Have you ever planned a lesson you were proud of, then watched it split your mixed-ability class in half? If that’s familiar, you already know the daily puzzle of teaching a class with mixed abilities.
This post is about solving that problem with one lesson instead of five — an approach called Universal Design for Learning, or UDL — and I am going to share three questions for you to ask yourself before you plan. It starts with a reframe, and it isn’t “differentiate more.” It’s gentler than that, and a great deal simpler.
For some students it’s too fast. They’re done, they’re bored, and boredom leads to them poking someone, or whispering, or a complaint that they’re bored.
For other students it’s too hard. They can’t get started. So they check out. Or they refuse the work. Or they crunch it up and throw it at you, because they have given up trying to tell you it is too hard for them.
All of this is happening during the same lesson. And you need to respond to all of this in the same minute. That’s a LOT. 😳
How do I teach one lesson that reaches every level in my class?
Time for some unpopular feedback. Speaking the truth in love kinda’ stuff.
Stop planning for a class that’s all at one level. That class has never walked through your door, and it never will. The spread of abilities, the diversity is your class. Forever.
If you build a lesson with more than one way for students to get started, more than one way to make sense of it, and more than one way they can show what they know — then most of your students will find a first step without you creating and planning five versions for the same thing.
This concept of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) connects to two pillars of the Calm Classroom Framework — Differentiation and Equity and Inclusion. But this one isn’t a challenge you solve once. The enormous range of ability in a single room is the permanent shape of the job.
Is a mixed-ability class actually normal — or am I doing something wrong?
Let me tell you who was actually in my last Grade 2 room.
A bright little girl, brand new to English, barely speaking it. She arrived at roughly a pre-K level in everything — fine motor included.
I also had a sweet little boy who was unlikely to move much past a K-1 level in literacy and numeracy — but who could be taught real independence, and was.
And in addition to those two: children reading from a low Grade 1 to a high Grade 4 level. A full diversity of math abilities, and a scattering of developmental delays.
In short — pre-K to high Grade 4, in one class. Plus everything else.
That’s a lot of diversity to teach..
But here’s the important part. That wasn’t a hard class. That was a regular class. That’s the job. That has always been the job.
And because I knew that, I wasn’t looking for books during silent reading, because I had books ready for pre-K to Grade 5 students in my classroom library.
During counting collections I also had options for my beginning adders through to my kiddos chomping at the bit to start on multiplication.
In short, I had exited the denial stage of what my classroom composition should look like, and I was prepared for the truth.
Why is teaching a mixed ability classrooms considered the exception not the rule?
Somewhere along the way, most of us were handed the wrong expectation — that a Grade 2 class means a room of children at an “assessed” Grade 2 level (by what assessment and by whose assessment I would love to know), and anyone above or below that line is a problem to be pulled out, assessed, and sorted back toward the middle. I mean, I know we truly love our students, but that is somehow how we talk about these students.
Don’t think though, that I don’t respect, believe or understand the overwhelm that comes with this. No, 1000% I am with you on that. But this is what it is, so fighting it every year is a waste of energy.
I also understand how we got to that belief. What we expect is written into the curriculum, the report cards, the word “grade” itself. We want to communicate to parents, so we use words like “Not yet meeting expectations” or “Exceeding expectations.”
But let’s face it, we are expecting a student/classroom that does not exist. It never has. And somehow we start each year hoping for one.
The child reading at a Grade 4 level is not too advanced for your room. The child at a pre-K level is not behind your room. They are your room.
The diversity isn’t the exception to your class. It is the class.
Why this isn’t just another strategy
When you believe the class is supposed to be uniform, and every child outside the middle becomes extra work — a deviation to manage on top of the “real” lesson, then, suddenly, you have a problem.
So you plan for the imaginary average. Then you patch by creating a modified worksheet, building an extension task, creating pull-out groups, sending a note home. Now you have one lesson, plus a growing pile of exceptions.
