Ask three questions before you finalize anything:

  • Does the primary way students access this content require skills that are not the actual learning target? (Reading fluency in a science concept unit, for example.)
  • Does the primary way students demonstrate understanding require skills that are not the target? (Essay structure in a math class, for example.)
  • Are there students at the margins of your classroom (students with IEPs, English language learners, students experiencing chronic stress) whose variability reveals a design flaw that likely affects others too?

That last question points to a principle sometimes called designing for the margins. When you design a lesson that works for your most constrained learners, you frequently build something better for everyone. Captions help students in a noisy hallway. Graphic organizers help strong readers who are weak at synthesis. Structured choice helps the student with ADHD and the one who simply needs a task to feel worth doing.

Variability Is the Norm

CAST's foundational research establishes that learner variability, encompassing differences in how students engage with content, process information, and express understanding, is the classroom norm rather than a deviation from it. It is the norm. A UDL lesson plan is designed around that reality from day one.

The Three Pillars: Multiple Means of Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression

The CAST UDL Guidelines (v2.2) organize the framework around three core principles, each targeting a different dimension of how the brain learns.

Multiple Means of Engagement ( The " Why")

Engagement addresses the affective network — what motivates students to begin a task, what sustains their effort when it gets difficult, and what helps them regulate when frustration spikes. This pillar is the most frequently overlooked, because varying content delivery is easier than redesigning what makes learning feel worth doing.

Practical moves: offer genuine student choice in topics, tools, or working environments; connect content to students' lives and cultural communities (this is where UDL intersects directly with Culturally Responsive Teaching, a connection worth exploring in your own practice and professional reading); explicitly teach and practice strategies for managing frustration and sustaining attention.

Multiple Means of Representation ( The " What")

Representation addresses the recognition network — how students perceive and comprehend information. The IRIS Center at Vanderbilt describes this as offering the same content through multiple formats so that no student's access depends on a single channel.

Practical moves: pair dense text with visual diagrams or graphic organizers; provide audio versions of readings via text-to-speech tools or teacher recordings; pre-teach vocabulary before students encounter it in complex texts; introduce concrete examples before abstract definitions rather than the other way around.

Multiple Means of Action & Expression ( The " How")

Expression addresses the strategic network — how students plan, organize, and communicate what they've learned. This pillar is about giving students more than one way to show understanding, and more than one set of supports for getting started.

Practical moves: allow students to submit a labeled diagram, a recorded explanation, or a written response for the same prompt; scaffold executive function by breaking long projects into checkpoints with interim feedback rather than a single deadline; provide sentence starters or response frames for students who struggle to initiate.

"The goal of education is not simply the mastery of content knowledge or the use of new technologies. It is the mastery of learning itself."

— CAST, UDL Guidelines v2.2

Step-by-Step: Proactively Design Your First UDL Lesson

Here is a workflow that applies whether you are redesigning an existing lesson or building from scratch.

Step 1: Set a clear, barrier-free learning goal. Write the goal so it specifies the what, not the how. "Students will explain the causes of the Civil War" is a clean goal. "Students will write a five-paragraph essay explaining the causes of the Civil War" has embedded a format that is probably not the actual learning target. If you are working with IEP goals, align your UDL goal to the relevant academic standard the IEP references. UDL does not replace IEP accommodations — it reduces the number of moments where those accommodations need to activate.

Step 2: Audit the lesson for unintended barriers. Walk through your planned materials, tasks, and assessments. For each one, ask: is this barrier related to the learning goal, or is it an obstacle the design created accidentally?

Step 3: Design with a low floor, high ceiling. A low floor, high ceiling task lets every student enter the work and lets no student hit an artificial cap. In practice, this means starting with a concrete, accessible entry point (a visual, a physical manipulation, a brief discussion) before moving toward abstraction. Then offer extension paths for students ready to go further, without making those paths mandatory for everyone.

Step 4: Select methods and materials for each pillar. Choose at least two ways to represent core content, at least two ways students can engage with it, and at least two ways they can express understanding. You do not need six options for everything. Two well-chosen options address most of the variability in a typical classroom.

Step 5: Build in checkpoints before the final product. Plan moments for formative feedback throughout the unit, not just at the end. Students who are struggling rarely surface that on their own until it is too late to help them. Understood.org's lesson planning guide frames these mid-process check-ins as central to UDL, not optional extras.

UDL Lesson Plan Makeover: High School Science & Social Studies

UDL examples skew heavily toward elementary math. Here is what the framework looks like when applied at the secondary level.

