There can be a lot of assumptions around language in teaching. We often assume that everyone knows what we mean, but I’ve experienced first-hand feeling lost in the foreign language of acronyms and education speak in meetings and training.
Adaptive teaching, for example, is a relatively new term but a very old concept. This idea of adapting lessons to be accessible for all children has been a focus for years but the approach has changed.
Initially, differentiation was big on difference, with teachers producing different resources for different children on different coloured paper, for example. We are now looking at adaptations and tweaks to lessons, meaning less workload for the teacher but still a big difference in the accessibility of the lesson.
A key focus for me over the past 12 months has been embedding adaptive teaching into the ethos and practice of my school.
My starting point was challenging the assumption that every member of staff was on my wavelength about adaptive teaching, and instead to make sure that they understood the terms and acronyms being used.
I looked at the information I am sharing with staff on the special educational needs and disabilities register and within one-page profiles. I was using terms like “scaffold”, “interleaving learning” and “facilitated group work”, and assuming all teachers knew these terms and how to apply them.
I decided to take away the need for staff to have to ask if they weren’t sure and explain everything from scratch. There was a risk here of staff feeling patronised, of course. To overcome this, I shared the challenges I had had with language at the start of my teaching career and, as we have early career teachers in each year, I will always break down acronyms as we go as I want to remove as many barriers for staff as possible.
To do this, I created a booklet breaking down every strategy I talk about, and each is colour-coded by the area of need it may best support.
For example, chunking; 081127882 is a hard number to remember. If you chunk the number into 081 127 882, it’s easier. Cutting large bits of information into smaller pieces helps us to understand and retain them. Our short-term memory is thought to be able to hold, on average, four pieces of information at a time.
In addition, by breaking down the strategies into colour-coded sections, staff can look for suggestions for children in their class with particular needs.
It also means that if staff come across an unfamiliar strategy being referenced within pupil information, it is simple for them to find a quick, easy-to-read explanation of how it can be used.
How-to booklet to help adaptive teaching
The booklet has been introduced to staff in CPD sessions and this has been followed up with learning walks, team teaching and general conversations.
Staff have fed back that they have been helpful, particularly the colour-coded sections allowing them to easily find an area of need and strategies they can use immediately.
Some strategies within the booklet require some pre-lesson preparation but many can be done within the lesson without any pre-planning or preparation. For example, a visual task plan would need to be prepared prior to the lesson whereas mind mapping to plan ideas could be something incorporated into the lesson on the spot.
Adaptive teaching is imperative for all children to be able to access all lessons equally. By not purposely adapting our teaching, we may accidentally exclude children. But it does not need heavily differentiated resources. Sometimes in the world of adaptive teaching, less is more.
Laura Chamberlain is Sendco at Shireland CBSO Academy
For the latest research, pedagogy and practical classroom advice delivered directly to your inbox every week, sign up to our Teaching Essentials newsletter
