Rolling out professional development on adaptive teaching across a trust is ambitious but when done well can create strong foundations for high-quality, inclusive teaching.
Laura Atkinson is School Improvement Lead at Hales Valley Trust, a trust of seven primary schools.
Last year, they put one leader from each school on our Adaptive Teaching: Train the trainer programme. The train-the-trainer model works by training one or more leaders in a setting on adaptive teaching so that they have the skills and confidence to train and develop their colleagues.
Laura led the trust-wide implementation of the programme. She supported the leaders to reflect on and translate what they learned into a strategy to strengthen classroom practice, leadership capacity and pupil outcomes across all seven schools.
Here’s three principles that underpinned the trust’s approach.
1. Building a shared vision for inclusive, high-quality teaching
The trust’s aim is for teachers in every classroom to provide consistently high-quality, inclusive teaching. They want every teacher to be equipped with the knowledge, professional judgement and expertise to respond effectively to pupils' needs.
“Adaptive teaching is fundamental to high-quality inclusive teaching and an essential part of expert classroom practice,” Laura says. “We understand how important the quality of teachers' in-the-moment decision-making is and the impact it can have on how successfully pupils access, engage with and succeed within the curriculum.”
Supporting teachers to be responsive to barriers to learning using an adaptive teaching approach allows more pupils to access the same curriculum. “We want to develop teachers to have the confidence and depth of knowledge to be able to make those responsive decisions in the moment to remove barriers to learning while maintaining high expectations for every pupil. I think it’s quite a difficult and brave thing to do.”
She recognises how an evidence-informed approach is crucial to this: “Ultimately, we want to build expert teachers whose professional judgement is underpinned by evidence-informed knowledge, a wealth of pedagogical expertise and a deep understanding of how pupils learn”.
With a clear aim, she and the school leaders could focus on what inclusive teaching looks like in practice and how to deliver this professional development to colleagues across the trust.
2. Empowering staff through tailored, evidence-informed development
“What's quite exciting about the way we've approached this is that every teacher and leader across the trust is going to have this shared understanding of adaptive teaching,” Laura says. In the past, there were gaps in teachers and leaders’ knowledge and understanding of what adaptive teaching meant. Training all staff on adaptive teaching fills this gap.
“Our priority was to establish a shared language, expectations and a common understanding of what effective adaptive teaching looks like across every school in our trust.”
The trust appreciated the freedom to tailor the professional development for their context. “What we particularly valued about the Adaptive Teaching programme from Ambition is that it gave us ownership to design training that reflected our own context while being firmly rooted in research. It doesn’t prescribe a single approach.”
It’s enabled them to build adaptive teaching into existing opportunities for professional development: “Adaptive teaching has become a unifying thread that runs through our wider professional development strategy, instructional coaching, teacher walk-throughs and ongoing conversations.”
Laura describes how teachers record their lessons to watch back with their coach. “There might have been a moment in a lesson where an adaptive teaching approach was really impactful. We might say, ‘talk to me about the impact that your adaptive teaching had in this moment’. Or we can challenge what other adaptive teaching approaches might have been useful at this point. With this video-supported coaching we're enabling our staff to strengthen their reflection and analyse the impact of their instructional decisions. I think that's going to be really crucial for helping them develop their adaptive teaching expertise over time.”
The trust is keen for their approach to be rooted in evidence to allow them to see the impact of adaptive teaching and be able to measure its success. This involves developing an evidence base, Laura says, “to gather great examples of effective adaptive practice across the trust. It’s going to enable leaders to identify emerging strengths, refine implementation and sustain improvement over time. As part of this, we're going to continue to bring the leaders who did the programme back together.”
Laura sees their trust-wide ongoing training on adaptive teaching as being “a central part” of their long-term strategy for how they will develop new and proficient teachers into expert teachers.
3. Creating sustainable improvement through ongoing practice
Laura says the most important part of the trust’s experiences with adaptive teaching so far as been “the shift in knowledge and professional understanding around adaptive teaching. Leaders and teachers now have a much clearer understanding of the principles underpinning adaptive teaching and what high-quality adaptive practice looks like in the classroom.”
She notes that adaptive teaching isn’t a set of tools to be applied in isolation or a quick-fix solution. “It’s not about it being this resource or this tool, because it's not about that at all. Adaptive teaching is not a collection of disconnected strategies or resources. It's absolutely underpinned by secure curriculum knowledge, deep pedagogical understanding and continual professional judgement informed by pupils’ needs.”
She continues, “it was important to understand the principles of research behind it, which Ambition always do. That’s been the biggest part for us really. The programme has provided us with a strong evidence-informed foundation on which to build our implementation. It’s part of everything we do day in, day out.”
“We've been going in to visit lessons as part of our implementation and we’re already seeing increasingly purposeful examples of adaptive practice in classrooms. Does it still need refining? Absolutely. But that’s exactly what we would expect at this stage. We want our staff to continue to keep going back, retrieving and understanding the principles and improving through deliberate practice and ongoing conversations.”
She acknowledges that developing adaptive teaching expertise is not about short-term measures but long-term sustained implementation. “We are on our journey,” she says. “We know there is more work ahead, but we have established strong foundations and a shared direction to strengthen teaching across every school in our trust. We’re excited for where this is going to go.”
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