Everyone Deserves to Swim

What a field trip to the pool can teach us about inclusive education and the instructional practices that could help make it possible.

Imagine you're a third-grade teacher taking your class to a pool party. Your students have a range of swimming abilities. Some are ready to dive off the diving board, some are just learning to float, and a few have never been in a pool at all.

Now imagine this: to "keep everyone safe," you leave the non-swimmers in the locker room with ocean-themed coloring sheets and a “swimming” assistant. You bring the tentative swimmers to the pool, but seat them at the edge, feet dangling, while everyone else jumps in. They were included and excluded at the same time. How will they ever strengthen their swimming skills if they are not given the opportunity to use them?

This analogy may feel extreme, but it reflects what happens in schools every day. Students with disabilities are removed from grade-level experiences with good intentions. We don't want them to struggle. But exclusion carries real costs to belonging, to learning, and to how peers engage with one another.

The question we should be asking instead is: What scaffolds and supports could allow all students to be included?

The 22 High Leverage Practices

The High Leverage Practices (HLPs) are 22 research-based instructional actions that special educators should prioritize when designing learning environments, setting goals, and delivering instruction (McLesky et. al., 2022). 

They fall into four domains:

• Collaboration (HLPs 1-3)
• Assessment (HLPs 4-6)
• Social Emotional and Behavioral (HLPs 7-10)
• Instruction and Feedback (HLPs 11-22)

Collaboration: Planning Before the Pool

Back at the pool: what if teachers, special educators, administrators, and families had met beforehand? They gathered input on each child's strengths and needs, and designed the trip so every student could participate? That's HLPs 1–3 in action. Effective collaboration means co-planning with general education teachers, facilitating IEP meetings where family voices are genuinely heard, and guiding paraeducators toward supporting independence rather than creating dependence.

Assessment: Don't Assume Swimming Readiness

A skilled team doesn't assume what students can or can't do. Instead, they gather information from multiple sources including observations, work samples, caregiver input, and progress data. When a student isn't making progress, the first question isn't "what's wrong with the student?" It's "what in our instruction and/or what is missing from our instruction that might be contributing to a lack of progress?" That reframe is the heart of HLPs 4–6.

Social and Behavioral Supports: Preparing for a "Zig-Zag" Day

A field trip is unpredictable. Thoughtful teams prepare students for sensory challenges, preview the schedule to reduce anxiety, and pre-teach coping strategies in small groups before reinforcing them with the whole class. In classrooms, this looks like consistent routines, visual schedules, explicitly taught social skills, and behavior support plans grounded in functional assessments, not reactive punishment.

Instruction: Teaching Everyone to Swim

Before anyone can safely enjoy a pool party, students need to learn how to swim. A skilled team of instructors and lifeguards would design a series of swim lessons with clear goals in mind, drawing on their expertise and the varied readiness levels across the class. They would monitor progress throughout, provide ongoing and specific feedback, and use that information to shape the plan for the day of the field trip itself so that by the time everyone arrives at the pool, every student has been genuinely prepared to participate.

That's exactly what high-leverage instruction looks like in schools. The largest HLP domain covers everything from goal-setting to delivery. Effective specially designed instruction means identifying SMART goals, sequencing content deliberately, adapting materials without lowering expectations, using scaffolds that fade over time, and grouping students flexibly based on data, not fixed assumptions about ability. It includes scaffolds and supports like text-to-speech software, concrete manipulatives, peer partnerships and engaging high-quality materials. It means planning for students to generalize skills and concepts across settings, people, time and context.

UDL: Remove Barriers for All

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) asks teachers to proactively design instruction that works for all learners from the start, not retrofit accommodations afterward (CAST, 2018). When we remove barriers from the onset, everyone gets in. UDL 3.0 goes further, centering students' cultural and racial identities as essential to instructional design, and shifting the goal from "expert learning" to sustaining learner agency and identity (CAST, 2024). UDL asks us to ask the question earlier: not "what do we do with students who can't access this?" but "how do we design the pool experience so everyone can fully participate from the beginning?" The pool is designed with ramps, shallow ends, pool noodles, and life jackets available to everyone, no one needs to be pulled aside for a special accommodation. That's proactive design.

Our instructional design should not include erasing differences to make one-size-fits-all lessons. Instead, we must recognize barriers, celebrate diverse strengths, and design for them.

Putting it All Together

The HLPs define the what. UDL defines the how of instructional design. And the Council for Exceptional Children Code of Ethics (Council for Exceptional Children, 2015), grounded in student dignity, advocacy, and evidence-based practice, guides the decision-making behind all of it. Together, they keep one thing at the center: the student.

Everyone deserves to swim. And every student deserves to learn, struggle productively, and belong. No student belongs in a locker room or dangling their feet at the edge. All students belong in the water with their peers.

References

CAST. (2024). Universal design for learning guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org

CAST. (2018). Universal design for learning guidelines version 2.2. https://udlguidelines.cast.org

Council for Exceptional Children. (2015). What every special educator must know: Professional ethics and standards (7th ed.). CEC.

McLeskey, J., Maheady, L., Billingsley, B., Brownell, M. T., & Lewis, T. J. (Eds.). (2022). High leverage practices for inclusive classrooms (2nd ed.). Routledge.

What Now? 

1. Download the HLC Packet — See exactly which math concepts your students need to master, and when.
   
   
2. Watch the HLC Intro Video — New to High Leverage Concepts? Start here. It's short. It's worth it.
   
   
3. Universal Design for Learning in Mathematics — The book Ashley Marlow co-wrote with Katie Novak. Start designing lessons that work for every student before they struggle.
   
   
4. The Background on the HLC Progressions — Sandi Stanhope walks you through the HLC framework and what it means for your students.
   
   
5. Bring ALN to your school or district — Stop workshopping inclusion. Start building it, with us, inside your classrooms.

All Learners Network is committed to supporting pedagogy so that all students can access quality math instruction. We do this through our online platform, free resources, events, and embedded professional development. Learn more about how we work with schools and districts here.