Unlocking Universal Design: Paula Kluth’s Strategies for Inclusive Classrooms ~ 606

Tim Villegas:
Recording from my office in beautiful Marietta, Georgia, you’re listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast, Episode 21. Today we have Paula Kluth, nationally recognized author and speaker on the topic of inclusive education and autism. We talked about her latest book, Universal Design Daily, and how educators can learn to plan for all students by changing their mindset.

After the podcast, please visit patreon.com/inclusivepodcast where you can support our goal to bring you in-depth interviews with inclusive education and community advocacy thought leaders. Also, you can help other people find us by giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. So without further ado, here is the interview.

Tim Villegas:
It’s been a few years since we’ve talked on the phone. This is really exciting. Thank you for doing this.

Paula Kluth:
I actually can’t believe that it’s been a couple of years because I’m always reading everything that you are posting and writing. It feels like it was just yesterday, but I’m so glad to be back with you.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I wanted to talk about a few things—one about Universal Design Daily, but I also have a few more questions. I was actually looking at the questions I asked you, I think it was almost three or four years ago. We talked about your book Don’t We Already Do Inclusion?, reverse inclusion, and families taking their students from public schools and putting them in private schools.

I guess the first thing I wanted to ask was: what is kind of new in your world? I know you have Universal Design Daily, the book, but what else is new for you that you’d like to talk about?

Paula Kluth:
Well, last time we spoke, I was kind of returning to my roots. You’re right—Don’t We Already Do Inclusion? had just come out. I was going back and talking more broadly about inclusive education. I was at a point in my career where I was making some assumptions that we were all on the same page and had a shared commitment to inclusive education. But I started to realize that there are big differences in how people interpret the language of inclusive education—semantic differences and philosophical commitments that vary from place to place.

I thought it was time to revisit the energy that existed back in the ’80s when inclusion was newer to folks. I wanted to go back and say, “We’re never done.” That was the point of that book—there’s always something in our model that we can revive. Technology changes, social models change, attitudes evolve. Because of things like UDL and co-teaching evolving, we have new practices. I spent a couple of years doing a lot of work in that area.

Of course, what goes around comes around. So again, I was trying to breathe some life into those conversations. UDL was gaining a lot of momentum, and in a lot of schools I was working in, co-teaching was blossoming. The folks making big strides in inclusive education were asking, “Tell us how to do this in the most practical ways.” After spending a couple of years in the world of philosophy and beliefs around inclusion, it was time to move on to other projects—talking to folks, looking at the latest research, practices, curriculum, and instruction.

It’s been a nice path over the last couple of years. I find that a lot of the places I’ve been working with, especially long-term ones, found that a renewed focus on inclusion was really helpful. But they also want to evolve—think about designing instruction differently, human resources differently. A lot has changed. Talking about UDL, so much has changed in the field since the ’80s when I started studying. Think of how many models we’ve seen—personalized instruction, curricular adaptation, differentiated instruction, universal design. There’s plenty to take a look at in a new way, even for folks who’ve been doing this work for a while.

Tim Villegas:
So I think that, in talking about the book and the reason why you wrote it—help me understand. Talk to me as if I were a teacher whose administrators and instructional support specialists are saying, “We really want you to utilize Universal Design for Learning in your lesson plans and in your co-teaching model. When we observe your teaching, this is what we want to see.” Explain to me: what exactly is UDL, and what am I supposed to do with this framework?

Paula Kluth:
That’s a great question. I find it can be very confusing, especially if you come from a background in differentiation. With differentiation, you just had to remember a few categories. With UDL, there are many different ways of understanding principles and checkpoints.

However, I think the reason why a lot of schools—and why I personally—are attracted to UDL is because it deals with the same idea. What’s confusing to teachers is they think, “I was already doing a lot of these things. Why are you now giving it a different name and framework?”

There are a couple of reasons for that. First, unlike some other models, UDL has a strong focus on technology—not just as a set of materials, but as a way of thinking. The origin of UDL and its initial thrust came from looking at what technology could do to level the playing field and provide access.

Second, the word “universal” itself is powerful. It sets a higher standard. This model is really about all kids. One of the things I say when I present is: if you’re using UDL and you don’t notice a wider range of learners in your classroom or district because of it, then we’re missing the point. “Universal” means everybody.

Third, UDL takes into account the learner as an agent. It centers on student engagement, goal-setting, and growth mindset. We’re thinking about partnerships in a new way. These elements may have existed in other models, but they’re central in UDL.

So what is Universal Design? Like other models, it’s a way of designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment to support all learners. It accommodates variability and uniqueness from the ground up.

Differentiation was often additive or retrofitted. You’d do the lesson and then say, “Oh, Tim needs something different,” or “Paula needs support.” UDL, from its very language, focuses on designing from the ground up. The term comes from architecture—the idea that you build ramps into the design so everyone can use them. It’s not something you add later for one or two individuals.

