The Adaptive Teaching Approach That’s Helping Hundreds Of Schools Personalise Teaching At Scale

Every class will have pupils with different levels of prior attainment, each with different strengths and needs. That’s why adaptive teaching is so important.

Here, we’ll explore how hundreds of primary and secondary schools across the UK use an approach to adaptive teaching that combines teacher insights, online assessments, and real-time questioning to effectively adapt teaching for thousands of pupils every week.

Primary and secondary schools come to us because they have pupils working behind where they need to be and are at risk of not meeting the expected standard. 

They select which pupils need additional support and we provide them with a range of purpose-built maths tutoring programmes, each designed to be completely personalised to each pupil’s strengths and needs.

Teacher insights to ensure each pupil’s needs are met

Even before a Third Space Learner has their first online one-to-one session with their personal maths specialist tutor, steps are taken to adapt the teaching they will receive.

It all starts with the pupils’ teachers, as they’re who know each pupil the best. We give teachers the choice of 22 tutoring programmes so pupils can make progress whatever their level of prior knowledge or potential barrier to learning.

Each programme contains 20 lessons, purposefully created and ordered by default to best meet each programme’s goal. This order is completely adaptable, allowing teachers to align the tutoring to class teaching or prioritise areas they know their pupils struggle with.

• Primary Programmes
  • 5 Foundation Programmes (Years 2-6) help pupils who are significantly behind expectations for their current year, with a goal of closing gaps
  • 5 Booster Programmes (Years 2-6) help pupils who are just behind and are designed to accelerate progress
  • The SATs Revision Programme is for pupils who would benefit from additional SATs-style question practice to achieve EXS in their maths SATs
  • The Year 5 Ready to Progress Programme supports pupils in the summer term as they prepare to move up to Year 6
• Secondary Programmes
  • 5 KS3 programmes are available to support students depending on how far back their gaps go and what support they need, ranging from programmes designed to address outstanding gaps from KS2 to programmes to prepare students for KS4
  • 5 GCSE programmes to choose from depending on each student’s target grade, with programmes available for grade 3 to grade 7

Diagnostic assessments to form the foundation of adaptive teaching

Next, the focus shifts to the pupils and deepening the understanding of each pupil’s unique needs. We do this through a pre-programme diagnostic assessment.

This tells each pupil’s Third Space Learning tutor (and their school!) how they should be thinking about adapting their teaching for this pupil. That is, which of the 20 lessons in the programme they might need to spend more time on, and which they can use as an opportunity to quickly recap knowledge before moving on. 

Teachers can use the results of this diagnostic assessment to adapt the order of the lessons in each programme at any point.

Formative assessments and scaffolded lessons to adapt teaching in real-time

When it comes to the time of each pupil’s scheduled one-to-one tutoring lesson, tutors – already equipped with the results of each pupil’s diagnostic assessment – use formative assessments and our specially created scaffolded lesson slides, each with adaptable pathways, to respond to their pupil’s needs in real-time.

Through this scaffolding, we can support an ambitious curriculum that’s accessible to all; all pupils can work through all lessons, just with slightly different levels of support depending on their needs.

All tutoring lessons begin with a pre-assessment slide to help tutors understand how secure a pupil is with this concept. The results of this assessment will help them decide what pathway to take:

If pupils struggle, tutors can start the lesson with a prior learning slide to ensure pupils have the prerequisite knowledge they’ll need to get the most out of the lesson:

The tutor then uses ‘I do, we do’ slides to allow pupils to build conceptual understanding of the topic, before allowing the pupil to practise the skill. Tutors can skip the prior learning slide and start here if the pupil showed in the pre-assessment slide that this wasn’t needed:

If, during the pre-assessment slide, the pupil has shown they’re already secure and confident in this topic, tutors can skip the ‘let’s learn’ and ‘follow me + your turn’ slides and move straight on to the independent practice portion of the lesson:

Let’s see what this adaptable pathway looks like altogether: 

As well as these structured assessments, tutors are also trained to use effective questioning throughout the lesson to assess pupil understanding and adapt their teaching accordingly, for example:

• Can you explain how you got this as your answer?
• What do you think you need to do first here?
• Why do you think that’s correct?

Post-session questions to help adapt future teaching

Once a lesson ends, there are still opportunities to adapt future teaching. 

All Third Space Learning tutoring sessions end with Post-Session Questions (PSQs) which ask pupils to answer a question on the topic they’ve just covered with their tutor.

Not only does this help teachers to track the progress pupils are making during the course of the programme, but the results give tutors even more insights to adapt their teaching in the future:

Combining technology with human insights to help adapt teaching at scale

Adapting teaching for a few pupils is very different to adapting teaching for whole classes or cohorts. 

That’s why we believe in harnessing technological and human insights to support teachers in providing adaptive teaching for multiple pupils – all at the same time.

Online assessments quickly and easily identify individual knowledge gaps, helping to prioritise different topics and adapt and scaffold teaching accordingly. Online tutoring means multiple pupils can receive one-to-one support all in the same timeslot, without needing multiple tutors to come into the school at once.

But without human insight, these can only help us to adapt so far; we need to pair them with what teachers know about their pupils, and with tutor insights from real-time formative assessments and effective questioning.

If you visited a Third Space Learning school, you might find 10 different pupils all in a room, all working on the same lesson but working on the exact pathway at the exact pace that meets their needs – depending on how their tutor adapts the lesson in real time.

Or, you could just as likely find 10 different pupils all working on 10 different topics, each chosen by their teacher and guided by the results of their diagnostic assessment to provide support exactly where each pupil needs it.