DISCUS-IS Research Blog  ·  Post 2 of 4  ·  Series: What Instructors Tell Us 

UDL isn't a Checklist - It's a Disposition

What video-stimulated recall interviews revealed about how inclusive statistics instructors actually think

DISCUS-IS Project Team  ·  NSF IUSE #2314358  ·  Tags: UDL · Instructional design · Reflective practice

Somewhere in the history of Universal Design for Learning’s translation into practice, it became a list. A checklist, really. One widely-used observation protocol for recognizing UDL in postsecondary STEM classrooms reduces the framework to binary selections: “1A: Information was available digitally. 3A: Clicker questions cover previous content. 6B: Posted objectives in an obvious place.” The implication is that an instructor who checks enough boxes is implementing UDL.

The DISCUS-IS project came to a different conclusion.

In video-stimulated recall interviews with two introductory statistics instructors whose students demonstrated equitable outcomes across neurodivergent and neurotypical populations, we asked instructors to watch recordings of their own teaching and talk through the decisions they were making in real time. What emerged was not a list of strategies. It was something more like a way of being with students — a disposition of attention and responsiveness that expressed itself differently in each instructor’s classroom but drew from a common source.

The coding problem

The research team conducted deductive qualitative coding of the interview transcripts, aligning instructor utterances to the numbered UDL Considerations as a coding framework. We expected a relatively clean mapping: an instructor describes a practice, the practice corresponds to a consideration. What we found instead was that instructors’ rationales for their decisions were “seldom reducible to a single, discrete UDL Consideration.” A single utterance — one explanation of one instructional choice — would routinely touch multiple considerations simultaneously.

To test whether this complexity was a feature of the data or an artifact of the research team’s interpretive lens, we conducted an internal advisory board exercise: faculty colleagues who were familiar with UDL independently matched instructor utterances to UDL Considerations and discussed their interpretations aloud. The exercise confirmed what the research team had observed. The relationships between instructors’ descriptions and the UDL framework were genuinely multifaceted. Inclusive instructional decision-making doesn’t map neatly onto a matrix.

What Dolmage saw that the checklist misses

Jay Dolmage, in his critique of academic ableism, argues that Universal Design should be “registered as an action — a patterning of engagement and effort” rather than a destination or a checklist (2017, p. 145). He urges educators to “reanimate Universal Design as a verb,” as a “process and mode of becoming.”

This framing resonates strongly with what we observed in the instructor interviews. Neither instructor described their teaching in terms of strategies they had adopted. They described processes of noticing, adjusting, anticipating, and responding. Instructor Jackson spoke of watching which students were not engaging and modifying his approach in the moment. Dr. Young described a shift in her teaching over several years toward greater attentiveness to what students were actually saying and doing, rather than delivering content and checking whether the transfer happened.

This is UDL as a verb. It is iterative, context-dependent, and inseparable from the instructor’s relationship to the particular students in the room.

Design Thinking as the mechanism

Recent work in mathematics education has proposed Design Thinking — the iterative, human-centered problem-solving process described by Brown (2008) — as the mechanism for enacting UDL in practice. Imm and colleagues (2024) argue that “design thinking helps us to enact the guiding principles of UDL, moving from a generic checklist towards a design process in our vision for more equitable, inclusive, and responsive mathematics.” Lambert and colleagues (2021) similarly identify empathy as the connecting tissue between UDL and design thinking in mathematics teacher education.

The DISCUS-IS interviews offer a retrospective version of this argument. Rather than designing instruction prospectively with Design Thinking in mind, the instructors we interviewed arrived at UDL-aligned practices through years of iteration — paying attention to who was struggling, asking why, and adjusting. The video-stimulated recall interview provided a structure for making that iterative process visible and articulable.

What this means for you

If you have felt that UDL requires you to overhaul your teaching or adopt practices that feel foreign, the finding that emerges from these interviews is worth sitting with: the instructors we studied did not describe themselves as implementing a framework. They described themselves as paying attention to their students.

The checklist is not useless. It can prompt instructors to notice barriers they hadn’t seen, or to try structures they hadn’t considered. But it is not sufficient — and if it crowds out the more fundamental orientation of curiosity about students’ experiences, it may actually work against inclusive design. The question isn’t which boxes you can check. It’s what you are noticing, and what you do about it.

← All posts      Next: What Empathy Looks Like →

Part of the “What Instructors Tell Us” series · DISCUS-IS Project · NSF IUSE #2314358