UDL focuses on three areas:

1. Engagement – This includes strategies students use themselves. It’s about relevance, motivation, and challenge. You provide multiple methods—not necessarily in every lesson, but across time.
2. Action and Expression – This is about how we teach and support different ways for students to show what they know.
3. Representation – This is about giving students multiple ways to acquire information. Whether it’s physical models, virtual field trips, reading, or using technology like e-readers to enlarge text, it’s about making content accessible.

When teachers hear these three categories, they often feel overwhelmed. But in some ways, it’s simpler than other models that had eight or nine variables. UDL is an attempt to inspire us to think about possibilities for students and to phrase things in a way that’s elegant in its simplicity.

Paula Kluth:
How do we make Universal Design accessible? By breaking it down into these three categories. The folks at CAST have provided a lot of material under each one. But the categories themselves are a way to say, “Here are the three things to keep in mind.”

So when you’re planning with co-teaching partners, working with students, or being observed by administrators, start by grasping the differences in those three principles. Then, understand that you’re already doing some of this. Shake out what you’re doing and see where it fits in the model. Identify which areas you need to study more. It gives us space to brainstorm, collaborate, and use a common language.

It can be a lot, but I always say: start small. Start with the principles, then fill in what you’re already doing and how it fits. That can help folks take the next steps and realize this isn’t reinventing the wheel. You already know how to do this—it’s just a different way of talking and a framework to learn new things.

Tim Villegas:
I have a couple of questions based on what you said. First, what’s the main pushback you get from teachers when explaining UDL and its principles? Is it more like, “I’m already doing this, why do I need to change?” Or is it, “I don’t know how to do this—can you tell me specifically?” Or is it something else?

Paula Kluth:
There’s definitely a sense of overwhelm and confusion about the model. There’s so much material out there and so many different explanations of what UDL is and how to start.

I always begin by helping teachers catalog what they’re already doing. Get a firm grasp on the three principles. Then use that to understand your units and lessons. Ask: are there multiple ways for students to get the content? Not just within a lesson, but across days, weeks, and months. Let’s collect strategies.

If someone says, “I don’t know where to start,” I suggest picking one thing. Maybe start by adding more open-ended questions to frame units. Or take one unit and provide a wider range of learning materials. Introduce a few new tech tools—maybe blogging or speech recognition software. Co-teach with someone new. Vary student groupings. Try new assessment tools.

When we put it that way, teachers often say, “Oh yeah, I could do that.” It helps to break it down and recategorize what they’re already doing. Then pick a place to start.

One idea I use often is giving a single lesson a makeover—a hack. Take one lesson and ask: is it rigorous enough? Is it accessible? Is it interesting? Are the activities varied? Are there several ways for students to learn and show what they know?

Sometimes the lesson is already great. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken. That can be helpful too—realizing that some lessons are already well-designed.

It’s not just about lessons and units. It’s also about the rhythm of the year. Teachers often say, “I love that simulation lesson.” Maybe it’s about increasing the frequency of what works well and what students respond to.

Paula Kluth:
If you have a teaching partner, do some observing back and forth to see what’s working. Build slowly. When I was writing the book, I found myself overwhelmed with all the narrative accounts of UDL. That’s why it’s 365 ideas—you can just open it and pick something. If I felt that overwhelmed getting started, I figured others would too.

So one thing I tell folks is: open a page, pick something, and try it. You don’t have to keep using it, but just try it. You can use any number of resources—open a blog, go on Twitter, try something in an area that feels like a growth area for you.

Tim Villegas:
Right. You sort of answered my second question, which was: what are some specific strategies, maybe even from the book, that can help refocus you? I think you made a really good point—sometimes we know what works, we know what keeps students engaged, but we hesitate to use it all the time because we think they’ll get used to it or bored. But another way to think about it is: yes, you do know what your students like. You can vary the way you represent the material using UDL principles. And it’s okay to have fun.

Paula Kluth:
It’s necessary. We know that laughter releases endorphins. Movement and interaction are part of engagement. It’s good for you and it’s good for them. It’s not healthy for kids to be sitting and getting for long periods of time. That’s why a lot of engagement strategies involve student agency—making things, asking questions, being in charge. Student-centered learning, project-based instruction, service learning—all that good stuff. Bringing in humor, novelty, and joy are important, especially for engagement.

Paula Kluth:
Sometimes teachers think, “It can’t be a circus every day.” And it doesn’t have to be. You don’t need three clowns twirling in the air every day. But over the course of the days, weeks, and months, students should be able to count on you for learning experiences that rise up to meet them. The classroom should be a place of exploration, smiles, laughter, and human connection. Those things are good for a healthy community and for learning.

