Researchers recognize adaptive teaching as a component of effective instruction. Educators adjust their teaching according to the social, linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs of their students. While there is consensus that effective teachers are adaptive, there is no consensus on the language to describe this phenomenon. Diverse terminology surrounding the same phenomenon impedes effective communication and comprehensive understanding of this important aspect of classroom instruction. Moreover, researchers have studied this phenomenon using a variety of methods, in various disciplines, with different results. Therefore, our research team completed a comprehensive literature review of the empirical research studying adaptability across academic disciplines. In this article, we describe how adaptive teaching is defined and conceptualized in the education research literature from 1975 to 2014, the methods used to study instructional adaptations, and the results of these studies.

This cross-case qualitative study draws on poststructural notions of identity to explore the relationship between multimodal literacies of young children and their becoming identities. Although research focuses on the products or texts of multiliteracies, more research is needed to examine shifting identities in the process of students creating. This study uses mediated discourse analysis to analyse interactions across one school year in a kindergarten (five-and six-year-olds) and a second-grade (seven-and eightyear-olds) classroom. Four insights are discussed across cases: (1) understanding and recognition of shifting identities, (2) the children becoming and doing teacher, (3) being a multimodal visionary and (4) living as a mentor designer and teacher. Insights highlight a 'multimodal as agency' stance, suggesting that through the process of creating multimodal forms of literacy, positions were instantiated and identities were re/negotiated. We encourage early childhood educators to create multimodal curricular spaces to facilitate young children's agency and becoming identities.

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In this article, the authors examine data spanning the last decade and pose the question, What are the qualities of adaptive teachers?D uring a read-aloud of the story Winnie Finn, Worm Finder by Carol Brendler, students in Ms. Branen's kindergarten class share their connections via pair and share. Ms. Branen models how good readers make connections to the story as they read. The focus of the lesson was on making connections as a comprehension strategy. However, after hearing how rich students' conversations were, she decided to extend the lesson by including a discussion on inferences and how good readers access what they know to make inferences to decide what will occur next in the story. She says to her students, "You can also use what you know as a reader and information from the text to make inferences. What is an inference?" She writes down students' responses on the dry erase board and then shares what her students have said. "It's when you use the information in your brain and the text to make sense of what is happening in the story. Remember, text is another word for book or what you are reading. I want you to go back to your seat and write an inference about the story. Make an inference about what you think will occur next in the story." Eliza (all student names are pseudonyms) shares, "I infer that there has to be worms in the wagon because the wagon is full of soil." Nia shares, "I think that the girl is going to help the worms by making food for them." Ms. Branen writes down students' inferences on chart paper and continues to read aloud the story, showing students how to check if their inferences are correct. She reminds her students, "Good readers think about the story when they make an inference."In this scenario, Ms. Branen enhanced this read-aloud by deciding, in the moment, to insert a minilesson on how good readers use inferences to further comprehend. When asked during her post-lesson Margaret Vaughn is an assistant professor at

The authors discuss the tension between the science of reading and adaptive teaching. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the science of reading emphasizes the teaching of reading as decontextualized and compartmentalized aspects of literacy acquisition that are distant from culturally sustaining and relevant pedagogies and restrict teachers in their efforts to teach reading. The authors demonstrate that adaptive teaching is a vital characteristic of effective reading teachers and recommend that scholars—those who study reading processes and reading acquisition (i.e., the science of reading) and those who study effective literacy instruction—work across paradigms to research the nuances of these processes, particularly in ways that study diverse student and teacher populations in various real‐world classroom contexts.