Reinforcing inclusion: Arts teachers’ micro-adaptations for pupils with SEND

BECCY THOMPSON, SENIOR LECTURER IN PROFESSIONAL STUDIES AND DRAMA PGCE LEAD, UNIVERSITY OF ROEHAMPTON, UK

Introduction

It is well established that students with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) face more disadvantages in school compared to their peers without such needs (Children’s Commissioner, 2022). A concurrent issue in English state schools has been the ‘downgrading’ of arts subjects, raising questions about the accessibility of the curriculum (Tambling and Bacon, 2023). In response to these two areas of concern, the qualitative researchQualitative research usually emphasises words rather than quantification in the collection and analysis of data. discussed in this article takes an aspect of a project that investigated six arts teachers’ decisions for students with SEND (Thompson, 2021) in a boys’ secondary school. One aim of the research was to determine whether and how arts teachers’ decisions reinforced the inclusionAn approach where a school aims to ensure that all children are educated together, with support for those who require it to access the full curriculum and contribute to and participate in all aspects of school life of students with SEND. Inclusion is a widely contested term but is conceived broadly here as a right to belong (Thompson, 2021). In this article, teacher-participants’ in-the-moment decision-making or ‘micro-adaptations’ (Corno, 2008) are dissected, emerging as a strategy that all participants used.

Micro-adaptations

Adaptive teaching aims to meet students’ needs by providing opportunities for all to achieve the same goals, rather than pre-planning differentiated tasks (Bromley, 2021). However, students with SEND have historically been wrongly equated with ‘low ability’ (Mazenod et al., 2019) conflicting with this core principle of adaptive teaching (Westwood, 2024). Despite this schism, adaptive teaching is now the preferred approach for supporting students with SEND, as highlighted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2020).

A growing body of literature advocates for adaptive teaching, and Corno (2008) usefully distinguishes macro- from micro-adaptations: the former relate to pre-planned tasks or curriculum; the latter refer to the decisions that teachers make ‘on the fly’, contingent on students’ needs. As students’ learning needs can be shaped by classroom context (Webster and Blatchford, 2017), it was predicted in this study that teachers would report that their interventions for students with SEND were largely spontaneous. Nonetheless, there is little written about teachers’ micro-adaptations and how these might reinforce the inclusion of students with SEND.

Noticing

One problem of studying teachers’ micro-adaptations is that they are not easily observed. Furthermore, a common feature of teacher expertise is that teachers may not consciously process their live decisions (Shavelson and Stern, 1981). The project was concerned with exploring the ‘lived experience’ of teachers and was therefore underpinned by a phenomenological approach, although this could not solve the issue of how to document teachers’ decision-making. Mason’s (2002) extensive work on noticing served to manage the aforementioned challenges, informing the choice of methods. Mason (2002) suggests that we notice things all the time, but in order to become ‘disciplined’ in their practice, teachers need to consciously mark moments to become aware of them. This can be achieved through keeping journals, observations and recording discussions with colleagues. Acknowledging that such work takes time, the data collection took place over an academic year and, informed by Mason’s suggestions, included triangulated informal observations, semi-structured interviews and stimulated recall interviews that were videoed. The methods were all employed to ‘educate awareness’ (Mason, 2002, p. 90) in participants about nuances in their practice.

Context, methods and data collection

In the school studied, the number of students with formally identified SEND was around the national average, although up to 50 per cent of students in the six classes used were included on the internal SEND register. Two teacher-participants from art, two from D&T (design and technology), one from drama and one from music were purposely chosen. Several measures were implemented to retain transparency with participants, and ethical clearance was granted by the King’s College London Ethical Committee, where the research took place (see Thompson, 2021).

Each teacher was observed and interviewed twice about the same class. The first phase of data collection involved an informal lesson observation and semi-structured interview. The second included a stimulated recall interview (SRI), which, following Peterson and Clark (1978), used recording a lesson and encouraging teachers to notice and ‘think aloud’ (p. 5) about decisions that they took.

SRIs

SRIs employ video or audio clips of an event to help participants to recollect their thinking and decision-making at the time (Malva et al., 2021). Ordinarily, a recorded observation is used by the researcher as the basis for an interview, and the interview transcription forms the data (see Malva et al., 2021). In this research, a lesson with the teacher (the same class from phase one) was filmed and teachers were interviewed immediately afterwards, alongside watching moments in the video where they interacted with students with classified SEND. The video acted as an ‘artefact’ (Hollingsworth and Clarke, 2017, p. 462), heightening teachers’ ‘sensitivity to notice’ (Mason, 2002, p. 90).

