Great teachers matter. And great teachers matter particularly for pupils with SEND.
Those great teachers pre-empt challenges, plan in scaffolds, build a good structure, consider cognitive load before a lesson, and make slides that present materials carefully. Great teachers plan well.
But they also adapt well. While adapting approaches are no silver bullet, they stress the importance not only of great planning, but of the ability to change the plan, based on:
- Checking for understanding, and
- Adapting based on those checks.
Even when a teacher knows their class well, they can never perfectly anticipate how 30 pupils will encounter new learning. There will always be some unknowns – what content pupils have misremembered or misunderstood, how quickly they’ll pick up a skill, or how keen they are to engage in a new topic.
This fact underlines the need for adaptiveness. It stresses the importance of changing, dynamically, based on the right pupil feedback.
This is true of all pupils, but it can be particularly the case for many pupils with SEND.
Not all adaptations work as intended
Understanding pupil needs is not something a teacher can ever finish. Before teaching a class, teachers can read reports, meet with parents, listen to pupils, and engage in specialist training, but there will still be pupils for whom the plan doesn’t become the reality. For whom the anticipated scaffold wasn’t needed, the expectations of independence weren’t met or for whom an additional adult needed to spend a bit longer on some foundational learning. For whom a profile of multiple strengths alongside areas of relative challenge, makes anticipating difficulty – well, difficult.
No teacher can anticipate everything. No teacher can be sure every adaptation is impactful.
And for pupils with SEND, the variables are sometimes higher. The learning environment might not be quite right. Learning routines might not be well-established. Communication might not be crystal clear. Prior knowledge might be incorrectly assumed. Physical barriers to access may exist.
These things matter for all pupils, but it’s often pupils with SEND who are most impacted when they’re not securely in place.
Check. Adapt.
This makes the Check. Adapt resource particularly pertinent for pupils with SEND. Teachers should plan as best as they can, but also have approaches they can draw on to respond during a lesson, based on good feedback.
Methods of ‘checking’ may be subject or phase specific. They might involve observing a skill being practised, taking answers on a mini-whiteboard, looking at pupils’ written work, or questioning pupils.
The ‘Check’ is key. But so is what follows.
As this resource shows us, that might mean that teachers:
Pause and Fix
Where the learning environment isn’t particularly enabling for anyone’s learning, where instructions feel overly complex for a large number of pupils or where a common misconception exists, a teacher might change the provision for all pupils.
Adapt Support
Where the task is overwhelming for some, a teacher might chunk the task, model the steps needed or add a temporary scaffold.
Extend and Support
Where a few pupils require additional support, a teacher might create a temporary group, deploy a teaching assistant differently or pair pupils for some peer support.
There’s no one approach that guarantees success, but it’s this ongoing understanding of pupils, and teachers’ adaptations, that can make for more successful lessons.
Changeable needs
Sometimes, the advice given to teachers presents the needs of pupils with SEND as static and fixed. Whether it’s a list of teaching strategies for a given need type, the recommendations on a pupil profile or the contents of an EHCP’s ‘Section F’ – we can come to think of pupils as having needs that are permanent, where they are so often changeable.
An approach that takes the changeable nature of many needs, and that supports teachers to understand pupils ‘in-the-moment’ and make changes, accordingly, feels important for all. But it feels particularly important for our pupils with SEND.