It’s exhausting. It never ends. And no matter how kind we are, in multiple ways we are communicating to the children that are outside the average that the real class was meant for those kiddos who were at that imaginary middle level.
That’s the hard part, because this is a child’s life we’re teaching to — not a data point, not a reading level. A seven-year-old learns fast whether the lesson was designed with them in mind. The child we pull out and sort learns the lesson underneath the lesson: I’m the problem the class works around. That belief doesn’t stay in Grade 2 though, it follows them.
When you believe the diversity is the class, everything changes before you plan a thing. You stop planning for the middle and patching outward. You plan for the spread from the first minute.
That’s not more work added on. It’s a different lesson — one with more than one door in it from the start.
There’s a name for building this way. It comes from architecture. It’s worth borrowing.
What is UDL in education?
UDL, or Universal Design for Learning, is an approach to planning lessons so the full range of learners can access them from the start.
Architects know that when you design a ramp into a building from the start — rather than bolting one on years later — something interesting happens.
The ramp was drawn for people using wheelchairs, initially. But it also serves the parent with a stroller. The worker with a loaded cart. The traveller with a suitcase.
Me when my knee is sore. 😊
Designers call it the curb-cut effect: build access in from the beginning, and far more people benefit than you planned for.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) moves that idea into the classroom. Instead of teaching to an imaginary middle and retrofitting access for the students it fails, you design so the range can get in from the start.
Universal Design for Learning:
- Universal — the whole class has access to it, not just the kiddos who “need” it. That’s the inclusive part.
- Design — planned this way from the start, not tacked on. That’s the teacher-helper part.
- Learning — as opposed to for architecture.
Where did UDL come from?
UDL was developed by CAST, a nonprofit education research organisation, and it’s grounded in the neuroscience of how different brain networks handle the recognition, strategy, and emotion of learning.
How do I plan one lesson that reaches every level?
But you don’t need the neuroscience. You need three plain questions.
When you plan a lesson, ask:
- Is there more than one way for students to understand the lesson? Listening, watching, reading, doing — not only the channel I defaulted to.
- Is there more than one way to make sense of it? A diagram, a model they can hold, a story, a real object — so the idea isn’t locked behind a single format.
- Is there more than one way to show what they know? Written, spoken, built, drawn, acted — so the child who understands ecosystems isn’t prevented from showing what they know because writing a paragraph is the hardest thing in the room for him or her.
That’s the whole thing. Not five lesson plans. One lesson, with a few more ways to access the lesson than usual.
Some students learn through the avenue that you would have made available in the first place. But now the ones you used to have to find levelled works for, or find a new worksheet for, find they too can get in.
This is what good differentiation was always reaching toward — meeting a child in their zone of proximal development, where a task stretches without shutting them down. UDL just moves that thinking to the front of planning instead of the end.
Where should I start with a mixed-ability class?
You don’t overhaul everything, you just pick one lesson and add options.
Teaching ecosystems? Instead of a reading and a written response, offer a short video, a hands-on sort of real objects, and the reading. Three ways in, one idea. Let students make sense of it in a group where talk is allowed — because talk is where a lot of children think. Then let them show you: write it, record it, build it, draw it. Give them options. Students love to make their own choice.
I’ll be honest, the ELL student I mentioned above sometimes got very little from the content areas like Social Studies, but she got a LOT from being in a small group interacting with her peers. But another ELL student with a beginning level of English might show real understanding through a diagram. It depends if we are working with something really hands on like Force and Motion, or if we are doing something less hands-on like writing. Although there was a lot of Lego in my writing block. 😉 The child reading at a Grade 4 level goes deeper in their expression of learning on the same task instead of getting busywork to fill the gap.
Notice what you did not do. You didn’t write a lesson for each level, or find levelled texts for each group. You built one lesson that was wide enough to hold all the diversity of your students.
What teachers get wrong about planning for diversity
Designing for everyone means lowering the bar.