Findings and analysis

Once the interviews were transcribed, thematic memos were created, triangulated and interrogated for initial themes. Open coding (see Corbin and Strauss, 2015) was used and micro-adaptations emerged as a theme in the analysis, indicating that the teachers support the inclusion of students with SEND. There is not scope here to cover all examples of teachers’ micro-adaptations, so the remainder of the article examines two characteristics of micro-adaptive teaching according to Corno (2008): ‘Capitalising on students’ strengths’ (p. 161) and scaffoldingProgressively introducing students to new concepts to support their learning, which were found to endorse inclusive practice.

Capitalising on students’ strengths

In the data, there were various examples of teachers capitalising on the strengths of their students with SEND. This included one D&T teacher motivating a student (with speech, language and communication needs) to design a football-themed headphone stand because: ‘He loves West Ham. Everything is West Ham.’ In another instance, during the SRI, the drama teacher identified a Year 10 student (Student A, also with speech, language and communication needs) who found ‘physical body work quite difficult’ in a performance of The Tempest on which the class were working. The teacher responded to Student A’s capabilities while directing him. The following excerpt is speech taken from the filmed lesson:

Now you need to come forward, [Student A], like a monkey, eee eeee. [Student A crouches.] Ah, I quite like the crouch, yeah. So, if you first lean forward and reach towards him and then go back to the crouch – so lean towards [Student B]. [Student A does so.] Yes, yes, yes and now push back [Student B] and now say your line, [Student A].

Drama teacher

The drama teacher unpicked their decisions in the moment, explaining: ‘I grabbed onto a little squat that he did because it was his own… something he went into easily.’ By incorporating movements that Student A naturally produced, the teacher acknowledged his artistic capabilities. They used contextual knowledge that they held about Student A’s challenges with learning choreography. They also reasoned that Student A was ‘not going to forget that he crouched there, he said this line and it will be there’, and they hoped that ‘it makes things a bit clearer about the text’. Incidentally, Student A’s crouch was adopted into the final performance of The Tempest, maximising his unique approach to movement and giving this status in a public showcase.

Scaffolding

Alongside capitalising on students’ strengths, micro-adaptative teachers also, as Corno (2008) suggests, scaffold skill-based tasks, ‘strategically coaching’ (p. 170) students individually towards a common goal, increasing a sense of inclusion. For example, one of the art teachers helped Student C (with social, emotional and mental health needs) to mix the right tone of paint. Student C had created what the teacher described as a ‘horrible brown colour’. The art teacher reasoned that in the first instance they believed in ‘backing away and letting them succeed – you know – their success is more their own’. Nonetheless, they pointed out Student C in the video, saying that ‘there are occasions when I need to intervene’. When asked whether they modified instructions for Student C, the art teacher reflected:

I gesticulate more so I will make sure I’m pointing to the things I’m talking about and mix those things together. I’ll also segment it, so where I spoke to Student C at a point, where I might say “right, you add white to make it lighter and the complementary to make it darker”, we just talked about adding the white and then I said “right, do that and then give me a shout” because he’ll need that, just that, segmented.

The art teacher showed how, as Corno (2008) outlines, micro-adaptative teachers can ‘build scaffolding into activities and analyse errors and misconceptions’ (p. 166). In another class, a D&T teacher stepped in to adjust students’ sawing, picking up errors just through the ‘horrible’ sound that they were making. Crucially, the example of Student C illustrates the teacher bringing ‘students along – and, ultimately, together’ (Corno, 2008, p. 170); Student C was able to remix a more satisfactory colour and continue with his picture. It seemed that the teacher was enabling Student C to access what Corno (2008) describes as the ‘common experiences’ (p. 170) of the class (mixing the right colour) so that he was ready for the next stage of the lesson with his peers.

Further examples of micro-adaptations found in the data resonate with Hardy et al.’s (2019) findings, as teachers used a range of diagnostic tools to reinforce inclusion. This included an art teacher questioning a student to explain how he was holding his pencil when he struggled with shading. The music teacher modelled, strumming a guitar alongside students who were battling to learn chords.

Conclusion

As a small study, the findings presented are not generalisable, although they correspond with others, indicating that theoretical transferability is possible. For example, this research shares the values of current policy, such as that of the EEF (2020), advocating the importance of adaptive teaching as one aspect of effective provision for students with SEND.

In the project, themes emerged from teachers’ judgments about students with SEND, indicating that deficit thinking about their academic attainment persists. Yet the SRI helped teachers to unpick nuances in positive inclusive practice. In a post-interview discussion, one teacher said that the SRI meant ‘I could pinpoint exactly why I was doing what I was doing’. The tool encouraged teachers’ ‘sharpened sensitivity’ (Mason, 2002, p. 72), strengthening the case for research that prioritises teachers’ reflections about supporting students with SEND, which may otherwise remain hidden.