Teach Primary Issue 18.6

48 | www.teachwire.net It’s all about ADAPTATION Meeting children where they are, not where they ‘should’ be, is the key to great formative assessment, say Ben Fuller and Felicity Nichols T he Teachers’ Standards, which set out the expectation for teachers to ‘adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils’, were introduced in 2011, but the use of adaptive teaching as a discrete term is more recent. The Early Career Framework defines it as ‘Provid[ing] opportunity for all pupils to experience success, by adapting lessons, whilst maintaining high expectations for all, so that all pupils have the opportunity to meet expectations.’ Where you can anticipate and prepare adaptations in advance during lesson planning, this may reduce the number of changes and decisions you need to make during a busy lesson. Adapting your planning makes it inclusive by design, meeting the needs of your cohort where they are, and not making assumptions about where they ‘should’ be. With thoughtful lesson design, not all adaptations will be visibly obvious in the classroom. In a recent drop-in we made to a science lesson that included several children with sensory needs, the teacher incorporated a movement break, as children completed a vocabulary quiz by moving to several locations around the classroom. This was an effective activity for all, as well as an essential adaptation for some. With strong subject knowledge, you can anticipate the ‘tricky’ bit of the learning, know the common misconceptions and plan a range of subject- specific solutions to support children. Adaptive teaching and additional needs Adaptation can also mean thinking about the individual ‘additional to and different from’ support children will need to access the lesson. The EEF SEND 5-a-day ( tinyurl.com/tp-SEND5 ) approach is a good starting point for implementing impactful strategies. For individual children with SEND, knowing and consistently implementing their agreed strategies and reasonable adjustments is essential; don’t forget to use the written support plans agreed during the ‘assess, plan, do, review’ (APDR) graduated approach. All children – not just those with SEND – might have specific gaps in learning, or misconceptions, particularly since the pandemic. Effective questioning strategies, such as concept cartoons ( tinyurl. com/tp-concept ) and true/ false quizzes, etc. used before planning and teaching a topic can shed light on prior understanding, so that the teaching can be planned appropriately. The key is to seek out those gaps, i.e. to assess rather than assume. What is responsive teaching? When reflecting on the coining of the term ‘formative assessment’, Dylan Wiliam commented that it might have been more appropriate to call it ‘responsive teaching’, as the word ‘assessment’ can cause confusion or distraction by making us think about more formal methods of establishing what children know. At its heart, formative assessment is about actively seeking to discover exactly what children understand (and what they don’t yet) and responding to that “Effective questioning strategies used before planning and teaching a topic can shed light on prior understanding”