Written by Dr Sarah Filer, Teacher of Science at Portsmouth High School GDST
Adaptive learning in the classroom is a dynamic approach that tailors educational experiences to meet the individual needs of students. It can adjust the curriculum accordingly, providing a personalised learning path. This method has been shown to improve engagement and academic performance, as it allows students to work at their own pace, ensuring that each learner is challenged appropriately and receives immediate feedback. Adaptive learning allows the needs and abilities of each student to be recognised and addressed.
Adaptive learning is an important part of any classroom but has been used particularly successfully with our Year 11 students in the lead up to their exams. Once the syllabus was completed, the students have been asked to audit their current understanding of each topic. They were provided with the syllabus on an excel spreadsheet that only myself and the student had access to. Using a simple red/amber/green system, they were able to identify their own areas of strengths and weaknesses. This then allowed the students to take a number of different approaches to their revision. Different skills/strategies were taught for revision depending on whether a topic was secure or still needed consolidating or even relearning in some instances. A range of different strategies were then used, which included the following:
Relearning/consolidating: Seneca Learning; making notes from notes/revision guide; further teacher input through reteaching in small groups; watching videos and making notes.
Revising: Use of pre-made flashcards (from resources such as Physics and Maths tutor); past paper question practice.
Each week students completed a spreadsheet of their intended revision strategy, and resources were made available on an individual basis. Through this method, students were able to see the benefit of different strategies depending on their current level of understanding. All too often, I encounter students that request past paper question for revision, yet their understanding of a topic is not yet secure enough for them to tackle the questions with any confidence.
Once students were at the point of completing past paper questions, and this was different for all students, they were asked to provide a weekly list of topics that they felt they needed to focus on. This was to include the questions they required for in lesson and for homework. This allowed them to take responsibility for their own learning and ensured that they were fully engaged as they were completing tasks that they had specifically requested. This enabled me to provide a specific set of revision questions for each individual student. Students that had similar questions sets were able to work together, but I also witnessed lots of collaborative learning in which students that were more confident in particular areas would be assisting those students who were not as confident. However, all students’ questions were stored in our Teams files and therefore were available to all students if they so wished at a later date. This provided the class with a huge bank of topic specific questions to access as and when they required.
Although, more time consuming to provide individual packs of questions to students, it enabled the students to focus their revision on the topics which they felt needed more work. It would have been all too easy to provide the same questions to all students each week, but I did not feel that this would have been the most productive approach for each individual. The students themselves greatly appreciated the extra effort and consideration of this approach and greatly valued the opportunity to specifically revise their own preferred areas.
