In the past when we have considered how best to teach children with special educational needs and disabilities, differentiation has often been the go-to answer.
Differentiation tends to focus on working with individuals or small groups of learners. While it can be a useful approach when understood and deployed well - for example, in special schools - when used in mainstream, it can lead to teachers juggling multiple “micro-lessons” during a class, or delegating teaching tasks to others.
Recently, however, many teachers have been considering a different approach: adaptive teaching.
This is not a novel idea. In fact, it’s integral to the Teachers’ Standards that teachers “will adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils”.
Adaptive teaching makes this requirement even more explicit, though, and arguably makes provision more inclusive in the process.
In adaptive teaching, the focus is on the whole class or groups of learners in the same classroom achieving the same learning goal.
It’s heartening to see teachers turning towards this approach. Because while differentiation has its place, it too often relies on labelling, which creates assumptions about children’s ability and, in turn, leads to assumptions about how to teach them.
How adaptive teaching helps pupils with SEND
In the past, in mainstream schools, this has led to children with SEND receiving different - and often simplified - learning experiences, which only exacerbates existing gaps in attainment.
We can’t blame teachers for this; these habits were perpetuated by lesson planning templates that were designed around meeting the needs of “most” children.
These templates often included a separate section, reminding teachers to plan something different for the children with SEND; the presumption being that this needed to be a simplified version of what the rest of the class was doing.
In practice, though, there is not much evidence to support the need for distinctive teaching approaches for children with learning difficulties. In fact, always giving these pupils work that is “simpler” leads to them feeling segregated in the classroom and their progress slowing.
Instead of identifying reasons for difference, we need to respond to individual differences. Adaptive teaching allows us to do this.
So, how can teachers begin to build this approach into their practice?
The fundamental behaviours here, according to researchers Linda Darling-Hammond and John Bransford (2005), are for teachers to see themselves as learners, to be deliberate about their practice, to understand their own metacognitive behaviours and to use adaptive problem-solving to bring greater skill to solve new, often ill-structured problems.
Ticking all of those boxes, of course, won’t be easy. So, I will also add three procedural habits, adapted from the work of researchers Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki (1986).
1. Regular and repeated engagement with variability. Teachers experience this every day, but deserve protected opportunities to practice deliberately.
2. Practise generalising knowledge to different environments or circumstances, reflecting critically with mentors and colleagues.
3. Take any opportunity to engage in professional debate, encountering varying explanations from peers and experts.
Perhaps most importantly, if we truly want to see progress in outcomes for all children and to strengthen inclusivity across schools and trusts, leaders need to recognise that training on adaptive teaching might just be the most powerful professional development out there.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
