Allowing access for all: What action research taught me about rigorous, responsive teaching
Updated: Sep 12
Teaching is, in itself, action research. A lesson plan is a hypothesis--informed, of course, by what we know from experience and about best practices. Nevertheless, carefully planned instruction can leave students without a clear way into the work. An engaging activity can generate conversation without revealing what anyone learned. A polished digital project can hide the thinking we most wanted students to practice. This is when the teacher becomes the researcher, looking back at the hypothesis and methods, examining how to tweak processes, considering best practices, and applying changes to plans.
In my curriculum design, my lesson development, and conversations with educators, I kept returning to these challenges. They matter both when preparing to teach and when reconsidering familiar classroom routines. The following five recommendations bring that work together around a practical question: How can we design learning that pushes students while giving them meaningful opportunities to succeed?
1. Rigorous and fair lesson planning relies on clear end goals for students.
Start by identifying what students should understand and demonstrate. Then plan whole-group universal accommodations: purposeful options available to everyone that remove barriers unrelated to that goal. This approach draws on Universal Design for Learning, which anticipates learner differences through flexible engagement, representation, and expression (CAST, 2024). Accessible text, audio, vocabulary previews, visual agendas, written preparation, and structured discussion can be part of the lesson from the beginning.
Universal access does not mean identical support. Students may still need individualized accommodations or specialized instruction. It means the basic lesson already anticipates variability rather than waiting for students to struggle. Language-accessible design can provide flexible pathways while preserving challenging content goals (Doran, 2015).
In my analysis of diverse learners’ needs, I revised a Grade 10 English lesson in which students compare a muralist’s account with an institutional announcement. The intellectual goal remained consistent: analyze how language, perspective, and omission shape meaning. The revision made the routes into that analysis more deliberate.
The revised plan offers bilingual annotation, audio texts, partner rehearsal, and planning checklists. It also includes a brief learner inventory and review of recent work samples to guide support decisions. Individual accommodations remain part of that planning.
Three ideas guided the changes. Identity directed attention to students’ languages and knowledge without requiring personal disclosure. Self-efficacy emphasized models, attainable steps, and specific feedback that made progress visible. Sociocultural consciousness prompted questions about whose language and knowledge the lesson treated as authoritative. These ideas informed my culturally responsive planning and evaluation of the lesson (Chen & Lindo, 2018; Nganga, 2015).
For teachers, the planning question becomes specific: Is a student challenged by the intended analysis, the language used to express it, or the process required to complete it? Those difficulties call for different responses. An incomplete assignment alone cannot tell us which response is appropriate; culturally responsive evaluation requires multiple sources of evidence about the learner and the learning context (Chen & Lindo, 2018).
2. Student-centered instruction includes purposeful structure and meaningful intellectual agency.
Students need to make consequential decisions: what a source means, which evidence supports a claim, whose perspective is missing, and how to revise an argument. Connecting academic writing with students’ civic, personal, and other writing experiences can help establish meaningful purposes for that work (Holmes et al., 2022).
Students also need preparation to make those decisions thoughtfully.
In my Rhetoric in Denver writing unit, first-year writers investigate how public texts represent the city and compose a multimodal argument for a defined audience. Students develop their own interpretations, but the assignment unfolds through field notes, source comparisons, a provisional claim, a storyboard, peer response, and a revision memo.
Each stage gives students something meaningful to resolve while giving the instructor evidence about where support is needed. The sequence draws on research supporting explicit modeling, guided practice, focused feedback, and carefully prepared peer review for linguistically diverse writers (Campbell & Filimon, 2018). Peer readers identify the claim they hear, a strong evidence connection, an omission, and an alternative interpretation. Writers then decide which feedback to use and explain their choices.
The integrated version of the unit adds geographic inquiry. Students examine maps, community histories, and representations of place. Geography changes what their evidence can establish and what arguments they can make.
When adapting this approach, choose a question that matters in your subject and community. Model the difficult thinking, provide manageable checkpoints, and preserve room for students to reach different defensible conclusions. Structure should help students exercise judgment with increasing independence.
3. Culturally responsive classroom management prepares students for participation, disagreement, and intellectual risk.
Discussion, cooperation, and respectful disagreement are learned practices. Explicit expectations, perspective taking, and guided discussion of conflict are among the practices recommended in culturally responsive approaches to nurturing young children’s behavior (Price & Steed, 2016). In secondary classrooms, the same planning questions deserve attention: Have we taught the routines we expect, and have we considered how students understand them?
My classroom management field guide examines how expectations change across instructional formats. Talking with a peer may interrupt direct instruction but can also contribute productively to collaborative inquiry. Students need explicit signals about which expectations apply.
