Adaptive teaching is either the same or a development of the idea itself, depending on your understanding of differentiation. This is often because differentiation focuses on the entire class while responding to individual student needs through individualising resources and content. It involves having a working knowledge of each individual’s prior levels of attainment within a class and providing targeted support for them to access the knowledge, skills and behaviours on offer. However, depending on your understanding and interpretation, adaptive teaching moves away from the idea of labelling individuals and groups according to their level of ability in different knowledge, skills and behaviours. It is instead centred around the idea that teachers have high expectations for every pupil in their care. Again, however, this distinction between differentiation and adaptive teaching relies on your understanding of differentiation, focusing on having different expectations for different learners.
Adaptive teaching as a relative of differentiation involves the differentiation of practice, however, rather than the provision of different activities, tasks and outcomes. This approach to teaching, learning and assessment adapts the content delivery process to meet individuals’ needs. Part of this addition comes in the form of the language used within the delivery of content, setting of tasks and provision of questioning and feedback. This relates to the vocabulary and wording of the content and questions used within the delivery of sessions, activities and tasks.
Another distinctive feature which helps to define an understanding of what adaptive teaching represents is its focus on the entire class while still responding to the needs of individuals. This holistic view of needs involves balancing the input of new content provided by an educator to individuals to ensure the opportunity for mastery. As such, being responsive to the content offered is more than just adjusting the teaching to match individual needs more effectively. This is partly as adaptive teaching when viewed through a practical perspective, fosters an understanding that distinctive tasks for different groups of pupils are a barrier to effective learning and is more in line with its more archaic cousin differentiation. The setting of different tasks for different individuals or groups promotes the practice of setting lower expectations for those individuals. Instead, adaptive teaching is an overarching approach encompassing content, process, product and environment similar to that of differentiation but through the understanding of adapting for the individual learner rather than groups of learners.
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Nottingham Education Network 