Adaptive teaching is a key concern in the profession at the moment and it’s clearly fundamental to creating the kind of classrooms that leaders, teachers and families want. But to be truly inclusive, adaptive teaching strategies alone are not enough.
To make a significant difference, we must nurture the inclusive values, commitments and professional ethics that underpin adaptive teaching. Academics refer to these as dispositions. I like to call them inclusive mindsets. Either way, we need to see them as core competencies rather than peripheral soft skills.
Despite investment in adaptive teaching strategies, accessing the curriculum is still challenging for a significant number of children. This can leave teachers feeling demoralised.
Creating an adaptive teaching toolkit is one thing, but ensuring that it is applied consistently and effectively is another. When left unaddressed, biases about pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) can significantly lower expectations for progress.
Inclusion and adaptive teaching
Learning to teach confidently in a diverse and unpredictable environment requires incredible skill and aptitude. Knowing what to do when you’re trying to teach Katie about the French Revolution while she’s refusing to get out from under the table, for example, takes significant practice and resilience.
With so many competing priorities, it’s perhaps no wonder that leaders can neglect the building of skills and dispositions that help us to apply our knowledge of teaching for all children. But without this, techniques become mere tricks, disconnected from rich subject pedagogy and the needs of real children. As the saying goes, no strategy survives contact with reality.
The true value of developing these dispositions is in the radical influence that they have on our way of relating.
Take the idea of a commitment to equity for all students. This informs how the teacher uses their adaptive expertise, application being contingent on the belief that they can support learners that face even the most significant barriers.
Empathy is another disposition that gives teachers invaluable insight. Some may see it as an inherent personal quality, but research shows that empathy can be developed, and we know that empathic relating can have a transformational effect on relationships, which, in turn, aids learning.
Building the right mindset
Military training has long recognised the power of building dispositions such as resilience, adaptability and mindfulness in order to enable personnel to operate effectively in extreme and unpredictable situations. It happens in medicine, too, with hospitals training staff in techniques to increase compassion and self-efficacy in order to function better in difficult, high-stakes surroundings.
Currently teachers’ professional development focuses heavily on what they do and not so much on how they feel, or how children respond. I’d like to see CPD (for both pre-service and in-service teachers) explore applying these dispositions in situ to a wide variety of learners with different start points.
Increases in child poverty, SEND, emotional ill-health and social isolation - in addition to the usual high-stakes testing - now seriously impact our classroom environments.
The way that we train and develop teachers needs to prioritise, embrace and even champion complexity. New dispositions, like any habit, take time to develop, but they are critical to effective and inclusive teaching.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
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