Bitesize Research: Adaptive Teaching

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a good week so far - and wishing you all a restful break when it comes along! We’ve been hearing lots about adaptive teaching as a new way of describing differentiation in recent times - this is the emphasis of the Early Career framework too in terms of meeting the differing needs of pupils as well as being the preferred term from the DfE. Going forward, I know we’ll be continuing to think about this going forward, as will the teaching profession in general. As such, this week, I was really interested to see an article in TES on adaptive teaching. 

Objectives: To suggest some ideas about effective adaptive teaching in school settings

Summary: 

• The author argues that adaptive teaching differs from differentiation crucially insofar as it starts on the whole class, rather than the individual

• The author suggests two approaches to adaptive teaching:

• 1) Proactive adaptive teaching - this is an approach that may look to perform small, inclusive adjustments to lesson organisation, and the author argues that this relies heavily on having strong teacher-student relationships. It may also look at modelling and giving instructions in bitesize chunks so that working memory isn’t overloaded. 

• 2) Reactive adaptive teaching - by way of using quick and ongoing formative assessment, this can be used to adjust teaching during the course of a lesson. In this respect, the author suggests a helpful resource from the Maximising the Effectiveness of Teaching Assistants group - see here.

How might this look in the classroom?

Expectations should be set high and tasks are challenging for all the students. Students are given a live example of WAGOLL - “what a good one looks like” and they have had the opportunity to follow the “perfect” thought process in problem solving

The main strategy for adaptive teaching is scaffolding; providing different levels of support for students whilst they all attempt the same task.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• What do I currently understand about adaptive teaching? What do I need to know more about?

• How do I look to do proactive adaptive teaching?

• How do I look to do reactive adaptive teaching?

• What additional support would I like with adaptive teaching?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!