An experienced English teacher I interviewed made this concrete. She described teaching students to paraphrase, invite others into a discussion, disagree with evidence, and revise a claim. Individual preparation and rotating intellectual roles were intended to keep confident speakers from doing all the reasoning (Cullen, 2026a).
Her account also emphasized boundaries. When a student disparaged a classmate’s home language, she interrupted the harm, created space for written reflection, and followed up before returning to the academic discussion. Looking back, she identified a curricular change: teach language plurality proactively (Cullen, 2026a).
For both novice and skilled teachers, management deserves a place inside lesson planning. Prepare the routines students will need for the intellectual work ahead. Then examine who participates, who receives correction, and whether students have actually been taught the expectations being enforced.
4. Technology should expand access and help students make their thinking visible.
Before selecting a technology platform, identify the learning opportunity it creates or the barrier it addresses. A tool might support access to a text, help students compare ideas, make feedback easier to use, or provide a meaningful audience for their work. Technology-integration frameworks might help teachers examine both what students do with a tool and how it changes the literacy task (Howe et al., 2024).
It can also introduce obstacles. Public writing may create privacy considerations. Multimedia production may reward prior technical experience. AI assistance may complete the reasoning the assignment was intended to develop. Research on AI-supported writing also provokes concerns about accessibility, bias, privacy, and inaccurate output (Evmenova et al., 2025).
In Rhetoric in Denver, students draft privately and have public, pseudonymous, or private publication options. Assessment focuses on argument, evidence, reader awareness, accessibility, and revision. A successful project does not depend on attracting views or subscribers.
The integrated unit also establishes boundaries for optional AI use. Students first develop their own observations, source analysis, claim, and draft. Assistance can then help them question an existing argument or examine an organizational choice. Students remain responsible for the interpretation and evidence.
These decisions also raise a teacher-preparation question: What experiences help teachers learn to select and evaluate technology thoughtfully? My survey of five teacher educators examined eight approaches to multimodal preparation, including classroom-video analysis, technology-enabled simulation, and technology-integration frameworks. These received mean ratings of 4.60, 4.50, and 4.00, respectively, on a five-point scale (Cullen, 2026b).
Figure 1.
Mean Ratings for Multimodal Preparation Approaches
Note. The graph includes digital and nondigital approaches. Five educators participated; simulation and technology-integration frameworks each had four valid ratings, while the remaining approaches had five. Means exclude “not enough experience to judge” responses. Ratings indicate endorsement, not frequency of use or demonstrated effectiveness (Cullen, 2026b).
The written responses help explain the connection to classroom technology. Respondents identified needs involving captions, image descriptions, fair assessment across differences in technology access, and distinguishing production polish from learning. They also described uneven faculty confidence with simulations, technology frameworks, changing platforms, and AI-assisted production (Cullen, 2026b). Preparing teachers to use technology therefore requires opportunities to examine accessibility, assess student reasoning, and justify tool choices alongside learning how the tools operate.
For preservice teachers, that preparation might involve reviewing a digital assignment with a mentor: Can every student access it, what thinking does it require, and what evidence will it produce? Practicing teachers can apply the same questions before adopting or revising a technology-supported lesson.
Collect annotations, drafts, conferences, or revision memos alongside the finished product. Ask students to explain one consequential decision: Why this image? Why this source? Why this revision? Those explanations help you judge whether the technology supported the learning you intended.
5. Build a shared cycle of planning, practice, feedback and revision
Thoughtful technology use is one part of a broader professional practice: learning to select, explain, and adapt instruction. My action research suggested that candidates need consistent expectations, accessible examples, and repeated opportunities for feedback and revision across coursework and clinical experiences (Cullen, 2026b).
Teachers need opportunities to practice selecting, explaining, and adapting instructional approaches. My action research on multimodal teacher preparation pointed toward a shared cycle that connects these decisions across coursework, clinical experiences, and ongoing professional learning. Beyond the ratings discussed above, respondents identified a need for consistent expectations, accessible examples, and repeated opportunities for feedback and revision (Cullen, 2026b).
For preservice and practicing teachers, these findings suggest a manageable cycle:
Identify a rigorous learning goal and anticipate barriers.
Design accessible options and explain how the selected modes support the goal.
Rehearse or teach a bounded lesson segment.
Examine individual student thinking alongside feedback.
Revise one consequential choice and explain why.
