Spinning the plates: Responsive and Adaptive teaching

I have not been posting recently, as I have been busy moving to Oxford. As I am having a Christmas break, I thought I would write something on how adaptive and responsive teaching looks like in the real classroom. The idea of differentiating by multiple tasks being used in the classroom at once, is long considered obsolete as it is time consuming and so difficult to implement successfully! Instead, we talk about adaptive/responsive teaching embedded in a culture of anchoring in challenge and providing scaffolds.

Anchoring in challenge, a term used by Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby in their book Making every lesson count, is well rooted in my teaching philosophy:  having high expectations for ALL students and pitching high, getting them ready for their best performance ever and making them believe that they can aspire to and achieve their personal best. As we pitch high, we provide the foundations for a I can attitude and we scaffold activities to support students to reach the same final goal.  To achieve this, sentence builders, underpinned by a lexicogrammar approach is key, as all students have got the ingredients to communicate and become fluent at the highest level, while providing a clear scaffolded structure to reach spontaneity. 

Adaptive teaching is about planning high ability core activities that are scaffolded by us, in response to our students’ answers, skilfully, through checking for understanding techniques, to cater for all abilities. It’s like a lift, that we elevate, when necessary, to stretch all students, or take down, to reinforce misconceptions from some students and to provide scaffolds for some, in order to immediately go up again, to stretch students straight away. 

How is this done in practice? 

Modelling stage

Through dictation activities where we move from dictating very short sentences to longer ones, using MWBs, to constantly check for understanding and react appropriately. In this type of activities, varying the speed of the utterances is also key to adapt input to the students’ demands: 

I start saying sentences very slowly, increasing the speed and the length of the utterance, as the activity progresses, to move back to a slower speed, again, if some students cannot cope well and go back to being faster again. We may need just a lesson for modelling but we may need two or even three if that is what our students need: Responsive teaching.

Modelling activities  are also great opportunities to check for understanding and identifying gaps in knowledge. I, personally, do this via grammar dictation, which is a normal dictation but with deliberate grammatical mistakes of stubborn, classical errors which students must spot themselves or via our skilful questioning: 

Is this sentence correct? Why? What would  be the correct way? Let’s revise adjective agreement! Can you give me examples of this rule applied correctly? 

For a wide range of modelling activities visit this blogpost. 

Scaffolded production 

At this stage, students must start producing the language themselves via structured and scaffolded practice. A this level, checking for understanding and carrying out responsive teaching, may be trickier as, we stop using MWBs and students start working in pairs or move around the room. It is imperative for the teacher to keep moving constantly to spot errors, making a mental note of these for a subsequent whole class feedback task, after an activity, or just to give advice and encourage students individually, as they carry out the activities in the lesson: 

That was a great answer, well done! How could you make it even better by adding the past tense? Or You are doing extremely well, can you include some content from the past topics we studied? Or, That was a great answer but a little bit short, can you have a look at your sentence builder to make sure you extend your answer?

When common mistakes and issues are spotted, we adapt our teaching to address these:

Students may need more practice of the learned structures as a whole class, either orally or with MWB, using a Wheel of Names or a Flippity task, where they need to translate sentences practising key structures, from English into the target language. When this is done, scaffolded and responsive teaching is also key. For example, for those who have finished translating a sentence, while others keep going: 

That’s great, could you add some more information on the spot using the future/past/imperfect tense? Or Can you write a list of alternative things you could have used instead of the shown translation? (Outformation/metacognition). For a wide range of activities to be carried out at this stage, visit this blogpost. 

Grammar

Some grammar will be learned, implicitly, within the modelling and structured/scaffolded stages. However, given the constraints of curriculum time, explicit grammar needs to be learned to make sure that students can manipulate the language and start moving away from the sentence builders. 

My experience is that an inductive approach to grammar works best, which also allows for checking for understanding and adapt teaching accordingly: 

Can students work out a specific grammatical rule after extensive use of sentence builders and narrow readings/listenings? Can they discuss this rule in pairs? Can we all explain the rule explicitly? Can we contrast our knowledge of past grammatical rules with this new rule? ( for example the formation of the present and the past tense?) 

After rules have been established, students need to apply the rules, using the same activities used in the structured production stage, but now, moving away from the sentence builder by changing the person who does the action and using different vocabulary from that on the sentence builder. The idea is to work with the grammatical structure in context (lexicogrammar) and in sentences, not just in isolation with new examples. Wheel of Names, Boardgames, Battleships or Flippity (randomiser), work extremely well to practise grammatical rules. 

As before, we do so as a whole class activity using MWBs, encouraging, supporting and stretching students as we carry out different activities: 

Great answer! Could you write this verb/sentence in the future too? Can you read your sentence and spot any mistakes? Where? Adapt your teaching according to the information you gather from the students: Do you need further lessons embedding grammar practice with scaffolded production tasks? If so, which activities are you going to use?

Reaching Fluency and Creativity 

At this stage, the idea is to work, entirely from memory and under time restrictions. Students tend to work independently, so moving around to spot errors is now more important than ever! This is what I call spinning the plates! We move around, we spot errors but also excellent use of the language: we showcase the latter; we engage students in deep thinking about what they know well and expect them to demonstrate this knowledge through meaningful independent output. Students set themselves targets based on this and where gaps are noticed, we reteach, remodel, practise again and again. Speed Dating, group talk or the 1,2,3 technique work brilliantly here. The important thing is to listen to the output produced by the students and to respond to it!

The beauty of the process is that not specific worksheets are needed, all is managed via our skilled questions and observation of the classroom and students' answers. It is teaching skill at its best.