Beyond the Nando's chilli challenge

Moving to adaptive teaching

Quite a few years ago, I was teaching an art lesson to a mixed group of Key Stage 3 pupils in a PRU. These were children who had already been told, through their experiences,, that they weren’t good in school and they weren’t good at learning. They weren’t really very good at much.

I’d planned the lesson carefully. I expected ALL children (the red group, the baseline, to be able to do one thing). The MOST children (the amber, the middle ability ), to do a bit more. And then SOME (the green extension activity), to stretch a little further. This is differentiation in a nutshell. The three tier, same set of assumptions and three ceilings. All neatly colour-coded for children to realise which set they belonged to and how much you thought they could do.

The lesson I was teaching was on Greek art. Those who know me, know that I am not an art teacher so had to teach myself before the children. I was teaching about the meander pattern. The , angular, repeating motif that runs along the edges of ancient pottery and architecture, named after the winding River Meander in Turkey. I’d prepared my resources, my examples, my three levels of task. I even found out about the River Meander which I had no idea about before I was told that was what I was teaching. Despite my careful planning, one of the boys in class started talking about Marvel.

Now, in the old model, the differentiation model, that’s off-task. That’s a behaviour issue. That’s a child who isn’t listening. I jumped on this opportunity. I probably know more about Marvel then I do about Greek gods. The mythology woven through the characters, the patterns on Thor’s armour. He was making connections that my lesson plan hadn’t anticipated, because my lesson plan was built around what I expected children to do, not around who they actually were.

In response, my careful planned lesson changed. The ambition for learning didn’t though. I picked up what he’d given me and I ran with it. We looked at Greek patterns in superhero costume design. We talked about why ancient symbols keep showing up in modern storytelling. The energy in the room shifted, I valued what they were saying and found a way to incorporate it. The quiet girl who never volunteered anything said, “Dove (previous surname that kids often call me), is that why Wonder Woman has that headband thing?” . We moved beyond the three colour-coded Nando chill tiers, to following a different thread.

For a long time in English education, differentiation was the answer to everything. Mixed ability class? Differentiate. Child struggling with number? Differentiate. Pupil with SEND? Differentiate, differentiate, differentiate. The above is what it looked like in practice. Specific questions we would ask certain children, three carefully printed worksheets, for an extra flourish make sure you print it on a different colour to jump into the irlen fad. The worksheets would follow a similar fashion, a simplified version with the hard bits taken out, a middle-of-the-road version, and an extension task for the children we’d already decided were the clever ones.

The intention was good, of course it was. Teachers wanted every child to access the learning and planning three separate lessons within a lesson is a lot of extra work. Extra work might feel like extra gains, but somewhere along the way, differentiation became a sorting mechanism rather than a teaching strategy. It became about what we gave children rather than how we taught them. As Gallagher, Parsons and Vaughn (2022) found in their review of adaptive teaching in mathematics, the most effective teachers weren’t those who prepared multiple parallel versions of a lesson. It was those who adjusted their instruction in real time, responding to what they noticed about student understanding as the lesson unfolded.

Those children children at the bottom of that hierarchy, disproportionately those with SEND, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, those whose prior attainment had been disrupted by trauma or instability or simply not having been read to at bedtime, those children got less rather than more. Less challenge. Less ambition. Less belief. Rosenshine’s (2012) research showed that more successful maths teachers spent 23 minutes in a 40-minute period in active teaching demonstrating, questioning, modelling, guiding practice, while less effective teachers taught for only 11 minutes, asking just 9 questions across the entire lesson. The children who needed the most teaching were often getting the least. I am old enough to remember when instruction was seen as a bad thing - ‘too much teacher talk’ was a criticism on a lesson observation sheet rather than it being seen that I was trying to share knowledge.

Adaptive teaching, as it appears in the Early Career Framework and the Teachers’ Standards, asks us to do something fundamentally different. Instead of preparing multiple versions of a lesson based on our assumptions about what children can manage, we plan ambitious lessons and then adapt in the moment. We respond to what we see, what we hear and what we notice about how learning is landing - what children are understanding.

Parsons et al. (2018), in their research synthesis of teachers’ instructional adaptations, found that effective adaptive teachers demonstrated a kind of professional metacognition. They constant monitoring and adjusting their instruction based on how children were responding. Importantly, they found that teachers adapted with greater frequency when using open-ended tasks rather than closed, worksheet-based activities (Parsons, 2012). The three worksheets ideas weren’t just limiting children; but also limiting teachers.

Remember in the 2000s when you had to drive somewhere you hadn’t been before? I would print off the AA road map to get from A to B. It was imperative that i stuck to the instructions as I had no additional information in which I could draw upon. I didn’t have the wider map to use, just the step by step guide on how I got somewhere. Now, I used a sat nav, it can adapt in real time, address things such as changing the map depending on traffic and road closures. Adaptive teaching and differentiations is the difference between that predetermined route and reading the road as you drive.