Meanwhile, teachers are navigating classrooms in which students are creating TikToks, scrolling, and gaming—while they should be paying attention. In our research, 53% of tweens (age 8–12) and 69% of teens (age 13–18) reported that using social media distracts them when they should be doing schoolwork. To many, school phone bans seem like a no-brainer. Yet the question of establishing and enforcing bans isn't always a simple one.

Finally, don’t be culture-blind. When we ignore students’ identities, we efface who they are in the world and lose a rich resource for learning

: Teach students that failure is just another form of data. When a child feels shame about his learning gaps, he’ll hide behind quiet compliance or bravado and acting out.

If pulling a student out of an activity to support him or her makes you uncomfortable, notice your discomfort and try not to let it control your decisions.

. Practice lean-in assessment: As you gather a student’s human story, start to piece together his or her learning story.

Become a warm demander: Author Lisa Delpit describes warm demanders as teachers who “expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance

. Know every child: First and foremost, get to know each student as a unique and layered individual. Embrace storientation to learn where they’re from, what they love to do outside of school, what their family is like.

The evolution of CAST’s UDL Guidelines has been and continues to be a dynamic, collaborative, and research-based process. We shared the first version of the Guidelines — Guidelines 1.0 — in 2008. Since that time, we have continued to incorporate feedback from the field as well as expand research in the areas of UDL, education, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, disability studies, inclusive education, and asset-based pedagogies.

The UDL Guidelines offer a structure for proactively uncovering and addressing these barriers and for intentionally designing learning environments and experiences that more fully honor and value every learner.

The UDL Principles and accompanying Guidelines were conceived with the learning brain in mind. Like each person’s fingerprints, every brain is remarkably unique in its anatomy, chemistry, and physiology. While there are thousands of networks specialized for different functions, some of the differences we can observe are systematic and predictable. We can and should proactively anticipate and plan for these differences. UDL emphasizes three large brain networks that comprise the vast majority of the human brain and play a central role in learning. These networks include: the affective networks (where learners evaluate the internal and external environment to set priorities, to motivate, and to engage learning and behavior), the recognition networks (where learners sense and perceive information in the environment and transform it into usable knowledge), and the strategic networks (where learners plan, organize, and initiate purposeful actions in the environment)