Classroom research on adaptive teaching indicates few teachers modify instruction for at-risk students in a manner that benefits them. Responsiveness-To-Intervention, with its tiers of increasingly intensive instruction, represents an alternative approach to adaptive instruction that may prove more workable in today's schools.

For students to learn optimally, teachers must design classrooms that are responsive to the full range of student development. The teacher must be adaptive, but so must each student and the learning culture itself. In other words, adaptive teaching means constructing a responsive learning culture that accommodates and even capitalizes on diversity…