Being a teacher nowadays means incessantly enriching our teaching strategies with innovative ones that prove a high percentage of all students’ active involvement in the lesson as well as a long-term retention of relevant information. While in this process of identifying a new method that sparks every student’s curiosity about the topic of the lesson, increases engagement, keeps interest and ensures everyone’s progress, no matter how different he/she may be, the UDL / Universal Design for Learning approach caught my attention particularly because it offers learning opportunities for all.
Moving backwards to its roots, the term Universal Design for Learning was coined by Dr. David Rose, Dr. Anne Meyer, and their colleagues at CAST / the Center for Applied Special Technology in the 1990s. They adapted the concept from the broader „Universal Design” movement in architecture, which was originally pioneered and coined by architect Ronald Mace in the 1980s. While Mace focused on making physical spaces accessible to everyone without adaptation, Rose and Meyer shifted that focus to education – creating flexible curricula and learning experiences that support all types of learners from the outset.
Universal Design for Learning is, therefore, regarded as an educational framework designed to make learning accessible, meaningful, and effective for all students, regardless of their individual abilities, learning preferences, prior knowledge, language background, or educational needs. UDL encourages teachers to design flexible learning experiences that provide different ways of accessing information, participating in learning, and demonstrating achievement. The framework revolves around three interconnected principles: Engagement, Representation, and Action and Expression, which can be understood through three essential questions: Why do I learn? What do I learn? and How do I prove what I have learned?
The three UDL principles are not separate stages but interconnected dimensions of an inclusive learning experience. Engagement provides students with a reason and motivation to learn; Representation ensures that they have meaningful access to the information and concepts they need to learn; and Action and Expression gives them flexible ways to use and demonstrate what they have learned.
A UDL-informed lesson establishes clear and challenging learning goals while providing multiple pathways towards achieving them. By offering meaningful choices, multiple ways of accessing information, and different opportunities for demonstrating understanding, UDL supports inclusion, learner autonomy, motivation, participation, and academic achievement. It enables teachers to design lessons that are flexible enough to accommodate diversity while remaining focused on clear, rigorous learning outcomes.
To make this approach more accesible to every stakeholder in education, I chose to design a lesson about The Great Irish Famine based on UDL principles.
Topic: The Great Irish Famine (1845–1852)
Level: Upper-secondary / Bilingual English class
Duration: 50 minutes
Approach: Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
Key UDL principles: Engagement – WHY do I learn? Representation – WHAT do I learn? Action & Expression – HOW do I prove what I have learnt?
Learning objectives: By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
- identify the main causes and consequences of the Great Irish Famine;
- explain the relationship between the potato blight, poverty, land ownership and British government policies;
- interpret historical information from different sources;
- empathise with different perspectives without confusing empathy with historical judgment;
- communicate their understanding using an appropriate form of expression;
- make connections between a historical crisis, human rights and migration.
- Engagement – Why do I learn? (5 minutes)
Sparking curiosity and activating prior knowledge
The teacher displays the following statement: „What happens when the food you depend on disappears?” Firstly, students think individually for 30 seconds and then discuss with a partner, then answer the questions on the screen:
- What could happen to a community if its main food source suddenly failed?
- Who would be most vulnerable?
- What might people do to survive?
- Would migration become an option?
Students can respond by: speaking – discuss with a partner, writing – write 2–3 ideas or visualising – create a quick cause → effect sketch, thus involving multiple means of engagement. All these steps are covered before actually revealing the key word of the lesson – Ireland, 1845. In order to activate students’ previous knowledge as well as their critical thinking, the teacher requires them to predict the answer to the following question: „What do you think happened?” This creates a problem to solve, rather than beginning with dates and facts. Students understand why the topic matters before receiving historical information.
- Representation – What do I learn? (13 minutes)
Building historical understanding
The teacher provides students with a short visual timeline and briefly explains the key concepts:
1845 → Potato blight appears
↓
Repeated crop failures
↓
Hunger & disease
↓
Evictions & extreme poverty
↓
Government relief efforts / controversy
↓
Mass emigration
↓
Population decline
- Ireland’s population was heavily dependent on the potato, especially poorer rural communities.
