DISCUS-IS Research Blog  ·  Post 1 of 4  ·  Series: What Instructors Tell Us 

Two Instructors, Two Styles: What that Tells Us about UDL

On why there’s no single playbook for inclusive statistics instruction — and why that’s actually good news

DISCUS-IS Project Team  ·  NSF IUSE #2314358  ·  Tags: UDL · Instructor practice · Inclusive design

One of the quieter findings in the DISCUS-IS project is also one of the most practically useful: two instructors with genuinely different classroom styles, different orientations to teaching, and different approaches to the content produced comparably equitable student outcomes. Students in both classrooms described feeling supported, engaged, and capable of learning statistics. The UDL framework was visible in both. And yet the two classrooms looked quite different from each other.

This matters because UDL is sometimes encountered as a prescriptive list — a menu of strategies that, once adopted, constitute “doing UDL.” What we observed suggests something more interesting and more demanding: that UDL is less a set of moves and more an orientation toward students. And that orientation can be enacted through very different pedagogical personalities.

Instructor Jackson: warmth as the engine

Ian Jackson has been teaching at Curry College for more than twenty years. His classroom runs on relationship. Students describe him as someone who makes the teacher-student power dynamic feel absent — “he feels more like a friend than a professor,” as one student put it. His UDL-aligned practices are largely relational: he builds rapport, he circulates and checks in, he offers students the option to pass on a question, he reassures students who are overwhelmed. He has been teaching long enough that he has watched both the student population and his own teaching change, and he is paying attention to both.

What’s striking about Jackson in the video-stimulated recall interview is his candor about tension. He says plainly: “It’s a catch-22. I don’t want to get people uncomfortable, scare them off. So I don’t want to put people on the spot, but I also don’t want people just sitting on the sidelines.” This is not the language of a practitioner implementing a framework. It is the language of someone genuinely trying to read his students and respond.

Dr. Young: structure as the engine

Sara Young’s classroom runs on design. Her UDL alignment is more architecturally visible — she opens every class with a social question to warm students into participation, uses the Four Pillars of Statistical Inference as an explicit organizing framework throughout the semester, anticipates procedural barriers and neutralizes them before they impede conceptual learning, and positions students as co-contributors to classroom knowledge rather than recipients of it. She describes her teaching as having evolved significantly: “That’s how I taught it the first couple of times. Now I feel like there’s much more of an interplay between what they’re saying and what I’m noticing about what they’re saying.

Where Jackson’s empathy is visible primarily in his responsiveness to individual students, Young’s empathy is visible in her instructional architecture — the proactive design decisions that anticipate student needs before they surface as problems. Her comment about deemphasizing calculation is illustrative: “Who cares if you’re not good at calculation? You can still be good at this.” That’s not a strategy. It’s a stance.

What students noticed

Students in both classrooms independently described feeling like their instructors cared about them and wanted them to succeed. The language they used was different — Jackson’s students talked about safety, approachability, and not being judged for not knowing; Young’s students talked about interactivity, voice, and a class that felt alive — but the underlying experience was similar. Both groups described classrooms in which they were willing to ask questions, work with peers, and return to the material when they were confused.

The student data also corroborated a finding that surprised the research team: students noticed and named the same practices that their instructors described in the video-stimulated recall interviews. When instructors said they valued student voice, students said they felt heard. When instructors described building in low-stakes participation structures, students described feeling safe enough to speak. The alignment between what instructors intended and what students experienced was itself a finding.

What this means for instructors thinking about UDL

The most honest takeaway from holding these two case studies together is that inclusive teaching is not a personality type. Jackson’s relational warmth and Young’s structural intentionality are both legitimate expressions of empathy for students — and both produced classrooms that neurodivergent students described as places where they could learn.

If you are an instructor who worries that UDL requires you to become someone you’re not, these two cases suggest otherwise. The question is not which strategies to adopt but what you are paying attention to. Are you watching your students and asking yourself what they need? Are you making adjustments, in the moment and across the semester, in response to what you see? If so, you are already doing something that looks like the active, verb-form UDL that Jay Dolmage argues for — even if it doesn’t look like either Jackson’s classroom or Young’s.

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