10th-Grade Biology: Cell Division

Before: Students read Chapter 8 in the textbook, answer ten comprehension questions, and prepare for a multiple-choice test. Vocabulary appears in a glossary most students ignore.

After:

  • Representation: Provide the textbook chapter alongside an annotated diagram handout and a short explanatory video. Pre-teach five core vocabulary terms using visual word maps before students encounter them in the reading.
  • Engagement: Frame the unit around a driving question students connect with personally: "Why do some cells divide uncontrollably?" Offer a choice of real-world applications (cancer biology, wound healing, aging) for students to investigate in depth.
  • Action & Expression: Students demonstrate understanding through one of three formats — a labeled diagram with written annotations, a narrated screencast, or a traditional written response. The rubric criteria are identical across formats; the format is not the point.

11th-Grade U. S. History: The New Deal

Before: Three days of teacher lecture. Students take notes. Final assessment is an essay.

After:

  • Representation: Supplement lectures with primary source images (WPA posters, Dorothea Lange photographs) and brief documentary clips. Provide a graphic organizer that chunks the political, economic, and social dimensions of the New Deal before students are asked to synthesize across them.
  • Engagement: Connect New Deal debates to current conversations about government economic intervention. Allow students to choose one program to investigate, then share findings in a structured Jigsaw discussion.
  • Action & Expression: Final assessment options include a policy brief, a visual timeline with written analysis, or a recorded podcast-style debate between two historical perspectives. The rubric for conceptual understanding applies equally to all three.

Budget-Friendly UDL: Implementation Without Expensive Tech

A persistent misconception is that UDL requires classroom technology. It does not. Here is how to apply all three principles with low-cost or free resources:

  • Representation without tech: Printed graphic organizers, physical manipulatives, bilingual glossaries, teacher-created read-alouds recorded on any phone, and color-coded annotation guides
  • Engagement without tech: Student-choice menus printed on paper, flexible seating arrangements, anchor activities for students who finish early, discussion protocols (think-pair-share, Socratic seminars) that lower the social stakes of participation
  • Expression without tech: Oral responses during teacher check-ins, labeled drawings as an alternative to written explanations, index-card exit tickets with two or three response formats to choose from

ASCD is explicit that UDL is first a mindset, then a set of practices — and most of those practices require planning time, not purchasing budgets.

Start With One Pillar

Don't attempt to redesign everything at once. Pick one unit and apply UDL to the representation pillar only. See what changes, then expand. Teachers who sustain UDL practice over time almost universally started with one pillar, got confident, and added from there.

Using AI to Streamline UDL Planning

AI tools won't design your lesson, but they can reduce the time required to generate multiple options. Here are specific prompts that work:

For Multiple Means of Representation:

"I'm teaching [topic] to [grade level] students. Give me three ways to represent this content: one text-based, one visual, and one audio or video format. Each should require no more than 15 minutes to access and no special technology."

For Multiple Means of Engagement:

"My learning goal is [goal]. Suggest three real-world connections or student-choice options that would make this goal more relevant to [grade level] students, including students from diverse cultural backgrounds."

For Multiple Means of Action & Expression:

"Design three alternative ways for students to demonstrate [learning goal] beyond a written test. Include rubric criteria that apply equally to all three formats."

For barrier identification:

"Here is my lesson plan: [paste plan]. Identify three places where the design creates unintended barriers for students with learning disabilities, English language learners, or students with low print literacy. Suggest one UDL-aligned fix for each."

Always review AI-generated suggestions against your knowledge of your specific students. The tool does not know your room — you do.

Reflect and Redesign

UDL is an iterative process. The first time you run a UDL-designed lesson, you will learn things no planning session could have surfaced. After the lesson, ask students two questions directly:

  1. Which way of learning the content worked best for you today, and why?
  2. Was there anything that got in the way of your learning?

Their answers will tell you more than most formal observations. Students reliably identify barriers that educators miss, because they experience those barriers rather than design around them. Use that feedback to adjust the next iteration. This is not a failure of the first design — it is the process working exactly as it should.

A few honest caveats are worth naming. Implementing UDL lesson plans requires genuine investment of time upfront. Many educators find that the initial redesign of curriculum and instructional materials is the most commonly cited barrier to adoption — and that barrier is real. Schools that sustain UDL practice over time invest in ongoing professional development and collaborative planning time, not a one-day workshop followed by nothing.

The research on whether UDL lesson plans drive gains in standardized test scores is still developing, and it is worth being honest about that. What the evidence does support clearly is increased student engagement, greater agency, and more equitable access to grade-level content. For most educators, that is reason enough to start.

Your first UDL lesson plan does not need to be perfect. It needs to be better designed than the one it replaced.