Planning for equitable access: What action research taught me about rigor, writing, and trusting student voice
Updated: 20 hours ago
Teaching is, in itself, action research. A lesson plan captures what I want students to know and how I will determine they learned it. Their work gives me evidence to question those choices and revise.
As a writing instructor and teacher educator, I want learners to develop that same judgment. Whether they’re supporting a claim or designing a lesson, I want them to explain their decisions, weigh feedback, and trust their own voices. My feedback should help them build the confidence and knowledge to decide what needs work and why.
That goal connects my interests in writing research, authentic assessment, and teacher preparation. It also keeps me asking a practical question: What does this task let students think through for themselves?
A lesson plan demonstrates what I hope students will learn. Their work reveals what I need to rethink. That relationship defines my work in writing research and teacher preparation: how learners develop ideas, what helps them push through difficulty, and how teachers use evidence to decide what happens next.
Writing and teaching rely on similar processes. Writers decide which evidence backs a claim and how to meet a reader. Teachers decide how to make a hard task accessible and what a student's response demonstrates. Revision is how both act on what they learn.
Three sources sharpened this for me: research reviews, my own instructional designs, and local action research. An anonymous survey of five teacher educators and an interview with one veteran secondary English teacher revealed this same insight: teachers need to explain their decisions and revise them, not just make them. Together with the literature, these perspectives tie access, assessment, classroom relationships, and professional learning into one coherent approach.
Rigor begins with a clear intellectual purpose
Every plan starts with two main questions: what do I want students to know, and how will I know they've learned it?
In a Grade 10 lesson I designed, "Whose Voice Shapes the Story?", students compare a student muralist's account of a fictionalized proposal with an institutional announcement about the same event, analyzing language, authority, and omission. A strong response explains how each account steers readers toward a different interpretation.
That purpose is what lets me determine what supports might be necessary. Audio texts, bilingual annotation, vocabulary examples, partner rehearsal: all routes into the same analysis, not detours from it. I interviewed a veteran teacher who put it the same way: start with the objective, then check whether your resources and participation structures actually let students do that thinking. Boucher et al. (2025) frame Universal Design for Learning as a shared language for naming barriers and learner variability. Both point me to the same two questions: what does this task demand, and what supports do students need to meet that demand?
Evidence about supports requires the same scrutiny as evidence about learning. In a classroom study involving 768 students, van de Pol et al. (2015) found that scaffolding’s effectiveness depended partly on how teachers adjusted their support and how long students worked independently. That makes me ask more than whether I’ve provided help: is this the right help, at the right time? A checklist is a starting point. Work samples, student explanations, and observation help me decide what to keep, adjust, or gradually remove as students gain independence.
For diverse learners, this means reading difficulty in context. A multilingual writer might need language rehearsal. Another student might need explicit help organizing a multistep task. Two unfinished assignments can look identical and call for completely different responses. I want teacher candidates to investigate that difference, not dismiss it, while holding the analytical bar steady and supplying whatever support each student actually needs.
Authentic writing makes the reasoning visible
Writing research returns me to purpose and process. Students need something worth investigating, room to build the knowledge their argument requires, and feedback early enough to implement it.
In "Rhetoric in Denver," a four-week unit I designed for first-year writers, students investigate how maps, public language, the built environment, and community histories argue about place and power. Comparing writing-course models helped me pair public communication with a carefully sequenced composing process. Geography changes the evidence students examine and the conclusions they can defend, which became my test for any interdisciplinary design: the added discipline has to change the intellectual work, not just decorate it.
Campbell and Filimon's (2018) action research shaped the unit's modeling, guided practice, and focused feedback for argumentative writing. Students move from source analysis to a provisional claim, a draft, peer response, and a revision memo, one that explains a real change: in evidence, interpretation, organization, or audience awareness. That memo is where I look for the understanding beyond the finished text.
The teacher-educator survey raised a similar concern. Respondents valued multimodal assignments paired with individual explanations, and authentic assessment paired with reflection. The interview supplied a matching classroom practice: students prepare individually before collaborating, rotate roles, and explain their reasoning through conferences and reflection. One principle runs through all of it: the teacher needs access to each learner's thinking throughout the process, especially since a polished final product or a confident group performance can hide uncertainty.
Authenticity creates its own challenges. Public writing gives students a real audience, but publication brings privacy and access barriers with it. I built in public, pseudonymous, and private pathways, plus in-person and remote inquiry options. The assessment looks at the argument and the writer's account of revision, not at views or likes, which tell you nothing about the learning goals that matter.
