Dealing with the Complexity of Adaptive Teaching through Collaborative Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the challenges that teachers face in today’s heterogeneous classrooms when it comes to addressing students’ educational needs. By means of a conceptual discussion about this topic, relating to recent empirical studies in this field, we discuss whether teachers’ adaptive teaching behavior could be promoted through professional development approaches – such as Lesson Study – that focus explicitly on students’ learning. Taking students’ learning as a starting point in collaborative and classroom-based professional development approaches, one could expect that teachers gain more awareness of the variety of their students’ educational needs which, in turn, may lead to teachers better addressing these needs in classroom settings. It is argued that through such a cyclical and inquiry-based way of working, teachers may start to feel more competent and able to address the learning needs of students, leading to increasingly adaptive teaching practices. However, despite promising results in the literature, there is still much debate on the evidence of how Lesson Study influences adaptive teaching behavior in favor of all students and how this, in turn, impacts student learning. A “local proof route” to testing the effectiveness of Lesson Study might offer suitable directions.