- In 1845, potato blight devastated crops.
- The crop failed repeatedly over several years.
- Many people had little economic security because of the landholding system.
- Food continued to be available in Ireland, but many poor people could not afford sufficient food.
- Government relief policies have remained the subject of historical debate.
- Hunger, disease, eviction and poverty resulted in enormous suffering.
- Around one million people died, while more than one million emigrated during the famine period and its aftermath.
- Representation – Source stations (10 minutes)
Students are divided into 4 groups and each group receives a different type of source.
Station A – Visual source: an image of an Irish famine-era family / eviction is offered to this group whose job is to answer some questions:
- What can you see?
- What emotions does the image communicate?
- What can we learn from the image?
- What can’t we know from the image alone?
Station B – Historical testimony: the second group of students is provided with a short first-person account from a famine survivor and asked to identify evidence of hunger, evidence of poverty, evidence of emotions and one question they would ask the person.
Station C – Data: the third group is given a simple graph showing the Irish population before and after the famine and asked to identify: what changed, when the major decline occur and what might explain it.
Station D – Political/economic source: the fourth group receives a simplified extract concerning land ownership, relief or government policy; their task is to identify: who produced the source, the perspective it represents and the message it communicates.
The same historical concept is presented through: visual information, written testimony, numerical/data information and political/historical text. This supports students who process information differently.
- Action & expression – How do I prove what I have learnt? (14 minutes)
Now students choose how they want to demonstrate their understanding. This is a central UDL element. In this respect, students are given three options.
Option A – Historical explanation
Write a short response: „What were the main causes of the Great Irish Famine, and why was its impact so devastating?” Students should include at least three factors.
Option B – Human perspective
Imagine you are a teenager living in Ireland in 1847. Create a short diary entry explaining: what is happening around you, how your family is affected, what choices your family faces, how you feel about the possibility of leaving Ireland. Students should use historically plausible info.
Option C – Cause-and-effect map
Create a visual map:
potato blight
↓
crop failure
↓
Students add at least 4 additional consequences, including: hunger, disease, poverty, eviction, migration, population decline. Then add: „The famine was more than a failed crop because…” and complete the sentence.
It is to be noted that students demonstrate learning through: written analytical response, creative/human perspective or visual organisation of knowledge. The learning objective remains the same – the way students demonstrate it can vary.
- Engagement + action & expression (5 minutes)
The teacher places this statement on the board: „The Great Irish Famine was a natural disaster.” Students position themselves along an imaginary continuum:
strongly agree ←————→ strongly disagree
Students must give one reason for their position. Then, the teacher introduces a more developed statement: „The potato blight was a natural disaster, but the scale of the human catastrophe was shaped by social, economic and political conditions” to check if their opinion has changed. Students can respond by: speaking, showing a number from 1–5, writing one sentence, giving a thumbs up/side/down. This provides another low-barrier way to participate.
- Exit ticket (3 minutes)
The teacher gives each student a small slip of paper to fill it in at the end of the lesson.
- One thing I learned:
- One factor that made the famine worse:
- One question I still have:
- The Great Irish Famine was not simply a potato disaster because…
The lesson could be ended with this on the board:
WHY? We study the famine to understand how societies respond to crisis, inequality and human suffering.
WHAT? We learn about the causes, experiences and consequences of the Great Irish Famine.
HOW? We show our learning by explaining, creating, analysing or visualising.
To conclude, I would like to mention that the Universal Design for Learning approach was minutely explained and practiced during the Erasmus+ training course entitled „Beyond the Textbook: Multimodality for Teaching and Learning”, organized by Teacher Academy Ireland LTD, Dublin, Ireland, which I personally attended between 15th–20th June in Dublin in the framework of the ERASMUS+ Program, Key Action 1 – School Education (SCH), project number 2025-1-RO01-KA121-SCH-000339640, implemented by „Zinca Golescu” National College, Pitesti.