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Adaptive teaching is less likely to be valuable if it causes the teacher to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils.

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Until quite recently the prevailing trend was to create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils within the classroom as a differentiation technique, e.g. the teacher producing multiple versions of the same worksheet. Not only did this approach affect teacher workload, activities of this kind can place limits on pupil achievement.

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Other popular differentiation strategies were to differentiate by time and differentiate by outcome.

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With these strategies, teachers had different expectations of what pupils could complete in the allocated time and to what standard.

 

A consequence of this was a lowering of expectations of what pupils could and should achieve.

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Your approach should be to have high expectations of every child, looking for ways to support each of them step by step to achieve the learning objectives.

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There is a common misconception that pupils have distinct and identifiable learning styles. This is not supported by evidence and attempting to tailor lessons to learning styles is unlikely to be beneficial.

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Learning styles theory was popular in education for some time with many people believing that individuals had a preferred learning style (e.g. auditory, visual, kinesthetic) and that pupils would learn better if taught in that predominant style.

 

This is not supported by any credible evidence (Willingham, 2010) and attempting to tailor lessons to learning styles is unlikely to be beneficial.

What is true is that learners are different from each other, and that these differences can affect their performance.

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In claiming that learning styles do not exist, we are not saying that all learners are the same.

 

Rather, we assert that a certain number of dimensions (ability, background knowledge, interest) vary from person to person and are known to affect learning.

 

The emphasis on learning styles, we think, often comes at the cost of attention to these other important dimensions (Willingham, 2010).

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Things to watch out for:

• Being told that a pupil “learns best kinesthetically” and therefore should be allowed to wander around the classroom when they feel like it. There is very little evidence of successful interventions based on learning styles theory. (Willingham 2004)

• Activities which claim to exercise pupils’ multiple intelligences, such as getting pupils to sing and dance when reciting times tables. Gardner (1995) describes such use of multiple intelligences as trivial. This is trivial because pupils are not really engaged in the thing they need to think hard about.

• A colleague gives you advice to prepare three different versions of the same worked example, one which uses pictures, one which uses words and one which includes a video recording of yourself completing it so pupils have “choice” about how to study. Do not spend your time creating these resources ‒ one quality resource (e.g. talking pupils through a written example) will be better. (Education Development Trust, n.d)

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Watch the short video below that introduces Adaptive Teaching: