Inclusive teaching

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in SecEd Magazine on 26 March 2025.

Over the course of five articles, I’m going to explore inclusion and belonging, focusing on three areas of professional practice to help us achieve this in our classrooms. Those areas are:

This is the fourth instalment in a 5-part series. If you haven’t yet read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, I’d recommend you do so.

In the first article in this series, I said that inclusive teaching requires 3Ds:

1 Diagnose: To teach inclusively, we must first understand our learners’ individual starting points and additional needs. Such insight will allow us to tailor our teaching and ensure every learner has a fair chance of success. To achieve this, we need to use diagnostic assessments and start by identifying what learners already know and what gaps need to be addressed. We also need to make use of ongoing low-stakes formative assessments to ensure we continue to meet the needs of all learners. 

2 Deliver: Inclusive teaching doesn’t mean diluting the curriculum. Instead, it’s about providing the support necessary for all learners to engage with the same challenging and meaningful content. This means we must set high expectations for everyone and believe that every learner can achieve success and then communicate this belief consistently. We must, therefore, avoid simplifying language unnecessarily; instead, we need to explicitly teach key vocabulary to support understanding. 

3 Differentiate: Inclusivity means being flexible and responsive in the moment, as well as planning ahead to meet diverse needs. As such, we should regularly check for understanding during lessons and adjust our teaching based on what learners demonstrate they know and can do. We might pose targeted questions or use mini whiteboards to assess understanding before moving on. 

But what does this look like in the classroom? 

Differentiation v adaptive teaching 

Whereas traditional differentiation focuses on individual learners or small groups of learners, adaptive teaching focuses on the whole class. In other words, it is the difference between teaching up to thirty different lessons at once – matching the pace and pitch to each individual learner and providing different tasks and resources to different learners – and teaching the same lesson to all thirty learners by ‘teaching to the top’ while providing scaffolds to those who need additional initial support in order to access the same ambitious curriculum and meet our high expectations.

Crucially, with adaptive teaching, additional support offered in the guise of scaffolding is reduced over time so that all learners can become increasingly independent.

The problem with the former approach – teaching up to thirty different lessons – is that, as well as it being hugely time-consuming for the teacher, it can translate in practice as expecting less of some learners than we do of others – in other words, as dumbing down or reducing the curriculum on offer.

Unlike traditional forms of differentiation which can perpetuate attainment gaps by capping opportunities and aspirations, adaptive teaching promotes high achievement for all. 

Put simply, if we dumb down or reduce the curriculum for some learners, we only serve to double their existing differences and disadvantages, rather than help them overcome those challenges to achieve in line with their peers.

Adaptive teaching is not an afterthought

Adaptive – or responsive – teaching is not an add-on or afterthought; rather, it is integral to quality first teaching. Quality first teaching takes place when the teacher designs an ambitious, broad and balanced, and planned and sequenced curriculum and teaches that curriculum to every learner – thus achieving equality – but then ensures that ever learner can indeed access that curriculum and attain – thus achieving equity. 

Differentiation is marked by: 

• Different curricula
• Different tasks 
• Different expectations 
• Different feedback
• Different levels of challenge
• Different outcomes

Whereas adaptive teaching is marked by:

• The same ambitious curriculum
• The same tasks 
• The same high expectations 
• The same demanding feedback
• The same level of challenge 
• Scaffolds to make this accessible

These ‘scaffolds’ – like the scaffolding on a building – are temporary support structures that enable learners to reach higher levels of challenge. They are short-term alterations that are made to the way we teach the curriculum – extra or different things – in order to allow all learners to access that curriculum.

Those alterations might be live adaptations which are ‘in the moment’ tweaks made in response to ongoing formative assessment and/or learner observation (such as a repeated or chunked instruction). Or they might be planned adaptations which are regular additional support given to those learners with known needs (such as the use of a teaching assistant, tailored worksheets, etc). Planned adaptations might also be the reasonable adjustments we make for learners with SEND to ensure we do not discriminate against those with protected characteristics as defined under the Equality Act 2010.

Task scaffolds might be visual – such as giving a learner a task planner, a list of small steps to take to complete a task, worked examples, images that support vocabulary learning, and so on.  

Task scaffolds might be verbal – such as explaining a task in more explicit terms and in smaller steps, repeating an instruction, reteaching a difficult concept, using questioning to address misconceptions, and so on.

And task scaffolds might be written – such as a word bank, a writing frame, sentence starters, and so on. 

Visual, verbal and written task scaffolds are forms of additional or different types of support we can offer learners to help them get started with the same task as their peers. But we can also vary the size and style of a learner’s finished product in order to ensure equity. For example, we might allow some learners to produce a shorter piece of work initially, or to plan out in brief rather than write their response in full. Crucially, they complete the same task as the rest of the class, but the volume of work expected of some learners is adjusted to match their current performance or needs. Likewise, we might adjust the style of their work, giving some learners free reign whilst others are given a structure to follow or a set of signposts to use, perhaps even topic sentences at the start of every paragraph. 

