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ADAPT Strategy
Hutchinson’s ADAPT strategy (pp. 243–248) can be summarized as follows:
Step 1: Accounts of student’s strengths and needs
Hutchinson’s ADAPT strategy (pp. 243–248) can be summarized as follows:
Step 1: Accounts of student’s strengths and needs
- Review a student’s IEP for strengths and needs in social, emotional, physical, and academic areas.
- Academic areas include the basics of reading, writing, mathematics, and learning strategies to perform school tasks.
- Learning strategies include time management, study skills, note taking skills, listening skills, organizational skills, to name a few.
- Social demands include how students learn best: individually, in groups, or both, as well as how the teacher models positive interactions with students.
- Physical demands include classroom layout, changes to the layout, use of audiovisual equipment, computer software programs, etc.
- Academic demands look at not only instructional materials but also instructional and assessment strategies.
- This involves identifying potential mismatches between a student’s learning needs and the demands of the classroom. The key decisions for adaptations in this context are to bypass the mismatch, teach through the mismatch, or teach around the mismatch (p. 208).
- Choose adaptations that benefit the majority of students in the class and that have demonstrated effectiveness.
- Use observation to determine the effectiveness of an adaptation for the exceptional students and think about the adaptation from the perspective of the other students, colleagues, and parents.
- Continuously assess how well the adaptation overcomes the mismatch between student strengths and needs, and the classroom demands.