Paula Kluth:
I like the language of engagement because it helps us think about things in ways other models didn’t. Repetition is important. Patterns are helpful for kids—they create expectations, routines, and rituals. That helps a lot of our students. It also helps with planning and collaboration. For example, if you’re a speech pathologist and you know a teacher does collaborative work on Wednesdays, you can plan to be in that classroom. You know students will be working and you can support different goals.

Paula Kluth:
Patterns are great for co-teaching partners too. It becomes a shorthand. Like, “We always do social studies stations to kick off every new unit.” When you plan together, that’s already in the books. You know what you usually do, who facilitates what. It builds a nice rhythm.

Paula Kluth:
Once you have those patterns, you can jazz things up. If you’ve been doing the same collaborative structure every Friday, and you feel there’s nice variation across the week, try a different structure. Switch out a station. Instead of writing, have students do something collaborative. You don’t need 100 engagement strategies in every lesson, but across the year, make sure there are lots of ways for students to show what they know, understand content, and stay motivated.

Paula Kluth:
It’s a balancing act. You want predictability and ritual, but also novelty. Novelty supports attention and motivation. So you need a little bit of both.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah, we want predictability and pattern, but that can become stale. There’s also this idea of compliance. I went to an autism conference here in Georgia recently, and one of the speakers, Emily Rubin, said something that struck me. I’m paraphrasing: “A well-behaved child does not equal a fully engaged child.” I loved that.

Tim Villegas:
For many teachers, compliance—a well-behaved class—is very important. They have classroom management systems, rewards, tokens, marbles in jars. That’s all great, and I’m not saying it’s bad. But the focus becomes: let’s get a routine, let’s structure everything so the classroom is a well-oiled machine. Instead of asking: are my kids having fun? Are they engaged? Are they learning?

Tim Villegas:
That’s the most important piece. With UDL, that’s the biggest part. If your students don’t like you—and I’m not saying you should be friends—but if they don’t like you, don’t love learning, don’t love their friends, don’t love coming to school, then they have no motivation. There’s no intrinsic value to learning.

Tim Villegas:
It doesn’t matter what setting it is—co-teaching, special day class, self-contained classroom, small group room. Anytime you have a teacher invested in the student and the relationship, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where learning happens.

Tim Villegas:
I really appreciate this conversation. I see why administrators and district leaders want to have it with their teachers. They see it as the key to unlocking everything else—test scores and all that. That’s the system we have, but yeah.

Paula Kluth:
Look at the research coming out about schools increasing recess. Just increasing recess—no other intervention—and test scores go up. That shows the difference. There’s a misconception that if we get kids in their desks quietly and teach at them, we’ll get positive results. But what we know is that students need to move, share, interact, get intellectually messy, and be agents.

Paula Kluth:
One thing I do when I walk around schools is ask myself: “It’s a half hour into the school day. How many classrooms will I see students doing anything other than sitting quietly at their desks?” It’s shocking how often it’s 100% of classrooms. Every classroom will have some time for that, but it’s shocking how many are only doing that.

Paula Kluth:
It’s shocking how many classrooms I walk into and see students sitting quietly in their desks. Every classroom will have some time for that, but we know students require movement, engagement, hands-on learning, and problem-solving. We should be hearing their voices. That’s a great marker—how much are students talking versus how much are teachers talking?

Paula Kluth:
We should be giving kids all kinds of ways to interact with materials, with each other, and to have leadership in the classroom. One good marker is to evaluate how much time you’re talking versus how much time they’re talking. Over the course of a week, how many different ways were there for students to learn or show what they know? How many times did students laugh or show joy? Those are great starting points for thinking about whether your classroom is a productive learning environment. These things aren’t just nice to have—they’re central to learning itself.

Paula Kluth:
Especially when we talk about getting kids in their seats and using marbles in jars, we know there are so many benefits to movement. Not everything I’ve written about engagement is movement-oriented, but a lot of it is. Many ideas around expression are about movement or active learning.

Paula Kluth:
Active learning is good for health, creativity, retention, and engagement. The data is amazing. It’s surprising how long it’s taking institutions—ones that care about change and learning—to embrace this. Schooling is so entrenched in tradition. If you turn on a medical show, the operating room looks modern. But when you see a classroom on TV, it looks like the ones we grew up in. You don’t see cooperative learning. You see the teacher at the chalkboard. It’s a very traditional way of thinking.

