Schoolwide change has an uncomfortable middle.
At one level, schools articulate beliefs about inclusion, access, belonging, and student agency. In classrooms, teachers are expected to translate those beliefs into hundreds of decisions about goals, materials, instruction, assessment, and support. Between the two lies something easy to overlook: the people, structures, relationships, and routines that turn organizational beliefs into everyday practice.
This is where middle-level leadership matters. By middle-level leaders, I mean instructional coaches, department heads, curriculum leaders, learning support leaders, team leaders, curriculum coordinators, and others who work close enough to classroom practice to understand its complexity and have opportunities to influence thier peers.
These educators are uniquely positioned to help schools move Universal Design for Learning (UDL) from an initiative teachers have learned about to a way of thinking that increasingly shapes the school’s culture.
Why Schoolwide UDL Implementation Can Stall
Most schools do not struggle with UDL because educators disagree with the idea of increasing access for learners. The challenge is turning that belief into consistent practice across a complex organization.
Professional learning can introduce educators to UDL, learner variability, barriers, and the importance of designing multiple pathways for learning. But professional learning alone is not implementation. Implementation happens afterward, when educators begin trying to apply those ideas to the realities of teaching and learning.
It happens when a teacher tries something new and discovers that it does not quite work as expected. It happens in a team meeting when educators wrestle with whether a barrier could have been anticipated in the original design. It happens when a coach helps a colleague distinguish between the learning goal and the pathway students use to reach it.
Schoolwide implementation requires opportunities to revisit ideas, examine problems of practice, receive feedback, collaborate with colleagues, study evidence, and make adjustments over time. When UDL implementation stalls, the problem may not be a lack of commitment. The missing piece may be the infrastructure that connects a school’s aspirations to educators’ daily work.
That infrastructure lives largely in the middle.
Teacher Agency Matters, Too
There is another tension worth considering. When schools begin a major new endeavor, leaders understandably want everyone to receive the same training at the same time. There is logic to this. A common experience can create shared vocabulary and communicate that the work matters.
But shared direction does not necessarily require identical pathways or identical timelines.
Adults, like students, bring variability to learning. Teachers differ in experience, confidence, curiosity, prior knowledge, and readiness to experiment with a new practice. If we believe agency is important for students, we should be willing to think carefully about agency for teachers as well.
This does not mean that participation in schoolwide priorities becomes optional. Senior leaders still have an important responsibility to establish direction and articulate why the work matters. But within that direction, educators can have meaningful opportunities to experiment, make decisions, solve problems, and learn from one another.
John Kotter’s work on organizational change offers a useful perspective here. His change framework emphasizes building a committed coalition, engaging a growing group of people in the change, creating early wins, and celebrating those wins to build momentum. His work, specifically in education, also highlights the value of educators who are ready to move early: their experience can demonstrate that change is possible and help bring more skeptical colleagues into the work. (Kotter’s 8 Steps; Transformation in Education)
In schools, we often already know who some of these educators are. They are the teacher experimenting with new ways for students to demonstrate understanding, the instructional coach asking different questions about barriers, the department head helping a team reconsider a long-standing practice, or the learning support teacher shifting the conversation from “What is wrong with this learner?” toward “What in the design is creating a barrier?”
Rather than making these educators wait until everyone is ready to move at the same pace, we can invite them to help lead. Middle-level leaders are particularly well positioned to identify these pockets of energy, connect educators with one another, support thoughtful experimentation, and make emerging successes visible.
Over time, implementation becomes something built with teachers rather than something rolled out to teachers. That distinction matters.
Connecting Beliefs, Systems, and Classroom Practice
In our work with schools, we often think about improvement at three interconnected levels. At the organizational level are beliefs: What do we believe about learners, inclusion, variability, access, and agency? At the classroom level are the educators who bring those beliefs to life. And in the middle are the systems that make those beliefs actionable: programming, structures, roles, collaborative routines, coaching, and leadership.
Middle-level leaders connect these levels in practical ways. An instructional coach can help a teacher identify barriers in a lesson’s design. A department head can notice patterns across classrooms and help a team investigate them together. A learning support leader can move conversations away from simply providing accommodations after students struggle and toward anticipating barriers before they occur. A curriculum leader can help teachers preserve rigorous learning goals while creating greater flexibility in how students engage with learning, access information, and demonstrate understanding.
None of these leaders necessarily needs formal authority over the educators they influence. This connects with Bob Garmston’s idea that leadership is not simply a role but a function. Some of the most important leadership in a school happens through influence rather than authority: asking thoughtful questions, offering relevant reference points, creating opportunities for reflection, and helping people see possibilities they may not yet see themselves.
Access and Agency Are Design Questions
At the core of UDL are important beliefs about access and agency. Access is more than allowing a student into a classroom or adding an accommodation after a barrier has already appeared. It asks us to anticipate learner variability and, from the beginning, consider what might prevent students from accessing meaningful learning.
Agency takes us a step further. We want students to understand themselves as learners, make purposeful choices, monitor their progress, advocate for what they need, and increasingly take ownership of their learning. That requires intentional design.
Middle-level leaders can help keep these beliefs connected to concrete questions about practice:
- What is the actual learning goal?
- Where might learners encounter unnecessary barriers?
- What options could increase access without changing the goal?
- Where can students make meaningful and purposeful choices?
- How are we helping students understand themselves as learners?
