How language supports adaptive teaching through a responsive learning culture.

Addressing classroom developmental diversity requires creating conditions for optimal learning. Optimal learning is most likely when students are engaged, when learning resources including peers, books, classroom anchor charts, and so forth, are accessible, and when students recognize where in the classroom they can find the necessary support or information they need when they need it. 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 to ensure each student is learning optimally. The focus of this paper is on how forms of classroom talk make this possible, how making teaching adaptive, means building individual and collective engagement around imaginative possibilities, using language that is invitational, emphasizes noticing, intentionality, causal processes, thinking together and individual and collective self-co