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Adaptive teaching: at its core, it’s simply what great teachers do every day. It’s the natural adjustments we make, often without realising, to help every student in our classroom thrive. This ability to adapt is embedded in our teacher DNA—born from our shared goal of seeing each child reach their highest potential.
What Is Adaptive Teaching?
At its heart, adaptive teaching is about responding to the needs of all learners in the moment, without segregating or singling out students. Instead of creating entirely separate tasks or lessons for individual students, adaptive teaching involves small, meaningful adjustments that allow the whole class to access the learning.
It’s responsive teaching that adapts to the classroom environment, based on student needs and ongoing assessment. This could mean simplifying instructions, adding scaffolds, or extending challenges—all without disrupting the flow of the lesson.
Why Every Teacher Can Excel at Adaptive Teaching
Teachers instinctively want the best for every student. Whether it’s changing the pace of a lesson, rephrasing a question, or offering an extra example to a struggling learner, we make these adjustments regularly. The best part? We’re often doing these things without consciously labelling them as “adaptive teaching.”
This instinct to adapt is what makes us naturally adept at adaptive teaching. It’s embedded in us because of our commitment to seeing every child succeed.
Practical Strategies for Adaptive Teaching
1. Plan for Adaptability
Before your lesson even begins, consider how you can adapt it based on your students' needs. Think about common barriers to learning, and plan how you can overcome them. For example:
Prepare sentence starters or vocabulary banks for students who may struggle with writing - need further scaffolding? Consider using Widgit or the noun project to quickly connect visuals to your vocabulary.
Have extra challenges ready for those who finish tasks quickly - but make sure these are accessible for all learners.
Create a range of questioning levels—from simple recall questions to higher-order thinking—to engage all learners. Again, consider the speaking and listening scaffolds that could support EAL learners or those with SEND to access higher-order thinking questions too.
2. Use Ongoing Assessment
Formative assessment is key to adaptive teaching. During the lesson, keep an eye on how students are engaging. Use quick checks for understanding, such as exit tickets, or mini whiteboards and quick quizzes.
If you notice gaps in understanding, adjust your approach: re-explain concepts, offer visual aids, or give peer support opportunities.
For students who show mastery, stretch their thinking with more complex tasks or deeper questions.
3. Scaffold Learning for All
Scaffolding is central to adaptive teaching. It’s not just about supporting those who need help—it’s about offering the right tools to all learners. Strategies like:
Visual aids: Use diagrams, pictures, or infographics to make abstract ideas more concrete.
Step-by-step instructions: Break tasks into manageable chunks, guiding students through the learning process.
Sentence stems: Provide students with language frameworks to help them express ideas more clearly.
Collaborative learning: Pair up students to support each other in tasks and use flexible grouping to encourage peer learning.
4. Make In-the-Moment Adjustments
One of the greatest strengths of adaptive teaching is our ability to make adjustments during the lesson.
If a student is struggling, you might:
Rephrase or clarify instructions.
Offer extra time or simplify the wording or structure of the task without lowering expectations.
Introduce physical resources like number lines or graphic organisers to support learning.
For more confident students, adaptive teaching allows us to:
Introduce extension tasks.
Ask more challenging questions to deepen their understanding.
Encourage self-directed learning with independent projects or research tasks.
5. Utilise Teaching Assistants Effectively
If you have a teaching assistant (TA) in your classroom, they can play a vital role in adaptive teaching. Rather than having them support only specific students, consider:
Stationing the TA at a key activity station to support all students who need it during group work.
Using the TA to circulate the room, offering quick, in-the-moment help to any student who requires extra guidance.
Planning collaboratively with your TA so they can anticipate when and where their support will be most effective.
For more insights on this, check out Sara Alston's 2022 article on how to plan lessons with your teaching assistant (SecEd, 2022).
6. Anticipate Barriers
It’s important to think ahead about potential barriers students may face. For example, language barriers for EAL learners or issues with task complexity for SEND learners. Planning for these in advance allows you to remove obstacles before they hinder learning. Some examples include:
Providing bilingual resources or planning for activities which draw on learners' home languages.
Using visual timetables for students who need additional help with structure.
Ensuring tasks have clear, step-by-step guidance so all students know exactly what to do.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) provides a fantastic framework in their "Five-a-day for SEND learners" approach, outlining strategies that are beneficial for all students but crucial for SEND and multilingual learners. By integrating these into your daily practice, you’ll create an inclusive environment that benefits everyone. Read more about EEF’s Five-a-day for SEND outcomes here.
Remember: Adaptive Teaching Is Already in Us
The key to embracing adaptive teaching is recognising that it’s something we’re already doing. It’s woven into the fabric of effective teaching because it’s rooted in the desire to meet each learner where they are.
The core principles of adaptive teaching—adjusting practice during lessons, making “in-the-moment” changes, and anticipating challenges—are strategies many teachers use instinctively. By recognising these moments, we can share successful strategies with colleagues, contributing to a whole-school dialogue on what works best for specific students and contexts.
The Power of Small Adjustments
Adaptive teaching isn’t about overhauling lesson plans or creating time-consuming personalised tasks. It’s about small, targeted changes that have a big impact. For example:
A quick formative assessment can highlight who needs support, allowing us to adapt mid-lesson.
Scaffolding tasks with sentence starters, visual aids, or modelling can make the lesson more accessible without changing the learning goals.
Using a range of questioning strategies ensures every learner is challenged appropriately.
These small adjustments don’t add to your workload but instead make lessons more effective, engaging, and inclusive for all learners.
Conclusion: It’s in Our DNA
Adaptive teaching isn’t a specialist skill or an extra burden—it’s part of what makes us teachers. We adapt because we care. We adjust because we’re committed to helping every child reach their full potential. By recognising and celebrating the adaptive strategies we already use, we can continue to refine our practice and share our expertise with others. Adaptive teaching is not just something we do—it’s in our DNA.
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