The idea that teachers should adapt their teaching has been around for a long time. It was at the heart of Black and Wiliam’s 2005 seminal paper that called for assessment for learning, ‘Inside The Black Box’. It was included in the Teachers Standards that came into effect in September 2012: Section 5 of the Standards refers to teachers knowing ‘how to adapt teaching to support pupils’ education at different stages of development’. And Standard 5 of the 2019 Early Career Framework (which is the foundation for the training of all new teachers for their two years of ECT) also covers adaptive teaching: it refers to teachers ‘adapting teaching in a responsive way, including by providing targeted support to pupils who are struggling… so that all pupils have the opportunity to meet expectations’.
Ofsted picked up the theme of adaptive teaching in their 2019 ‘Education Inspection Framework Overview of Research’ document that underpinned the 2019 inspection handbook. When outlining the desirability of adaptive teaching, Ofsted also drew an important distinction between adaptive teaching and ‘differentiation’:
‘In-class differentiation, through providing differentiated teaching, activities or resources, has generally not been shown to have much impact on pupils’ attainment… On the other hand, adapting teaching in a responsive way, for example by providing focused support to pupils who are not making progress, is likely to improve outcomes. However, this type of adaptive teaching should be clearly distinguished from forms of differentiation that cause teachers to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils…’
Both this quotation from Ofsted, and the previous one from the Early Career Framework, do beg the question of how you would adapt teaching in an unresponsive way – if we are adapting, by definition we are responding to information we have received – but I’ll let the semantics go.
In the Inspection Handbook itself, Ofsted refers to the need for teachers to ‘check pupils’ understanding systematically, and identify misunderstandings and adapt teaching as necessary to correct these’ (Section 227, Evaluating the Quality of Education).
In the classroom, adaptive teaching is about teachers responding in the moment (e.g. during the lesson) or later (e.g. in a future lesson), to information they obtain about students’ learning. Teachers typically obtain this information through activities designed to check for students’ understanding, such as whole-class questioning and moving around the classroom, for example to do ‘live’ marking – checking for understanding in class is clearly crucial in adaptive teaching. But planning plays its part, too, because teachers may need to plan adaptations to their teaching as a result of the information they have gleaned about students’ learning – they may, for example, plan to reteach something that they realise students haven’t understood, or understood well enough.
Adaptive teaching matters because it is integral to good teaching. Indeed, you could say that ‘adaptive teaching’ is just ‘teaching’ – of course teachers will check that students have understood, they will support those that need it and they will clarify and reteach as they go, because that’s just teaching, isn’t it? But the difference between the workload-heavy routines of a culture of ‘differentiation’ and the workload-lighter routines of a culture of adaptive teaching are important to keep in mind.
That distinction should also help us with what adaptive teaching is not: it is not teachers spending hours and hours on the internet finding amazing images that a class may look at for 20 seconds; it is not designing multiple different activities for most or every lesson; it is not framing learning intentions in terms of what all, most, and some students should be able to do; and it is not differentiating by outcome – I will teach all of my students x and y and z, and I will expect the high-flyers to get x, y and z, but I’ll be happy with the low-flyers getting just x. Adaptive teaching aims to help every student to be the best they can be, but, crucially, it also recognises that teachers are entitled to a life beyond their very important job. I wholly recommend it.
