After beginning to teach a year 9 Latin class I noticed a distinct lack of engagement from the majority of the pupils. I decided to use four different adaptive teaching strategies to try to improve engagement from the class. After choosing the four strategies (grouping, questioning, input, and choice) I planned four consecutive lessons around the strategies and modern literature. The study showed that adaptive teaching strategies work best when teachers have good prior knowledge of individual pupils. Without this prior knowledge, I feel the two most successful strategies, grouping and input, would have been significantly less effective. The less effective of the four strategies, questioning and choice, could have been successful with more time and if they were used consistently throughout the teaching year. They both need time in order to develop the way in which they are used by teachers (specifically questioning) and by pupils (both choice and questioning), which is something I will be considering when starting my teaching career.

The Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Common Core Framework (CCF) requires all teachers to adapt classroom teaching to support all students (Department for Education, 2024). While the Department for Education's previously-encouraged concept of ‘differentiation’ was well-intentioned, in that tasks were meant to be graded to support and develop all students' learning in a class where there were many different levels of prior attainment, it tended to mean that in practice in the classroom different tasks were often set to cater to the supposed different learning attributes of students. Differentiation has now been superseded by the concept of ‘adaptive teaching’. Adaptive teaching is characterised by teaching that takes account of the range in prior attainment of students and anticipates barriers to learning by providing resources or specific support so that they may all achieve the same intended outcomes. Classics teaching is often characterised by the reading of large amounts of text, both in the original languages of Latin or ancient Greek or in translation. Students in the Classics classroom contain a wide range of prior attainment, cultural experiences and may have barriers to learning, such as Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. This article presents findings of how the use of a blended language approach, involving the digital parsing tools in the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani Latin course books, improved the quantity of translation of Latin achieved by students of mixed prior attainment and encouraged a more effective use of classroom time to develop deeper comprehension and understanding of the translated texts.

The new ITT Common Core Framework (CCF) for teachers expects trainee and early-career teachers to adapt their teaching to support all students in class (Department for Education, 2021). What used to be called ‘differentiation’ is now referred to as ‘adaptive teaching’ and full details of what it consists of, as far as the Department for Education in England is concerned, can be found on pages 19–20 of the CCF document. Much of the advice of that document is about supporting students with special educational needs and disabilities, about teachers’ need to recognise that different students have different levels of prior attainment and may have barriers to learning, and how different types of student grouping may affect learning in different ways. It dismisses as a ‘common misconception’ that students have different learning styles and warns against teachers creating ‘distinct tasks for different groups of pupils’ or ‘setting lower expectations for particular pupils’.