Research School Network: Revisiting RADAAR: exemplification By Dr Niki Kaiser, Director of Norfolk Research School
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Revisiting RADAAR: exemplification
By Dr Niki Kaiser, Director of Norfolk Research School
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Recently, work and discussion around adaptive teaching has prompted me to revisit RADAAR, a framework I developed while working as Science Content Specialist at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).
I originally developed the framework to help teachers translate the first recommendation of the EEF’s Improving Secondary Science guidance into practice: identifying what pupils already know, anticipating misconceptions and other barriers to learning, finding out what pupils actually think, responding appropriately, and then checking what has changed.
Looking at it again now, I’m struck by how closely that process embodies the spirit of adaptive teaching.
Supporting busy teachers to think on their feet
At its heart, RADAAR asks teachers not simply to wait until pupils struggle before trying to uncover what the problem is. Teachers are busy. They have full days, and might teach 150 different pupils over the course of one of them. We cannot possibly anticipate everything, but researching and anticipating likely differences in prior knowledge, understanding, and barriers to learning can make us much better prepared to respond when we meet the pupils in front of us.
This prior thinking can help reduce the cognitive load on teachers in the moment. We’ll be better placed to diagnose what is actually happening and adapt our teaching appropriately if we have already considered what might happen (and how we might adapt our approach) beforehand.
A cyclical process
Anticipation is only the beginning. We then need to diagnose what these pupils actually know and understand, and address what we find. And that still isn’t the end of the story, because unless we then assess understanding in some way, we won’t know what pupils have actually understood from what we have taught.
Often, it isn’t quite what we thought it was. And when it isn’t, we need to rethink, readapt and respond again. This cyclical process is central to RADAAR.
Put like that, the framework has a great deal in common with adaptive teaching: strong knowledge of likely starting points and barriers; eliciting evidence of pupils’ current understanding; responding to that evidence; and continually checking the impact of those responses.
I’m going to come back to that relationship in another post — to ask what I would retain, what I might change, and whether RADAAR can provide a useful practical structure for thinking about adaptive teaching without reducing it to differentiation-by-worksheet.
But before I do, I wanted to gather together some of the exemplification that has built up around RADAAR over the years. It has been adapted and used in science departments, teacher education, other curriculum subjects and beyond the UK, but some of this can be surprisingly difficult to track down.
The framework itself and supporting exemplification
The framework was introduced in this blog which introduced the three-stage process:
Research & Anticipate: What does the research tell us about the ideas pupils are likely to bring with them? What prior knowledge will they need? What misconceptions, difficulties with language or other barriers might we anticipate?
Diagnose & Address: How can we find out what these pupils currently understand? And how should our teaching respond to what we discover?
Assess & Review: How will we find out whether pupils’ thinking has changed? What might need revisiting, and what should influence our future planning?
Accompanying resources were introduced here: a set of resources designed to support teachers in putting the approach into practice. These now sit within the EEF’s Improving Secondary Science resources:
The original RADAAR Planning Logic diagram can be found here.
There is an editable RADAAR planning template here.
RADAAR in practice: these worked examples show how the process might look when applied.
There is a digestion example, which considers pupils’ existing ideas, diagnostic questions, models and links to later learning.
Dr Jo Castelino discusses her teaching of enzymes, including anticipated misconceptions, the use of models and subsequent checking of pupils’ understanding.
Carole Kenrick discusses forces, including the important distinction between a pupil making a mistake and holding an underlying misconception.
Amanda Clegg and Karen Collins look at mathematics in science, demonstrating how the same thinking can help identify and address difficulties pupils encounter when mathematical ideas are used in a science context.
RADAAR in teacher development to move conversations away from simply discussing the activities that might happen in an individual lesson and towards much richer discussion of curriculum, pupils’ prior knowledge, misconceptions and how learning would be assessed, as exemplified by Thandi Banda, mentor to Robert Howell, as part of the EEF’s Voices from the Classroom series.
Beyond science
Although RADAAR grew out of work around the EEF’s Improving Secondary Science guidance, I have always thought that its underlying logic has much wider applicability.
A particularly good example comes from the Geographical Association, which uses the three RADAAR stages in its material for trainee and early-career geography teachers on addressing misconceptions in geography.
An even more substantial adaptation can be found in work from St Bart’s/BTSA, where RADAAR was adapted to support the teaching of primary English grammar, punctuation and vocabulary. Their English RADAAR tool applies the same process of researching and anticipating difficulties, diagnosing and addressing them, and assessing and reviewing pupils’ learning across Years 1 – 6.
For me, this is particularly interesting. RADAAR started in science because that was the problem I was working on at the time. But there is nothing inherently scientific about the central questions:
What do pupils need to know already?
What are they likely to find difficult?
What ideas or misunderstandings might they bring with them?
How will I find out what these pupils currently understand?
How should I adapt my teaching in response?
And how will I know whether that response has worked?
