When architects design a building without wheelchair ramps, they don't get to call it "accessible" just because someone could carry a wheelchair up the stairs. The same logic applies to lesson design.
Tiffany Galloway, Chief Partnerships & Program Officer at the nonprofit Blue Engine, uses this analogy on purpose.
"Adding elevators into a building after you've already constructed it," she explains, "is costly, and trickier to do, than thinking about how you create those access points at the beginning of construction."
She and VP of Program Implementation Aisha Chappell have spent a combined 35+ years building classrooms where every student has a real door into grade-level content. At Blue Engine, their tool is Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
When the lesson wasn't built for the room
There's a scene that plays out in classrooms across the country with such regularity that Tiffany and Aisha can almost script it from memory: A lesson is underway. The teacher is doing their best. Somewhere in the back corner, a multilingual learner is copying off their neighbor — not because they lack the idea, but because the task hasn't yet made room for the English they're still building. Across the room, a student with an IEP is either navigating scaffolds that don't quite fit, or waiting for a way into a worksheet that hasn't found them yet.
Only 17% of general education teachers describe themselves as "very well prepared" to teach students with mild to moderate learning disabilities, and yet more than two-thirds of those students spend the bulk of their school day in the gen ed room. As Tiffany put it, teachers feel "stuck between maintaining a certain level of rigor for the classroom instruction or meeting the diverse needs of the kiddos in the room."
Teachers aren't dropping the ball. The lesson itself was never built for the whole team.
Think of UDL as the floor plan
Tiffany and Aisha don't blame the curriculum, and they definitely don't blame teachers. Instead, they question a common assumption in lesson design—that a single pathway into the content will work for most students—when, in practice, learners benefit from multiple points of entry.
UDL is a planning process (not a checkbox for accommodations or only a special ed intervention). It asks teachers to identify where barriers exist before students sit down, then build multiple entry points from the start. As Tiffany put it:
"UDL asks us to think about how we design learning so that the barriers don't exist in the first place. It's proactive. It's before we've even engaged with the students."