Knowing when to make adaptations 

Knowing whether to make these adjustments and when to make – and scale back or remove – these adjustments is key to the success of adaptive teaching. And there is no hard and fast rule to obey; rather, it’s a case of trial and error in response to ongoing low-stakes formative assessments. 

But there are some considerations to make. 

Challenge is determined by the things a learner already knows. If a learner knows an area of study well, then the same question on the same content will be less challenging to them than it will to a learner whose prior knowledge is limited. The four challenge variables are therefore:

1 The intrinsic demand of the task: in other words, how difficult the task is in itself

 and how much it will stretch learners. 

2 Cognitive load: in other words, how much a learner will have to think about at once in order to understand and complete the task. The more a learner must think about, the harder it will be to complete the task. 

3 Prior knowledge: in other words, how much a learner already knows about the task. The more a learner knows about the subject of the task, the easier they will find it. 

4 External supports: in other words, how much additional support is provided to help with memory demands. This might include help from the teacher or a teaching assistant, or indeed from other learners. 

Being aware of these four variables helps us to make appropriate adjustments. We can increase or decrease the challenge of a task – without changing the task itself – by:

1 Sequencing learning to make the bigger picture explicit 

2 Adapting and chunking the number of things a learner has to think about 

3 Activating prior knowledge through retrieval practice immediately before the task is begun 

4 Scaffolding for memory demands 

It might be helpful to think of this like a mixing desk whereby you slide four controls up or down depending on the challenge required. 

Here are my top tips for making sure our mixing desk produces melodic results: 

REDUCE cognitive load – chunk and check 

This is about breaking curriculum content or task instructions into smaller steps and checking a learner’s understanding of each step before moving on to the next step.

PREDICT cognitive load – sequence, repeat, reinforce 

This is about anticipating memory demands by sequencing the curriculum into a logical order so that key information is front-loaded, in other words key knowledge or skills are taught before they are needed in practice. It’s also about connecting the curriculum, making meaning by making the links between various aspects of subject knowledge explicit. In short, it’s about preparing learners for tasks by digging the foundations needed, and deepening learners’ understanding of curriculum content by making it concrete and contextual. 

SUPPORT cognitive load – scaffold and hold 

This is about holding back some memory demands by providing additional or different types of support to learners so that they can think about the same content as everyone else in the class. The information held back is then introduced in small stages, thus ensuring those learners being supported through scaffolds do not develop learned helplessness but rather become increasingly independent. 

STRENGTHEN cognitive load – retrieve and apply 

This is about embedding frequent retrieval practice into the curriculum – indeed, into every lesson – so that prior knowledge is repeatedly activated in order to prevent knowledge decay, and so that it remains accessible to learners as they begin a task. 

Here are some examples of adaptive teaching in practice…

In English, when teaching a complex novel such as Wuthering Heights we might give learners a simplified summary of the plot and some pen portraits of the key characters, as well as a family tree, before reading the text. We might also give learners a list of unfamiliar words – such as dialect – used in the novel, along with definitions.

When asking learners to write an essay about the novel later, we might first model how to structure the essay and we might write the essay’s introduction on the board, thinking aloud as we do so. Next, learners might work in pairs to write their own introductions before writing the remainder of the essay individually. We might adapt this task further for those who would struggle to work independently by providing them with a writing frame for the essay or a set of topic sentences to begin each paragraph. 

In maths, when teaching long division, we might break down the process into smaller steps then model each step and get learners to practise in pairs before completing some questions independently. Learners requiring more support might be given scaffolded questions to complete, perhaps with partially completed answers, whilst others are given more challenging questions which contain real world applications. 

In history, when teaching World War Two, we might provide a blank timeline for learners to fill in as they learn about key events but, for some learners in need of additional support, we might offer a partially completed timeline instead, leaving only a few gaps for them to complete themselves. 

In PE, when teaching football, we might divide learners into groups based on their current skills level. Inexperienced players might practise dribbling the ball and different passing techniques, with some explicit modelling, whilst more experienced players play a match that allows for the development of more advanced skills such as different formations and forcing the off-side trap. Such a strategy will allow inexperienced players to receive more direct feedback, whilst experienced players are encouraged to reflect on their own performance.

Coming up… 

Next time, in the fifth and final part of this series, we will explore inclusive assessment. 

About the author

Matt Bromley is CEO of bee and Chair of the Building Equity in Education Campaign. He is an education journalist, author, and advisor with over twenty-five years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a headteacher. He is now a public speaker, trainer, initial teacher training lecturer, and school improvement advisor, and remains a practising teacher. Matt writes for various magazines, is the author of numerous best-selling books on education, and co-hosts an award-winning podcast.

Matt’s next book, out in May 2025 and published by Routledge, is called Why School Doesn’t Work for Every Child and explores ways of creating more inclusive schools.