Adaptive Teaching
At St Michael’s, we are committed to ensuring that every pupil is able to access an ambitious curriculum, participate fully in learning and achieve their potential.
Our approach to adaptive teaching is rooted in our school vision, “Courage to Flourish in the Love of God,” and informed by evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation. We recognise that the most effective way to meet the needs of pupils is through consistently high-quality teaching, with teachers responding flexibly to pupils’ needs as learning develops.
Adaptive teaching does not mean creating a separate curriculum or routinely giving pupils easier work. Instead, teachers identify the barriers that may prevent a pupil from accessing the intended learning and make thoughtful adaptations to the support, representation, pacing, explanation or level of guidance provided, while maintaining high expectations.
Adaptive Teaching and The St Michael’s Way
Adaptive teaching is an integral part of The St Michael’s Way and is reflected through our six pedagogical principles:
Challenge – maintaining ambitious learning while removing barriers to participation.
Explanation – making new learning accessible, connecting it to prior knowledge and presenting information in manageable steps.
Modelling – making processes and thinking visible before gradually transferring responsibility to pupils.
Questioning – using pupils’ responses to check understanding, identify misconceptions and decide what support is needed next.
Feedback – responding quickly to misconceptions and helping pupils understand their next steps.
Practice – providing opportunities for guided and repeated practice before pupils apply their learning independently.
What Might Adaptive Teaching Look Like?
Adaptations are selected according to the barrier to learning, rather than simply because a pupil has a particular label or need.
Depending on the pupil and the learning taking place, this might include:
- worked examples and I do, We do, You do modelling;
- concrete and pictorial resources in mathematics;
- Widgit symbols, photographs and visual prompts to support vocabulary;
- word banks, sentence stems and Colourful Semantics;
- oral rehearsal before writing;
- pre-teaching or revisiting important knowledge and vocabulary;
- breaking complex learning into smaller, manageable steps;
- scaffolded reading or writing activities;
- strategic questioning and additional thinking time;
- temporary scoop groups for targeted re-teaching;
- flexible grouping based on pupils’ current understanding.
These strategies are used across mathematics, reading, writing and the wider curriculum and are adapted according to what assessment shows pupils need.
Using the Birmingham Continuums
Where pupils are working below age-related expectations, we may use the Birmingham Continuums to help teachers identify pupils’ current strengths, understand their next steps and plan appropriately adapted teaching.
The Continuums support a small-steps approach to assessment and learning, helping staff to recognise progress that may not always be captured through age-related curriculum judgements. They are used alongside teachers’ ongoing assessment and knowledge of the individual pupil to inform appropriate targets, teaching approaches and provision.
This means that adaptations remain purposeful and closely matched to the pupil’s current stage of learning, while pupils continue to access the same ambitious curriculum and classroom experiences wherever appropriate. The Continuums also help us to identify and celebrate progress over time and support discussions between teachers, SEND staff, parents and other professionals.
Developing Independence
A key principle of our approach is that support should enable independence, not create dependency.
Teachers continually check whether an adaptation is helping a pupil to access, understand and participate successfully in learning. Scaffolds and additional support are then reduced or removed as pupils become increasingly secure and independent. For example, a completed worked example may gradually become a partially completed example before pupils complete the process themselves.
Our adaptive teaching cycle is:
Identify the barrier → select the least intrusive useful adaptation → check understanding → respond or re-teach → fade or adjust support → check independence.
Through this responsive approach, we aim to ensure that all pupils learn together wherever possible, receive the right support at the right time and develop the confidence and independence they need to flourish academically and personally.
Further Information
Our full Adaptations Document provides further information about the approaches used across different areas of the curriculum, alongside practical examples for staff.