Adaptive teaching: From paper to practice
7 min read
Helen Ross, Owner and Founder, Helen’s Place Education Consultancy, UK
Elizabeth Malone, Reader, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Peter Wood, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Introduction
Recently, discourse around how teachers should meet learners’ needs in the classroom has shifted (Glazzard and Green, 2022; Knapton, 2022). Previous discourse was rooted in ‘differentiation’ of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), with teachers expected to ‘know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively’ (DfE, 2021a, p. 11). However, ‘adaptive teaching’, advocated within contemporary guidelines, advocates that teachers ‘adapt… [their] teaching in a responsive way’ (DfE, 2024, p. 20) so that children’s needs are anticipated and then met within that adapted provision. This paper explores adaptive teaching, its conceptualisation and its implementation by draw
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