Adaptive teaching in literacy instruction: Case studies of two teachers

Parsons, Seth A. (2012). Adaptive teaching in literacy instruction: Case studies of two teachers. Journal of Literacy Research, 44(2), 149-170.


This is an in-depth look at two third grade teachers’ “in-flight” decision-making during literacy instruction. Parsons looked at the adaptations these teachers made, with an adaptation being defined as “a response to an unanticipated student contribution, a diversion from the lesson plan, or a public statement of change” (p. 150). The accounts of the two teachers’ adaptations, built from observation data and interviews with the teachers, are fascinating, and also are very different from each other. The bigger story here, though, is probably the tools for data analysis that were created, namely, a rubric for rating the “openness” of literacy instruction tasks (based upon the idea that the more “open” the learning task, the more adaptive the instruction needs to be) and two sets of coding categories, one for categorizing the types of adaptations teachers made in-flight and the other for categorizing the reasons teachers gave for making those adaptations during post-teaching reflective interviews. The qualitative data presented here are deep but not wide, so they probably cannot be generalized much beyond the two specific classroom contexts where the instruction was observed. The tools, though, have more wide-ranging possibilities; they could be used when future researchers observe teachers’ adaptations to instruction in other classrooms.

It’s difficult to really document a pattern of adaptations from two widely varying case studies like the ones discussed here. With only two cases, one or two important differences can produce wide variations in results. In this study, the fact that one teacher knew her students very well because she had “looped” with the same students from second grade into third grade, and the other teacher had relatively little knowledge of her students at the time of observation, worked to make the patterns of the two teachers’ adaptations and reflections on those adaptations look very different. Also, the timing of the observations proved to be a key source of variation in the data. The school was launching an initiative that made literacy instruction more “project-based” than it had been before. One teacher was observed quite early into the implementation of the new initiative, and the other was observed later, which probably caused the patterns of adaptation and reflection observed to differ substantially. In sum, although I found the accounts of both teachers’ adaptations interesting, I found little that I could reliably generalize to other classrooms. The findings here can suggest directions teachers might go when they adapt instruction, but that is about all.

I’d like to see future researchers try out the rubric and coding categories Parsons proposes, perhaps adding to and refining them as additional cases are observed. This is possible, because Parsons provides these tools in their entirety in three appendices. I could even see the coding categories used by preservice teacher candidates as they observe in classrooms. Having them do this, and then ask their cooperating teachers about their reasons for the adaptations, would be an excellent way to build teacher decision-making skills. A further step might then involve having the preservice teacher candidates engage in brief teaching episodes themselves, and then analyze their own adaptations and reflect upon their own reasons for those adaptations. The categories Parsons proposes could be a good scaffold for that kind of teacher learning.