This month, we’ve been working with school leaders across Devon on a two-day programme exploring adaptive teaching.
Over the two days, we’ve looked at the evidence base, unpicked what we mean by adaptive teaching, explored tools to help leaders reflect on current practice, considered implementation challenges, and thought about how we might monitor and evaluate our approaches.
As with many areas of education, the more we’ve discussed adaptive teaching, the more we’ve been reminded that the details matter.
A guiding principle?
One principle in particular has generated lots of discussion, which we’ve called, “Remove the barrier, preserve the thinking”.
In other words, adaptations should help pupils access learning without removing the cognitive challenge that makes learning possible in the first place.
This can be easier said than done. When a pupil is struggling, our instinct is often to make the task easier. However, in doing so we risk adapting to the point that pupils are no longer grappling with the important ideas or doing the hard thinking that supports learning.
Consider these two situations.
In the first example, the teacher asks the pupils to explain their understanding verbally first. This helps the teacher identify whether the barrier is conceptual understanding or the act of writing itself. The pupils are then encouraged to write down what they have just explained.
In the second example, the teacher simply tells the pupils to write a sentence instead of a paragraph.
The difference is subtle but important.
The first adaptation temporarily removes a potential barrier while preserving the intellectual work. The second seems to sidestep the challenge altogether and leaves the original barrier unexplored.
‘Least help first’ adaptations
This idea aligns with a sub-point from Recommendation 2 of the EEF’s Deployment of Teaching Assistants guidance report: “Ensure pupils have the opportunity to attempt tasks independently before intervening appropriately when they can’t proceed.” Rather than immediately providing the most intensive adaptation, we can think carefully about the minimum level of support needed to help pupils engage successfully with the learning. In other words, think about ‘least help first’ adaptations.
A prompt might be enough. A reminder of prior learning might help. A sentence starter, model or scaffold may be appropriate. The key question is always: Does this adaptation help pupils think, or does it replace the thinking for them? This question is also a warning not to allow our collective focus on adaptive teaching to drive unintentionally harmful practices which remove hard thinking about the things we want pupils to learn.
Make approaches to adaptive teaching explicit
Interestingly, recent evidence suggests that while many teachers are already engaging in adaptive teaching far more than they realise, there is value in making it even more explicit:
“While teachers may feel they need to take on additional tasks when asked to customise their teaching, this review demonstrates that many adaptive teaching practices are already embedded in their work. Making these practices explicit can increase their frequency and show that implementing them is often more achievable than it may seem.” Bach, Hofer and Bichler (2025)
This finding has resonated strongly during our programme. Some of the most valuable discussions have involved teachers reflecting on examples and non-examples of adaptation and considering the possible consequences of different responses.
Providing structured opportunities for this kind of professional reflection matters. It helps teachers sharpen their decision-making and develop a shared understanding of what effective adaptation looks like.
The EEF’s Check.Adapt resource is a useful starting point, offering a range of prompts to encourage teachers to think about possible adaptations as well as a practical decision-making framework.
Likewise, this excellent Clips from the Classroom video from Blackpool Research School on adaptive teaching in mathematics provides a powerful example of several ways in which a might adapt instruction while keeping pupils firmly engaged in the thinking.
As interest in adaptive teaching continues to grow, perhaps this is a principle worth keeping in mind: remove the barrier, preserve the thinking.
Because the goal of adaptation is not to make learning easier. It is to make hard thinking possible for more pupils.
Bach, K.M., Hofer, S.I. and Bichler, S. (2025) Adaptive learning, instruction, and teaching in schools: Unraveling context, sources, implementation, and goals in a systematic review. Learning and Individual Differences, 124, 102781. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lind…
