“Adaptive teaching is empowering the students with everything they need,” says Natasha Merola, who’s seen first-hand how inclusive teaching strategies make a difference in the classroom.
Natasha plays a key role in embedding adaptive teaching in her school, Milton Keynes Academy. For Natasha, an adaptive teaching approach centres on “anticipating the barriers to student learning, whether they have a special educational need or disability or not”.
How one school is building adaptive teaching into every classroom
Empowering teachers to respond to pupil needs has been at the core of the school’s implementation of adaptive teaching.
"Staff need to feel empowered to be able to make the adaptations in the lesson, and that might be within behaviour systems in the school or subject knowledge-wise,” Natasha says.
One example is helping staff understand how adaptive teaching differs from the concept of differentiation. “It’s about breaking down the barrier of learning styles and replacing that with the knowledge of how students learn and cognitive science.”
Adaptive teaching can support inclusion aims in mainstream schools. As part of these aims, Natasha realised the need to break down the barrier between teaching and learning and inclusion, “threading them together so staff don't see them as two separate entities.”
Thanks to collaboration on staff development between transition teacher Natasha and the senior leadership team, the school now has a set of strategies to ultimately support pupils.
“It enables quality-first teaching to happen in every single classroom,” Natasha says. She calls these strategies “micro expectations”. Everything from using mini whiteboards in class to adopting a shared language helps embed a consistency that both pupils and teachers can rely on.
“Within our core steps, we've got chunking, modelling, checks for understanding, and different strategies to support learning behaviours. And we've made those part of our teaching and learning policy. So whether you're a novice teacher or an experienced teacher, students are going to be exposed to that every lesson.”
“That idea of consistency and doing the same things all the time has been a really important part of it.”
Supporting staff to support pupils
Implementing any new approach to teaching and learning strategy is a journey. “Challenges that we found are staff buy-in and motivation to the changes, especially where we've had some educators who bring prior knowledge of differentiation and different learning styles” Natasha says.
Natasha overcomes this through approaches such as knowledge sharing, embedding and practising, instructional coaching and drop-ins. “Now staff have seen the changes, and they're more inclined to use them. We try to explain to the students as well to get them to understand how they're learning and why we're doing what we're doing."
With the right support, teachers now feel empowered to respond in real time to pupils’ needs. Strategies they use include low-stakes quizzes, mini whiteboards and targeted questioning to diagnose and address learning gaps as they arise.
Another responsive approach teachers can use in the classroom is scaffolding. “I envision it as a pyramid,” Natasha says.
“The aim of the lesson is the tip of the pyramid for all learners, so how do we get to that moment? If we've got the foundation and take the scaffold away, the pyramid will still be there. But if we have the tip with the scaffold below, when we take it away, or we take the worked examples away, for example, and it comes crumbling down, that isn't great adaptive teaching.
“Adaptive teaching is empowering the students with everything they need through formative assessment, through scaffolds, through modelling and such, to get them to that tip of the pyramid."
“If adaptive teaching is happening, it means that students have built their self-esteem through the strategies to be able to apply the knowledge in context within their subject,” says Natasha.
Natasha completed Ambition’s Adaptive Teaching: Train the trainer programme, which is designed to help school leaders embed this approach in their own setting.
Could an adaptive teaching approach in your school help staff better meet the diverse needs of all pupils? Find out more on the programme page.
