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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Teach First
  • Year 1: First half-term: how can you support all pupils to succeed?
    • Summer week 4

    Mentor materials

    Observation discussion - adaptive teaching to respond to pupils’ needs

    Practice focus

    Interaction:

    Observation

    Outcome:

    To have planned for and practised adaptive teaching to respond to pupils needs.

    Stimulus

    Observe your teacher and consider how they have adapted their lesson to support all pupils to succeed. Choose to focus on one of the following that your teacher has explored in the online study materials:

    • Scaffolding questioning
    • Scaffolding through guided group work with the teacher or TA
    • Using flexible grouping
    • Providing additional support

    Praise, probe and set precise actions

    The following practise should be focused around the outcomes of the probe and precise actions, so that it is specific to your teacher’s developmental needs. However, below are some practise ideas based on the online study content to support you if needed.

    Plan and practice ideas

    Work with your teacher further adapt the lesson they taught to support all pupils to succeed. If you think there was nothing further that they could have done, practise should focus on adapting a future lesson to support all pupils to succeed. When doing this, you and your teacher might want to consider the following questions:

    • How is your adaptive teaching impacting upon pupils’ motivation and engagement, especially low attaining pupils?
    • How are you maintaining high expectations for all pupils?

    Key questions and talking points

    1. What might you do if many pupils demonstrated misunderstandings?
    2. How did you plan to support all pupils to be successful?
    3. What resources that already exist could you use to support pupils?
    4. Who could you approach for further advice on supporting certain pupils?
    5. What would you do if after the lesson, you identified that a group of pupils made many errors in their work during independent practice?
    6. Share that 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.