For a preservice teacher, this might mean designing a multimodal response to literature, rehearsing the instructions, and reviewing a recording with a mentor. For a practicing teacher, it might mean examining student annotations, recordings, or written responses with a colleague to determine whether the available modes revealed the intended understanding. Research combining coaching and video-based reflection supports guided examination of instructional practice, although the study’s small sample warrants cautious conclusions (O’Brien et al., 2021).
My interview with an experienced English teacher helped explain the professional judgment involved in this process. Her account emphasized learning about students, questioning resources and assumptions, structuring participation, and reconsidering decisions. The diagram below represents these recurring practices and gives the shared planning cycle a culturally responsive focus (Cullen, 2026a).
Figure 2.
A Recursive Process for Rigorous, Culturally Responsive Instruction
Note. Developed through analysis of an interview with an experienced secondary English teacher. The cycle connects knowing learners, examining resources and bias, designing shared and accountable goals, facilitating dialogue, and revising with humility (Cullen, 2026a).
Shared criteria can connect this work across university coursework, clinical placements, and professional collaboration. A common language for goals, barriers, and accessible options helps teachers explain and examine their decisions together (Boucher et al., 2025). Begin with one lesson, a few agreed-upon criteria, and a manageable amount of student evidence. Examine alignment, accessibility, cultural responsiveness, and the reasoning behind revisions.
My survey and interview support trying this shared cycle; they do not establish its effectiveness or demonstrate candidate competence. That is the next question for practice: Do revisions produce clearer evidence of learning and more meaningful participation? Action research keeps that question open by connecting evidence with action and further inquiry (Gibbs et al., 2017).
References
Boucher, A. R., Rappolt-Schlichtmann, G., & Hensler, E. (2025). Universal Design for Learning: A shared language to create a culture of collaboration and leverage interprofessional practice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56, 581–597. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00142
Campbell, Y. C., & Filimon, C. (2018). Supporting the argumentative writing of students in linguistically diverse classrooms: An action research study. RMLE Online, 41(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/19404476.2017.1402408
CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Chen, C. R., & Lindo, E. J. (2018). Culturally responsive practices in special education evaluations: A review of literature. The DiaLog: Journal of the Texas Educational Diagnosticians’ Association, 47(2), 9–13.
Cullen, L. (2026a). Effective instructional strategies: A best-practices guide to resources, technology, materials, and classroom management for a rigorous and culturally responsive curriculum [Unpublished course assignment]. American College of Education.
Cullen, L. (2026b). Teacher educators’ perceptions of multimodal preparation for culturally and linguistically diverse English learners: Action research results and curricular design [Unpublished course assignment]. American College of Education.
Doran, P. R. (2015). Language accessibility in the classroom: How UDL can promote success for linguistically diverse learners. Exceptionality Education International, 25(3), 1–12.
Evmenova, A. S., Regan, K., Mergen, R., & Hrisseh, R. (2025). Educational games and the potential of AI to transform writing across the curriculum. Education Sciences, 15(5), Article 567. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15050567
Gibbs, P., Cartney, P., Wilkinson, K., Parkinson, J., Cunningham, S., James-Reynolds, C., Zoubir, T., Brown, V., Barter, P., Sumner, P., MacDonald, A., Dayananda, A., & Pitt, A. (2017). Literature review on the use of action research in higher education. Educational Action Research, 25(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2015.1124046
Holmes, A. J., Yancey, K. B., O’Sullivan, Í., Hart, D. A., & Sinha, Y. (2022). Lifewide writing across the curriculum: Valuing students’ multiple writing lives beyond the university. The WAC Journal, 33, 32–63. https://doi.org/10.37514/WAC-J.2022.33.1.02
Howe, K. S., Asim, S., & Christensen, R. (2024). Applying a technology integration model to guide literacy lesson planning: A focus on teaching critical literacy skills using multicultural literature and digital tools. Literacy Practice and Research, 49(2), Article 3. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/lpr/vol49/iss2/3
Nganga, L. (2015). Multicultural curriculum in rural early childhood programs. Journal of Praxis in Multicultural Education, 9(1), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.9741/2161-2978.1073
O’Brien, K. M., Regan, K., Coogle, C. G., Ottley, J. R., & Nagro, S. A. (2021). Impact of eCoaching with video-based reflection on special education teacher candidates’ instructional skills. Teacher Education and Special Education, 44(2), 160–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888406420964732
Price, C. L., & Steed, E. A. (2016). Culturally responsive strategies to support young children with challenging behavior. Young Children, 71(5), 36–43. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2016/culturally-responsive-strategies
Research note: The local findings draw on the author's anonymous teacher-educator survey and analysis of a semi-structured interview with one experienced secondary English teacher. Participant records, identifying details, and the interview transcript are not included in this public account.
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