- Are the supports we provide increasing independence and agency over time?
These conversations move UDL away from being a collection of Guidelines and Considerations, and toward becoming a way educators think about teaching and learning.
Schoolwide UDL Requires More Than Classroom Practice
CAST’s Schoolwide Implementation Criteria reinforce this systems perspective. The UDL Schoolwide Implementation Criteria organize implementation across four interconnected domains: School Culture and Environment, Teaching and Learning, Leadership and Management, and Professional Learning.
That is an important distinction. Sustainable UDL implementation is not simply the accumulation of individual teachers’ use of UDL Considerations. Leadership structures matter. Collaborative processes matter. Professional learning matters. Culture matters.
CAST’s Leadership and Management criteria specifically call attention to leadership teams, organizational structures, monitoring implementation, and the use of data to guide improvement. In other words, the conditions surrounding classroom practice influence whether that practice can grow and endure.
This makes leadership inherently distributed. Senior leaders create direction and establish organizational conditions. Classroom teachers bring UDL to life with learners. Middle-level leaders help connect the two.
What Does Middle-Level UDL Leadership Look Like?
In practice, several leadership functions become particularly important.
1. Make professional learning part of the work
Learning about UDL should not end when a workshop ends. Leaders can create opportunities for teachers to apply an idea, examine the results, talk with colleagues, and refine their practice. This can include a 10-minute learning hit at a faculty meeting, using Journey Mapping during a department meeting, or reflecting on student exit data to inform lesson design.
2. Coach for design, not compliance
Instead of asking, “Are teachers doing UDL?” leaders can ask questions about goals, variability, barriers, access, options, and agency. The aim is not to check whether a Consideration appeared in a lesson. It is to strengthen the thinking that produced the lesson. How has access been increased or agency nurtured in a new way?
3. Look for patterns, not just individual problems
Middle-level leaders can see across classrooms. If several teachers are encountering similar challenges, the issue may not be an individual teacher’s or student’s. It may reveal a barrier within curriculum, scheduling, assessment, professional learning, or another part of the system.
Systems thinking helps turn isolated problems into opportunities for organizational learning.
4. Create conditions for teacher agency
Leaders can establish a clear direction while still creating room for educators to investigate, experiment, and contribute to the development of the work. Some teachers will be ready to move sooner than others, and their learning can become an organizational resource. Consider having those early adopters share their thinking about how learning is different in thier classroom.
Early successes can be studied rather than simply celebrated:
- What changed?
- Why did it work?
- What did students experience differently?
- What did the teacher learn?
- What might another educator adapt to their own context?
This is one way schools create the kind of momentum Kotter describes. It takes just 2 or 3 minutes in a faculty meeting. Success becomes visible, credibility grows, and participation expands.
5. Help educators move from ideas to implementation
There is a difference between understanding UDL conceptually and using it to solve authentic problems of practice. Middle-level leaders can bridge that gap by working alongside educators as they plan, observe, reflect, and redesign.
This is one reason our professional learning opportunities at Pathways to Inclusive Education include a UDL Instructional Leadership Collective focused specifically on developing leaders from within schools who can support UDL across classrooms and systems.
6. Build ownership from within
Outside expertise can introduce ideas, challenge assumptions, and build initial capacity. But sustainable change eventually needs to belong to the school.
The question becomes less, “Who can come in and implement UDL for us?” and more, “How do we develop the people within our own community who can continue to move this work forward?”
That shift is important because the ultimate goal is not dependency on consultants, programs, or individual champions. It is organizational capacity.
From a UDL Initiative to an Inclusive Learning Culture
Schoolwide UDL does not mean every classroom looks the same. In fact, demanding identical implementation would be somewhat inconsistent with the ideas at the heart of UDL.
What schools need is greater coherence in how educators think. Learner variability is expected. Barriers can exist in the design rather than within the learner. Clear goals can coexist with flexible pathways. Access should be considered from the beginning. Students should increasingly develop agency as learners.
Educators also need meaningful opportunities to develop agency in how they learn, experiment, collaborate, and contribute to improving their school. The destination can be shared even when the pathways are not identical.
Senior leaders and teachers are essential to this work. But between organizational vision and classroom implementation sits a group of educators with enormous potential to connect the two. Developing middle-level leadership allows schools to build capacity from within, create momentum through authentic practice, and make change less dependent on a single action step or individual.
That is the opportunity in the missing middle.
Ultimately, schoolwide UDL implementation is not about successfully rolling out a program. It is about creating the conditions in which educators continually become better at designing learning environments where students experience meaningful access, a sense of belonging, and increasing ownership of their learning.
And if we want that kind of agency for students, it makes sense to build the conditions for agency among the adults who teach them as well.
About Jason Hicks
Jason Hicks is an educator, school leader, coach, and consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, along with consulting experience across five continents. His work focuses on Universal Design for Learning, collaborative capacity, coaching, and helping educators advance their schools’ strategic priorities.
Learn more about Jason and the Pathways team.
References and Resources
CAST: UDL Schoolwide Implementation Criteria
CAST: Leadership and Management
John Kotter: The 8 Steps for Leading Change
Pathways to Inclusive Education Professional Learning Opportunities
AI assistance disclosure: This article was written by Jason Hicks with support from OpenAI’s ChatGPT for organizing ideas, drafting, and editing. The author reviewed and revised the final text and takes responsibility for its content.
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