Adaptive Teaching
Adaptive teaching is an evolution of differentiation that focuses on the entire class while still responding to individual student needs. It involves knowing your pupils’ prior levels of attainment and providing targeted support.
Over the past few years, ‘differentiation’ has become an increasingly unpopular term in teaching. Most likely, it was an unintended consequence of an accountability system that incentivised teachers to ‘prove’ they were differentiating by generating multiple worksheets or by organising mini-lessons for different groups.
If ‘differentiation’ comes with too much baggage, it may be timely to move forward with new terminology and ideas. The term ‘adaptive teaching’, especially as set out in the Early Career Framework, resets our expectations about what it means to differentiate, and it offers a more helpful and practical model.
The below details different ideas for adaptive teaching in various subjects.
What is the difference between differentiation and adaptive teaching?
Traditional differentiation usually refers to planning different activities for different groups or individual students, depending on their attainment levels. It also refers to the action you take to remove barriers to learning. Adaptive teaching is where you focus on the class as a whole.
English
Maths
Science
History
Geography
Art and DT
Music
PE
MFL
How parents and carers can support Adaptive Teaching at home:
EYFS
• Encourage your child to be independent at home and learn how to dress themselves and go to the toilet independently
• Share stories and poems at home
• Sing songs and play games together
• Practise counting in everyday situations
• When you’re out and about look out for a discuss numbers, letters and shapes in the environment
• Visit libraries, museums and galleries
• Involve your child in everyday tasks such as writing shopping lists, paying for items, laying the table and pairing socks
• Talk to your child about things they have done at school, but also about things they remember doing at pre-school, nursery, at the childminder or at home.
KS1/KS2
• Help your child complete homework
• Encourage reading as a part of your family life
• Practise times tables using TT Rockstars or other games
• Be out in nature and observe the world
• Visit libraries, museums and galleries
• Talk to your child about things they have done at school but also practice their recall of things they did at the weekend, last week or even last year.
• Build writing into your everyday life. Writing diaries, lists and stories.
• Develop resilience and learning from mistakes.