Education Endowment Foundation:Feedback: The engine room of adaptive teaching

We know teachers use a range of techniques to check for understanding. But the real difference comes not from the checking itself, but from what happens next. Feedback is not a single moment in the lesson; it’s the engine that drives adaptive teaching.

Adaptive teaching is not about planning three different lessons or worksheets. It’s about picking up on pupil signals and deciding what to do with it, in the moment, and over time.

Why this, why now? Feedback fuels adaptive teaching

Across classrooms, teachers are working with pupils who bring an incredible range of strengths, experiences, and potential. Meeting this diversity means recognising where barriers, misconceptions, or gaps, might hold learning back and using evidence to address them.

The EEF’s Teacher Feedback to Improve Learning (EEF, 2018) and Metacognition and Self-regulationHow children monitor their emotions and thoughts, and adapt their behaviour in different circumstances. guidance (EEF, 2025) reports suggest that effective feedback and metacognitive approaches can be especially powerful for pupils experiencing socio-economic disadvantage.

When teachers actively seek and respond to what pupils show them by adjusting explanations, pacing, or scaffolds they create the conditions for every pupil to thrive and experience success.

But there’s a challenge. Many teachers feel that feedback is something they have already done. Checking for understanding has become a list of techniques rather than a process of professional thinking.

Curriculum pressures and accountability can make it hard to slow down and act on what the evidence reveals in the moment. The result is that we sometimes collect information about learning without the time, or permission, to use it.

A new language for an old truth

Adaptive teaching gives fresh language to what great teachers have always done. It’s not a replacement for feedback; it encompasses feedback.

By focusing on how teachers interpret and act on what they see, adaptive teaching turns assessment into a tool for professional judgment, not just a box-ticking exercise.

It’s not about collecting more data, but about using what we notice thoughtfully, flexibly, and with purpose to guide what happens next.

That’s the art of adaptive teaching: reading the room, responding to the evidence, and trusting professional judgment to guide what comes next.

Call to action

Adaptive teaching lives in the everyday choices we make when we pause, notice, and act. In the moment, let these guide your next move:

• Checking only matters if it leads to adaptation.
• It isn’t about always changing what you do, it’s about being ready to.
• Sometimes adapting means re-teaching, sometimes extending, and sometimes celebrating that learning has joyfully landed.
• It’s about knowing when to step in, when to move on, and when to let learning breathe.

Each choice to notice and respond is a moment where evidence becomes action. Where learning moves forward, and where we make a bigger difference.

Next steps

Revisit recommendation one of the EEF Feedback to Improve Learning guidance report

Read recommendation five of the updated Metacognition and Self-regulationHow children monitor their emotions and thoughts, and adapt their behaviour in different circumstances. guidance report.

Use the framework to scaffold pupils’ use of metacognitive strategies when responding to pupils’ needs.