The unit is still a proposal, not a result. Comparing early interpretations with final arguments, tracking students' experience of the supports, and reading the revision memos would tell me whether the design delivers the learning it's built for.
Participation is part of the curriculum
A student-centered classroom needs routines that make participation possible. Students have to learn how to enter a discussion, give useful feedback, disagree with evidence, and reconsider a claim. Those are teachable skills, and they belong in the instructional plan.
The teacher I interviewed uses written preparation, structured turn-taking, and paraphrasing another's interpretation before responding. Those practices buy students time and language for hard conversations, and they help the teacher tell frequent speaking apart from real engagement. A quiet student's written preparation can reveal careful reasoning that whole-class discussion does not.
My review of classroom-management research sharpened this point further. Larson et al. (2018) found that teachers' self-reported confidence in behavior management didn't predict observed student behavior. Confidence has to be checked against evidence. In supervision, that means asking candidates to weigh participation patterns, student work, and mentor observations against their own sense of how a lesson went.
Cultural responsiveness pushes that reflection further still. Candidates need to ask whose knowledge shows up in the materials, which communication styles the classroom rewards, and whether the same behavior gets a different response depending on who displays it. My interview reinforced this: when students reveal a perspective the original plan missed, it's the resources and assumptions that need to change, not the student.
A responsive classroom also needs boundaries. Teachers have to interrupt harm without putting a targeted student in charge of educating the room. Written reflection and follow-up conversation give everyone space to return to the academic question with more care. Preparing students for disagreement before conflict happens is what makes this part of the curriculum instead of a crisis response.
Teacher preparation needs shared evidence of judgment
These classroom demands raise a practical question for teacher education: how do we actually know candidates are learning to make these decisions, and more importantly, putting them into practice? My local inquiry investigated whether the teacher preparation program at my university had a shared picture of multimodal preparation across coursework and clinical experience. The goal was to identify priorities for a methods course and tighter coordination among instructors and supervisors.
The five teacher educators responded positively to all eight approaches, with the strongest support clustering around practices that make thinking visible: analyzing classroom video, explaining multimodal choices, engaging with culturally responsive texts, and reflecting on authentic work. I saw a shared priority in those responses. Candidates need opportunities to explain why an instructional choice makes sense and examine what happens when they use it. The chart shows the ratings; the pattern helped me think about what those priorities could look like in teacher preparation.
Mean Ratings for Multimodal Preparation Approaches
Note. Mean ratings for eight multimodal preparation approaches. Five teacher educators participated. Simulation and technology frameworks each had four valid responses; the other items had five. "Not enough experience to judge" responses were excluded. Source: Author's teacher-educator survey analysis.
The narrow range and uniformly high ratings suggest broad endorsement, but with only five respondents, one person is 20% of the sample, so small differences between means don't tell you much about what to prioritize. The open responses were more useful. Four respondents flagged needs around accessibility or fair assessment, three cited time constraints, and three asked for shared rubrics, examples, curriculum mapping, or scoring calibration (themes could overlap within a single response).
I read this as a call for clearer expectations and better-supported practice. Candidates need real opportunities to justify a mode, explain a support, interpret evidence, and revise. Faculty need time and shared examples to assess that reasoning consistently. Makhmetova et al. (2025) linked teacher growth to combinations of formal learning, mentoring, collaboration, and reflection, which supports building professional learning around repeated chances to use and examine ideas in practice, not one-off workshops.
The interview helped me name this as a recurring process rather than a checklist. Open coding of the transcript surfaced five stages: notice learners, interrogate resources and assumptions, design shared objectives with individual accountability, facilitate dialogue while maintaining boundaries, and reflect before revising.
A Recursive Process for Rigorous, Culturally Responsive Instruction
Note. A recursive process for rigorous, culturally responsive instruction. The stages were derived through open coding of one experienced secondary English teacher's interview account. The cycle is an interpretive planning resource rather than a validated model. Source: Author's interview analysis.
These findings call for restraint too. The survey measured perceptions. The interview gave one teacher's retrospective account. Neither directly assessed candidate competence or student achievement, and my own questions and coding decisions shaped the interpretation. Comparing six systematic reviews and meta-analyses through an education-adapted AMSTAR 2 appraisal already made me wary of evidence that leans on self-report and stops short of classroom outcomes. The same scrutiny applies to my own inquiry: convergence across sources supports a local pilot, not a claim about effectiveness.
