: Adaptive teaching in practice: Using the EEF’s Check. Adapt. tool to develop novice maths teachers’ understanding of adaptive teaching How Maths leaders and trainee teachers can used the EEF’s Check. Adapt practitioner tool.

On our initial teacher training programme, we have four weeks of Intensive Training and Practice (ITAP) across the year. These weeks are designed to accelerate professional development through highly focused opportunities to build and refine core pedagogical skills. Through a combination of expert input, observation, deliberate practice and feedback, novice teachers are supported to bridge theory and practice and grow in confidence.

Responsive adaptive teaching is the focus for our fourth and final ITAP week, which takes place in April. At the end of the week, I caught up with our maths subject lead – Kylie Williams and three of our trainee maths teachers, Amelia, Sam and Zoe, to find out how they had used the EEF’s Check. Adapt practitioner tool at different stages during the week.

Framing the tool with a maths lens

The EEF tool provides a menu of general approaches to move learning forward based on pupil understanding, however for novice teachers, ​‘general’ can often feel abstract. To bridge this gap, at the start of the week Kylie paired the EEF tool with some additional reading, examples from her own practice and observations of colleagues to provide concrete strategies specific to the maths classroom. Using the tool during their observations of expert colleagues enabled to better understand the decision drivers underpinning experienced teachers’ practice. The trainees then collaboratively planned their own lessons, discussing and debating each element of the tool to ensure that adaptive teaching was embedded into their thinking before they even stepped into the classroom.

Check

The trainees focused on using multiple-choice diagnostic questions with each incorrect answer linked to a specific possible misconception, enabling them to reveal exactly where some pupils were getting stuck. Using mini whiteboards allowed them to quickly scan the room to gather a range of responses. They then wrote various pupil answers on the main board to spark a class discussion, asking: ​“Who thinks this one is correct? Why?”, supporting pupils to realise their own mistakes through reasoning rather than just being told the right answer.

One of the most significant takeaways from the week for the trainees was concept of the ​‘80/40 rule’. While the EEF tool uses categories like ​‘most understand’ or ​‘some are unsure’, as novice teachers they found it helpful to quantify these. They used 80% and 40% as thresholds to decide which of the adaptive responses would be most suitable, for example whether they would pause and fix for the whole class, scaffold for some, or use flexible grouping for more targeted intervention.

Adapt

Once the level of understanding in the class was gauged, the trainees then practised deploying some of the adaptive response strategies suggested in the EEF tool.

Scaffolding: providing an extra resource with modelled answers, which allowed pupils to see the steps required for a calculation before moving onto progressively more difficult, independent tasks.
Reteaching, not repeating: Planning beforehand how they would reteach in a different way if the first explanation failed, rather than simply repeating the same words.
Flexible grouping: Moving pupils around to provide additional support for a small number of struggling pupils.

Final reflections

While our trainee teachers have been learning about many of these adaptive teaching strategies throughout the year, seeing them synthesised into a single, research-informed framework and using this in their lesson planning has made the ​‘why’ and ​‘how’ of adaptive teaching much more visible, and filtering this through a subject-specific lens provided a powerful way to turn theory into practical classroom success.

Reference

Teacher feedback: Check. Adapt. – Practitioner Tool | Education Endowment Foundation