Adaptive Teaching and the Interactional Order of Classrooms

Responding to the need for fine-grained investigation of what adaptive teaching entails, this article reports on 88 qualitative lesson observations with highly competent teachers. The findings illustrate how, amidst the unpredictable flow of classroom life, the participant teachers fashioned a power dynamic with students that was asymmetric and cooperative in nature. This power dynamic was central to understanding how these teachers made responsive adaptations to practice, which were largely achieved through the strategic negotiation of learning journeys with students and the deployment of a broad teaching repertoire. These findings allowed us to broaden the conception of adaptive teaching in a novel way: by integrating dynamics of power into our account of adaptive teaching; by recognising that responsive adaptations are also targeted at longer term trajectories for student learning; and by delineating distinct strategies of teacher adaptations to practice that could incorporate students within the shifting interactional order of classrooms.