Technology should support thinking and access
Across every design and finding here, technology's value came down to what learners could actually do with it. A captioned video supports close observation. An accessible text or visual organizer helps a learner work through a demanding idea. Every tool needs a defined purpose, and the teacher needs evidence it's helping.
This matters most for my interest in AI and writing. In my unit design, students develop their own observations, source analysis, claim, and draft before any optional AI-supported questioning. Their process memo explains the decisions they made and which feedback they accepted or rejected. That sequence lets me study how assistance affects a writer's reasoning while still preserving evidence of the writer's original thinking.
My multimedia presentation ties this all together around whole-group universal accommodations: purposeful supports available to everyone, plus individualized support where it's needed. It connects accessible materials, explicit participation routines, and varied ways to demonstrate understanding, all pointed at one shared intellectual goal.
Video. Designing access before it is needed. A multimedia synthesis of the survey, interview, and proposed instructional response. Recommendations remain subject to evaluation through candidate and classroom evidence.
What I recommend for diverse learners
The approaches I recommend start with a challenging, relevant task and give students several ways to enter it. They also give teachers enough evidence to recognize when the plan needs to change.
Plan backward from meaningful work. Decide what students need to know and what authentic learning looks like before choosing activities or technology. In a writing classroom, students can investigate a community question, compare competing accounts, and develop an argument for an audience with a stake in the issue. Explain the criteria for success, model the thinking, and build in feedback before the final product. Campbell and Filimon’s (2018) action research supports explicit instruction and guided practice in argumentative writing.
Build access into the lesson. Make accessible texts, vocabulary support, audio, and opportunities for rehearsal available from the start. UDL provides a framework for anticipating barriers while maintaining challenging goals (Boucher et al., 2025). Multilingual students can draw on home-language knowledge and rehearse ideas before sharing. Students who struggle with planning can use staged deadlines and clear checkpoints. Keep individually required accommodations in place, and check whether each support helps the student do the intended work.
Make students’ knowledge part of the inquiry. Choose texts and questions that invite different perspectives, including community knowledge that school materials may overlook. Let students question how a source represents a place, language, or group. Give them choices about making personal connections; no student should have to disclose an experience or speak for an entire community. This extends cultural responsiveness into the questions students ask and the evidence the classroom values.
Teach collaboration and assess individual understanding. Give students time to prepare before discussion, teach useful ways to disagree, and rotate roles that require intellectual work. The teacher I interviewed paired these routines with individual explanations and reflection. That combination gives students opportunities to learn from one another while helping the teacher see who needs further instruction. A group’s polished product should lead to questions about each learner’s thinking.
Use feedback to build independence. Ask students to explain what they changed, why they changed it, and which advice they chose to set aside. Select technology for a specific purpose, such as accessing a text, examining an argument, or receiving feedback. Then look for evidence that it helps. In my writing instruction, that means preserving students’ initial thinking and asking them to account for their decisions when they use AI.
These approaches bring curriculum, instruction, and assessment into the same conversation. The task gives students a reason to care. The supports make participation possible. Their work tells me what to teach next. My goal is for learners to leave with stronger knowledge and greater confidence in their own judgment.
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
Langberg, J. M., Epstein, J. N., Becker, S. P., Girio-Herrera, E., & Vaughn, A. J. (2012). Evaluation of the Homework, Organization, and Planning Skills (HOPS) intervention for middle school students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as implemented by school mental health providers. School Psychology Review, 41(3), 342–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2012.12087514
Larson, K. E., Pas, E. T., Bradshaw, C. P., Rosenberg, M. S., & Day-Vines, N. L. (2018). Examining how proactive management and culturally responsive teaching relate to student behavior: Implications for measurement and practice. School Psychology Review, 47(2), 153–166.
Makhmetova, Z., Karabassova, L., Zhakim, A., & Karinov, A. (2025). Exploring the effects of professional learning experiences on in-service teachers' growth: A systematic review of literature. Education Sciences, 15(2), Article 146. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15020146
van de Pol, J., Volman, M., Oort, F., & Beishuizen, J. (2015). The effects of scaffolding in the classroom: Support contingency and student independent working time in relation to student achievement, task effort and appreciation of support. Instructional Science, 43, 615–641. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-015-9351-z
Research note: The local findings draw on the author's anonymous teacher-educator survey and analysis of a semistructured 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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