Paula Kluth:
It’s hard for our profession to move forward. Even though we know classrooms should look different today, there’s a pull toward tradition. Even newer teachers feel it. There are reward structures and values in place. People are panicked about testing. The irony is that students learn more when they’re at the center—when they’re in dialogue, connected, and teaching each other. The way to get higher test scores is actually to move away from traditional models.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah, and also what I find is that teachers are resistant to change. They feel—maybe not offended—but they say, “I’ve been doing this for so long. Why do I have to change now?” Then the blame shifts to the students: “If only they practiced more at home,” “If only their parents followed through,” “If only…” These are big barriers. The mindset becomes, “I don’t have to change. The students do.”

Tim Villegas:
Even when we talk about behavior change in applied behavior analysis, behavior intervention plans aren’t for the kid—they’re for the teacher. You have to change the environment to change someone else’s behavior. The environment fosters certain behaviors. But the mindset is often, “If only they would…” That’s a big obstacle.

Tim Villegas:
It’s difficult to shift that idea. It’s not about blame. It’s not about saying teachers have been doing it wrong. It’s about saying, “Here’s what we know works. Why wouldn’t we want to do what works?”

Paula Kluth:
Yes. And sometimes teachers say, “This isn’t my style.” I’ve had teachers tell me, “My principal would hit the roof if they saw me doing some of these things—dancing around, playing collaborative games, using drama.” I don’t know if that’s true or just a perception. There are a lot of things we’re up against in schools.

Paula Kluth:
Some teachers were taught in a traditional way. Some feel they don’t have support—whether or not that’s true. Others weren’t raised in this model and don’t know what it looks like. That’s another challenge.

Paula Kluth:
At the beginning of the book, I have a section about professional development for UDL. I offer ideas for exactly this issue. A lot of folks say, “I don’t even know what this looks like.” So I suggest talking to others in your district. Ask to observe another teacher who’s doing UDL. A lot of principals are open to that.

Paula Kluth:
Some people might be familiar with pineapple charts. They’re featured in a great blog called Cult of Pedagogy. Pineapple means friendship. You put a schedule in the teacher’s lounge, and anyone doing something innovative can post it. For example, “Tim is doing Rube Goldberg machines in physics on Monday.” Anyone can come visit—no evaluation, no conversation, just informal learning.

Paula Kluth:
It’s a way to learn from others in your building. It’s less intimidating and way cheaper than going to a conference. If you feel like an “old dog” learning new tricks, or you don’t feel supported, or you’re not co-teaching, or you just don’t know what it looks like—look for customized professional development. It helps you get a grasp and feel less isolated. It can be inspiring.

Tim Villegas:
Those are fantastic ideas. Everyone should get Universal Design Daily for themselves and get those practical strategies. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about or promote while I’ve got you recording?

Paula Kluth:
One thing I’d like to say—not just as a promotion, but something helpful—is about professional development. If I can leave you with one thing: whether you’re ending the school year or starting fresh, the best time to try something new is at the end of the year. Everyone’s a little bored, a little tired. Go ahead and knock it out. Create a cool panel. Try improv techniques. Co-teach with your speech pathologist. Jazz things up.

Paula Kluth:
After listening to this podcast, sit down—either alone or with a partner—and set a couple of UDL goals for yourself. That can help you focus. Maybe your goal is to use a new active learning technique every month. Or co-teach with your reading specialist by the end of the year. Or teach your paraprofessional about UDL so you’re both empowered. Or sign up for a workshop.

Paula Kluth:
Just start with one goal. A couple of themes to start your journey. I’ve also been doing short videos called “Off the Page.” I’ve done six or seven. People were asking me to send videos of things I’d said in workshops. So I started putting them on YouTube—just my name. Every month I post one. I’ll probably switch to every other month.

Paula Kluth:
Each video is five minutes. I take one idea from a book and talk about it. They’re free. You can use them in PD settings, brown bag lunches with paraprofessionals, or presentations to your school board. I’ve done three from Universal Design Daily. Whether you’re interested in that or something else, it’s a free resource to help spread the energy of inclusion.

Tim Villegas:
Great. Awesome. Listeners can find you at your website, and you’re on Twitter as well.

Paula Kluth:
Yes—Pinterest, Facebook, and I’m a fledgling Instagram user.

Tim Villegas:
Okay, good. Well, thanks for your time. I appreciate you taking time to speak with us.

Paula Kluth:
Thank you so much, Tim. I really appreciate it. I feel like I’m having coffee with you. Hopefully that’s not too casual. This is the kind of thing all people should get to do—have collegial conversations. So thank you for that.

Tim Villegas:
That is our show. We’d like to thank Paula Kluth for coming on the podcast. Make sure to follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and at PaulaKluth.com. Follow Think Inclusive on the web, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Today’s show was produced by myself, using USB headphones, a Zoom H1 recorder, MacBook Pro, GarageBand, and a sketchy kennel.

You can subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or Podomatic.com—the largest community of independent podcasters on the planet. From Marietta, Georgia, please join us again on the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thanks for your time and attention.