Every school year, thousands of students are impacted by the harmful practices of seclusion, restraint, and punitive discipline in schools. Research shows that these practices disproportionately affect neurodivergent and BIPOC students along with those with trauma histories. 

Punitive discipline practices can destroy a student’s experience of safety at school, damage relationships with educators, and exacerbate challenging behaviors. They rarely address the root causes of students’ behaviors or lead to proactive practices that support nervous system regulation and relationship repair.

As an educator, you may not control your school’s discipline policies, but you do have some control over how you set up your classroom. Whether you’re planning out your classroom today or the night before your first professional development day, one critical decision you will make is how to arrange your physical space. To support your students in accessing the classroom without barriers, allowing them the opportunity to fully engage in your space without feeling othered, you might consider a concept called ‘Universal Design.’

It’s understandable that thinking about how to make a space ‘as inclusive and accessible as possible’ could sound overwhelming! Never fear, though; there is already a set of useful principles that can guide you as you design your classroom space! I’d like to introduce you to ‘Universal Design (UD),’ a set of concrete principles and practices that allow individuals designing physical spaces and products to proactively decide to make them as inclusive and accessible as possible. 

Schools are often already designed with physical accessibility in mind and guided by The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), so the examples below are examples that you may already see as you wander the halls of your school building. 

Schools are not often, however, designed inclusively for nervous system regulation. 

This isn’t your fault. It’s also not your fault if you feel like you have the sole responsibility to help regulate the nervous systems of your 20-30 students, with little support from the administration or those in the central office. 

My hope is this series will help support you and your students not just as you start the school year but on all of the 180 days or so, that you teach. 

To help you do that, this week we’ll explore the concepts of Universal Design and how it can benefit not only your students but also you. Then, over the next few, I’ll break down a few concrete, easily implemented strategies that you can use in your classroom with minimal financial investment. 

The Key Principles of Universal Design 

Ronald Mace established the seven key principles of Universal Design in the 1990s, building upon the work of others who began to explore the concept during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. An architect and wheelchair user, Mace saw a need to establish a more formal guide for those designing physical spaces and products to help them make them as inclusive as possible for a variety of access needs. 

Mace and his team identified the following principles as key to creating accessible spaces: 

• Equitable Use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities, like automatic doors at the entrances of the school building. 
• Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities, like desks and chairs that can be used by a variety of sizes of students and are accessible for wheelchair users.
• Simple and Intuitive Use: The design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level, like clear signs with words and symbols used to identify the nurse’s office, library, or cafeteria in a school.
• Perceptible Information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities, like fire alarms with flashing lights and sound. 
• Tolerance for Error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions, like playgrounds with ramps and guardrails that minimize fall risk for students.
• Low Physical Effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably with a minimum of fatigue, like lever door handles, which can be used with one hand and without twisting the wrist.
• Size and Space for Approach and Use: Appropriate size and space are provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use, regardless of the user’s body size, posture, or mobility, like hallways and doorways with specific minimum widths, typically at least 32 inches for doorways and 36 inches for hallways to accommodate wheelchairs and other access needs. 

How can Universal Design benefit you and your students? 

To fully understand the benefit of Universal Design, we have to acknowledge that every single individual person has different needs, varying by day, time of day, subject being taught, experiences, and much more. It likely feels like a huge responsibility to consider the needs of 20, 25, or even 35 students at once. 

By proactively implementing UD in your classroom, though, students won’t need to silently assimilate to neuro-normative and ableist standards, nor feel othered when a change is made on their behalf. Instead, they will find a space that is naturally more accessible and regulating than others from day one. Your choices will not meet every single one of their needs, but you likely will create a space that demonstrates your compassion and openness to meeting their needs, immediately supporting relationship building. Relationship building benefits you and your students by allowing you a foundation to fall back on when things become more difficult. Relationship building also benefits you and your students by creating more regulated nervous systems for all! 

Regulated students who experience felt-safety in their classroom spaces are able to engage more actively and they retain more learning! Regulated students are less likely to be subjected to interventions like seclusion, restraint, and punitive discipline. Regulated students build connections and develop a sense of confidence in themselves and their ability to learn, impacting them for years to come. 

But UD doesn’t just benefit your students! 

By implementing this proactive strategy, you reduce the need to reactively change your classroom space based on student accommodations outlined in 504 Plans and IEPs. Because you’ve already made the conscious decision to naturally include equitable practices into your whole classroom design, you don’t have to worry about scrambling in as many ways once you finally have access to their formal documents. Yes, you may have to make some changes but these changes will likely happen less frequently or throw you off less when you’ve already got a curious mindset related to the inclusivity of your physical space. 

Let’s talk about your regulated students and how that can benefit you, too! To start, you don’t have to worry so much about students becoming so dysregulated that they demonstrate observable stress behavior, shut down, or internalize negative feelings. You might not have to spend so much time stopping lessons to help students regulate or waiting for a support team to give a student a break. Who knows, you might even find yourself doing less paperwork! 

You also benefit from a regulated nervous system, too! You might find yourself better able to enjoy your students, build stronger relationships, and feel more rejuvenated at the end of the day, despite the struggles in the system. Your choices could influence other educators, who see the benefits, creating a ‘popcorn’ like effect that supports other students in your building, too! 

How do you get started? 

First, get curious! UD requires curiosity and consideration of a variety of needs, along with an openness to collaboration and making adjustments based on feedback from your students. Consider the most common 504 and IEP accommodations that you see with your students, such as flexible seating or access to fidgets. Then, think about how you can proactively create universal access to these accommodations for all students. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore a few practices that are proactive and little to no-cost design ideas that you can incorporate into your classroom to support nervous system regulation. 

This week, perhaps consider what you already know about your school building and where accessibility and inclusivity do and do not show up in physical spaces! Or, write a list of common accommodations you’ve seen, helping guide your decision-making as you learn more about UD. 

This article is the first article that is part of a five part series about Applying Universal Design.