The opposite is true. Hand the child who can do Grade 4 work nothing but Grade 2 work, and you don’t have a calm student — you have a bored one hunting for something to do. Designing for the range raises the ceiling and lowers the floor at the same time. Rigour and access aren’t enemies. They’re both just offering wider access.
This is more prep than I can manage.
Building three ways into one lesson is real work the first few times. I won’t pretend otherwise. But it replaces the endless work of patching — the modified sheet you are creating at 9 p.m., the mid-lesson stress scramble when you have too many students to help, the meltdown from a child who couldn’t get figure it out. You move the effort to the planning stage, where it’s a choice, instead of during the lesson, where it feels like a fire.
The struggling kids just need to be pulled out and fixed.
Some children genuinely need specialist support. That’s real, and I was a Special Ed Coordinator for years. I know it to be true.
But a child reading below grade level is not broken and waiting to be repaired before your lesson can include him or her. They are a student to teach — in the room, in the lesson, during a lesson which you designed with them in mind.
Sort or assess or teach children with a mindset of what they can’t yet do, and you teach them precisely that. Build your lessons to include them, and you teach them the opposite.
Where should I start?
Don’t redesign your week. Pick one lesson — ideally the one that reliably divides your room into bored and lost, for many that is math. Add a single extra way for them to understand — one more way in, or one more way to show what they know. Just one.
In my class it was as simple as teaching them how to use tools like rekenreks, an abacus, numberlines, or cuisinare rods to which they always had access. And then expecting them to go get them without so much as raising their hands for permission. I had other supports too, but that strategy was fantastic.
Then watch the kiddos in your room. That’s where the reframe proves itself fastest — because so much of what we read as misbehaviour is a child who couldn’t get started, or a child who got started and then had nothing left to do.
How this connects to the Calm Classroom Framework (CCF)
This lives in Differentiation and Equity and Inclusion — but it doesn’t stay there.
It helps to smooth out classroom community. Children stop feeling like they are being sorted into the good students and the bad students. Instead, everyone’s in the room, doing the actual thing.
It supports SEL and emotional readiness. A child who can get started isn’t sitting in the low hum of shame that comes from a task she can’t even start.
And it protects your capacity. Design for the diversitye at the beginning, and there’s far less lass minute stress and panic in the moment.
The pillars of the CCF were never meant to stand alone. Build a lesson for the real diversity in your room, and you reinforce half the framework at once.
What teachers notice
The change shows up first in the students you used to worry about most.
The one who used to finish early and drift finds somewhere further to go. The one who used to shut down finds a way in and engages. If you do this often enough they start to feel safe, and they begin to believe they can. See how much easier that makes your day.
And one ordinary afternoon, you notice you spent far less of the lesson running between the two edges of the room — because the lesson was holding more of it on its own.
That is the calmer class I keep talking about.
The important idea
Here’s what I want you to leave with.
You were never assigned twenty-some children at one tidy level. That class was always a fiction. What you were handed — every year — was a diverse gropu. The child copying letters she can’t yet read. The child who’ll top out early in literacy but soar in independence. And everyone in the wide middle.
That diversity was never the exception to your job. It was the job.
And understanding that matters more than a planning preference, because we are not teaching to a level. We are teaching to a life. The child who spends a year believing the class or lesson wasn’t built for her carries that belief out the door and into the next room, and the next.
So build the room for her. Stop planning for the class you were told you’d have. Start teaching the one that’s actually in front of you.
It gets lighter for you. And for her, it changes what she believes she’s capable of — which is the part that lasts her whole life.
Research and Further Reading
- CAST. The UDL Guidelines. The three principles — engagement, representation, action & expression — and the learning-networks research underneath them.
- CAST. About Universal Design for Learning. Origins and evidence base.
- The Center for Universal Design, NC State University — Ronald Mace and the architectural origins of Universal Design, the idea UDL borrows from. (The curb cut itself is usually credited to Selwyn Goldsmith in the UK.)
- McLeod, S. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The space where a task stretches a learner without overwhelming them.
