Research School Network: Beyond the toolkit Building the professional practice of adaptive teaching

Building the professional practice of adaptive teaching

Adaptive teaching sounds simple. If pupils haven’t learned what we have taught, we adapt our teaching.

But knowing what to adapt, when to adapt it, and how to adapt it without lowering expectations is considerably harder.

The challenge isn’t a lack of strategies. Most teachers have a repertoire of scaffolds, questioning techniques, modelling approaches and explanations they can draw upon. The harder problem is knowing which adaptation is appropriate, for which pupil, at which point in the lesson, and then judging whether it has worked.

As such, adaptive teaching is fundamentally about professional judgement and so professional development in adaptive teaching needs to equip teachers, not just with strategies for the classroom, but with a way of thinking that is complex and requires confidence.

Last week, we launched our CPD model for the year with a key message: adaptive teaching isn’t about creating increasingly elaborate individualised provision. Long gone are the ​‘differentiation days’ when students with additional needs often had limited access to a rich curriculum or opportunities to think hard. The days when the majority of lesson planning time involved creating and printing a range of different worksheets for different groups of students. Although these days are, thankfully, a distant memory for most of us, there is a risk that the current conversations around inclusion might mutate into misconceptions in classroom practice that put limitations back onto the students who most need our ambition. So clarity of what adaptive teaching looks like, aligned with a EEF’s most recent guide to inclusive teaching, is crucial to successful implementation through our professional development programme.

As a Research School, our professional development infrastructure is well-developed and informed by the ​‘Effective Professional Development’ guidance. We have dedicated weekly CPD time in which to build staff knowledge, an embedded culture of deliberate practice that provides opportunities to model techniques and a paired coaching model that ensures staff are regularly provided with feedback. However, we realised that having this strong CPD architecture was necessary, but not sufficient.

By its very nature, adaptive teaching is multifaceted because the decisions teachers make about adapting their practice will be based on the endless eventualities that play out in classrooms every day. We could not whittle it down to six, neatly packaged, half-termly strategies. Whilst a teacher in one classroom might identify that a student is struggling to access the independent practice and decide to provide a temporary writing scaffold, the teacher next door might have noticed a misconception in prior knowledge and address it with a quick non-example. Both are examples of adaptive practice but both involve completely different strategies. How do we develop techniques – a key principle of effective PD – when there are so many techniques that a teacher might need to employ to make the learning accessible?

This is how we arrived at ​‘The MCA Way Playbook’ and the ​‘MCA Way Professional Practice Guide’. The playbook describes the what, why and how of ten core teaching practices, ranging from effective explanations to feedback. Each practice also has an adaptive practice section with strategies and scaffolds that support it. These act as signposts to the corresponding professional practice guide where the strategies and scaffolds are further defined and exemplified.

Through these resources, staff can build clear mental models of effective practice whilst the core learning remains the same: adaptive teaching isn’t sentence stems, or worked examples, or think alouds per se. Adaptive practice is systematic checking for understanding, followed by effective adaptation, whatever that may be.

Therefore, the playbook establishes a shared conception of high-quality teaching. It’s not a script, a checklist, or a prescription for every lesson. For each practice, we have made explicit the adaptations that teachers might consider when evidence from pupils suggests that the current approach isn’t working for them. Our professional development model can then focus on the professional judgements, including curriculum knowledge and knowledge of the students, that underpin this consideration.

Fundamental to this process is systematic checking for understanding. Checking for understanding is the bridge between instruction and adaptation. Without it, adaptive practice cannot happen. Without it, adaptive teaching can easily become: ​“I know this pupil struggles, so I’ll give them a scaffold.” With it, adaptive teaching becomes: ​“I’ve gathered evidence that this pupil hasn’t understood X. What is preventing them from accessing the task, and what adaptation is most likely to address that?” That shifts the conversation from labelling pupils to responding to evidence. As a result, our CPD will begin by exploring effective strategies to systematically check for understanding.

As well as strengthening our PD architecture with resources, we have also thought carefully about the final principle from the Effective Professional Development guidance: implement professional development with care, taking into consideration the context and needs of the school. Schools are busy, cognitively overloading places. We want to ensure that all of our systems are aligned so that what gets developed is what gets noticed. Adaptive and inclusive teaching is at the core of our academy improvement plan. Our quality assurance model is coherently aligned with our adaptive teaching priority and middle leaders will drive the implementation at a departmental level. They aren’t simply asking ​‘Is adaptive teaching happening?’ Likewise, they aren’t going in with a checklist looking for scaffolds. Instead, they are asking ​“Are teachers making effective adaptations in response to evidence of pupils’ learning?” This acknowledges that the adaptations will and should be different in each classroom because they are responsive to that student at that moment.

Our experience this year has reinforced something fundamental about professional development. Effective PD isn’t simply about choosing the right content or delivering high-quality training. It is about creating the conditions in which teachers can develop, practise and sustain increasingly sophisticated professional practice.

For us, adaptive teaching has therefore become more than the theme of this year’s CPD. It has become a test of our implementation model.

Can we translate evidence into a shared conception of practice? 

• Can we give teachers the knowledge and tools to enact it? 
• Can we create opportunities for deliberate practice and feedback? 
• Can we support professional judgement rather than prescribe decisions? 
• Can our leadership processes reinforce rather than compete with professional learning?
  
  These questions may ultimately be more important than the particular adaptive strategies we choose to teach.