Adaptive teaching can prove tricky to pin down. Most teachers welcome it. The phrase is now familiar in staff rooms and inspection reports alike, but I’m repeatedly experiencing a different understanding from school to school, and in some cases, from teacher to teacher.
A shared and sound understanding of adaptive teaching matters. If we don’t define it well and think hard about how it applies to busy classrooms, its promise will wilt and people will simply dismiss it as a buzzword and move on.
As inclusive classrooms are prioritised, too many muddled interpretations will mean that teachers may ignore its promise.
Adaptive teaching: a heritage
Adaptive teaching is not a new idea or way to describe teaching. In the 1970s, researchers Snow and Cronbach explored how learners’ differences interact with teaching. Later on, Lyn Corno described adaptive teaching as arranging teaching to fit learners’ individual differences, helpfully describing micro-adaptations and macro-adaptations.
In the formative assessment tradition, Wiliam and Black stated that teaching should be “contingent on what students have learnt” and make “adjustments to our teaching to better meet our students’ learning needs". This effectively characterise adaptive teaching. Some of these judgments and adaptations have to improvised in the moment, but many can be anticipated and well planned as formative assessment points for a given lesson.
We anticipate what pupils have learnt and we make predictions and plans. Then good formative assessment is how we find out whether it was right. We adapt in response to those assessments.
The 3As – Anticipate, Adapt, Assess
Here I should own a shift in my own thinking. When I first set out the 3As – Anticipate, Adapt, Assess – in my attempt to define adaptive teaching, I mapped them onto the ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ of teaching.
It was tidy and memorable; however, I now think, it wasn't quite right.
The problem is time: assessment does not wait politely until the end of a topic. Placed ‘after’, adaptation becomes a reaction to last week’s lesson, rather than an actual response to this moment. Placed before assessment, adaptation means adjusting our teaching before we know what pupils have learnt.
So, the order has changed: it is now Anticipate, Assess, Adapt. Anticipation happens before the lesson; it is in the discipline of lesson planning and curriculum development. Assessment and adaptation then work together, in a tight loop, during the lesson (particularly what Black and Wiliam call ‘moments of contingency’).
The 3As in action
Anticipate. Drawing on deep knowledge of the curriculum and our pupils, we predict where learning is likely to fail: such as patchy prior knowledge, unfamiliar vocabulary, common misconceptions etc. Then we plan the response, from a quick pre-test to a writing frame kept ready.
Assess. In the lesson, we gather evidence of learning as it happens: such as targeted questioning, mini-whiteboards, a hinge question, or simply circulating and listening with purpose.
Adapt. Then we respond, often with micro-adaptations: such as a re-explanation, an extra worked example, a brief regrouping, or a scaffold added and later removed.
Take a Year 8 history lesson on the causes of the First World War. The teacher pre-teaches ‘alliance’ and ‘militarism’, knowing they will prove pivotal knowledge. What they don’t predict is pupils freezing when asked to start their extended answer. Hearing the hesitation, the teacher models an opening sentence aloud, before releasing pupils to write independently. The teacher’s anticipation and quick assessment made space for the improvisation.
The best in-the-moment decisions and adaptations are rarely spontaneous. They draw on thinking done beforehand: such as which idea will trip pupils up, which example will clarify, or which question will expose a shaky grasp of the curriculum.
The 3As isn't a tidy, neat sequence that can be easily scripted. The classroom is too complex for that. Teaching is tricky and requires expert judgment. But I think the 3As model, unpacked clearly, can do a good job of a clear, shared model to help understand and better define adaptive teaching.
Neither script nor instinct
Adaptive teaching cannot be reduced to a checklist, but nor can it be left to instinct enacted by expect teachers alone. Treat it as a script and we stunt teacher responsiveness, but treat it as pure instinct or 'natural' improvisation and we leave too much to chance.
The 3As framework is an attempt to hold both together. It took me a little time to get the timing right. But I’d claim this is what effective teachers do: they adapt in the face of new information.
This December, as a Christmas treat (!), I am running a Teachology Masterclass on the crucial theme of 'Literacy and SEND'. It explores why literacy is a crucial for any inclusion strategy. The day breaks down practical strategies for supporting struggling readers and writers, whether it is complex reading or extended writing. Senior leaders and middle leaders, along with experienced teachers, would find this training helpful. It is live in Birmingham on the 4th December AND it has an online (highly interactive) option too. FIND OUT MORE HERE.
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