The concept of 'Micro adaptations' or pedagogical tweaks refers to the small, immediate adjustments a teacher makes during planning or instruction to cater to individual student needs, allowing for more accessible learning across the classroom without significantly altering the overall lesson plan.
Alongside deliberate and purposeful planning, teachers must be prepared to 'follow the learning' during lessons and make changes to their delivery in order to respond to levels of understanding and progress within the class.
Assessment Comes First
Effective assessment for learning is pivotal to following the learning successfully and could be seen as the 'diagnosis' element of adaptive teaching. Through techniques such as:
Teachers are able to understand where understanding is being developed accurately and where misconceptions may be formed or have formed. If we get this stage wrong or don't respond to the data we collect then the adaptive teaching process can't meaningfully go any further.
Micro Adaptations
Once we have identified an issue with understanding, the skill is in which adaptations to make and there is an extensive list that will shift depending on context. Below is a list of some common tweaks that teachers can make in the moment to maximise understanding.
| Additional questioning | Teachers may ask extra questions to support learners to be successfully or stretch their understanding. |
| Additional explanation | Teachers may provide additional information or reframe information to clarify understanding. |
| Additional examples | Teachers may provide additional examples and non-examples to strengthen understanding. |
| Additional modelling | Teachers may model processes again or in more details to correct misconceptions. |
| Additional practice | Teachers may create additional activities or extend existing ones to support learners to be successful or stretch their understanding. |
| Increased chunking | Teachers may need to break knowledge or processes up into smaller chunks to support learning. |
| Use of scaffolds | Teachers may provide learners with tangible resources like literacy maps, sentence starters, exemplars etc to support learning. |
Further Study
Adaptive teaching: What is it anyway? Alex Quigley - LINK
Understanding Adaptive Teaching - Education South West - LINK
Teaching Adaptively - Lyn Corno - LINK
