Responsive Teaching Part 1: Learning is Recursive Not Linear

The first in a series of posts looking at how responsive teaching can be understood, implemented, and embedded within system-wide efforts to improve teaching and learning.

I’m currently in Australia working with a range of different schools and organisations across Sydney, Canberra, Griffith and Melbourne and one idea that is coming up again and again is that of responsive teaching. It’s a core part of the excellent AERO and VTLM models and there appears to be a concerted effort here to build a coherent, systematic approach to applying the core tenets of responsive teaching, not just as a classroom technique, but as a guiding principle across curriculum, assessment, and professional learning.

In this first post on responsive teaching, I want to outline the core principles of responsive teaching and offer some clarity to support instructional design and planning.

The Linear Learning Illusion

Walk into many classrooms, examine many curricula, and you'll find a predominantly linear model. Unit 1 builds to Unit 2, which enables Unit 3, in neat sequential fashion. Students are taught, assessed, deemed proficient, and moved along. The assumption is that learning happens discretely, definitively, and that understanding can be captured in a single moment of demonstration.

But these linear models appeal to systems more than they serve students. They make accountability look tidy. They promise that all students will arrive at the same destination at the same time. But learning is messy. It meanders, loops back, and crucially, it sometimes stalls before it accelerates.

To be clear, some aspects of learning are linear. Procedural fluency, foundational knowledge, and basic sequences like learning letter sounds or arithmetic facts often benefit from structured, sequential instruction and often occur in an episodic fashion.

But often the kind of learning we are after is the kind of learning that occurs much later. Richer, conceptual learning is about drawing together multiple elements and is more semantic in nature. In other words we are after meaningful learning and most meaningful understanding which we might define as more deeper, interconnected and durable emerges recursively. It’s here that the linear model breaks down, and where responsive teaching becomes helpful.

Learning's Recursive Reality

Consider how deep understanding actually develops. A student encounters photosynthesis in primary school as "plants make food from sunlight." Simple enough. But real understanding emerges through recursive encounters: when they study cellular respiration and realise the complex symmetry of oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange; when they grapple with energy transfer in physics and see photosynthesis as an energy conversion process; when they study ecology and understand it as the foundation of all food webs.

Each encounter doesn't simply add new information, it transforms the understanding that came before. The student doesn't just know more about photosynthesis; they know it differently. Their mental model becomes more sophisticated, more nuanced, more connected to other concepts. This is learning as refinement, not mere accumulation.

This recursive quality manifests in three crucial ways that form the basis for responsive teaching:

1. Students frequently need to re-encounter ideas in new contexts to deepen understanding.

   The mathematical concept of proportionality, for instance, might be introduced through simple ratios, but true fluency emerges only through encounters across multiple domains, in scaling recipes, analysing maps, understanding probability, interpreting graphs. Each context doesn't just apply the concept; it reveals new dimensions of it.

2. Misunderstandings emerge after we assume something has been learnt.

   How often have we seen students appear to master a concept, only to reveal fundamental confusions when encountering it in a new context? The student who can solve quadratic equations algorithmically but cannot recognise a parabolic relationship in a real-world problem has learnt something, but not what we thought they had learnt. Their understanding is brittle, contextually bound, waiting to be revealed as incomplete.

3. Progress often involves refinement, not simple accumulation.

   A student's understanding of democracy isn't built by simply adding facts about voting systems and constitutional structures. It deepens through recursive grappling with concepts of representation, majority rule versus minority rights, the tension between freedom and order. Each encounter refines their mental model, sometimes requiring them to abandon earlier, simpler understandings in favour of more complex ones.

What is Responsive Teaching?

Given that learning is recursive in nature, then this strongly suggests that teaching should be a responsive in its design not merely reactive.

Responsive teaching is an approach to instruction that prioritises ongoing assessment and adaptation. It means using evidence of student thinking, before, during, and after teaching to adjust instruction in real time.

Responsive teachers make deliberate decisions based on how well students have understood, where misconceptions lie, and what support is needed next. It is grounded in the understanding that learning is not linear and that understanding develops over time through feedback, clarification, and revisiting key ideas.

Responsive teaching recognises that apparent mastery often masks underlying confusion, that understanding deepens through varied encounters, and that progress sometimes requires temporary regression as students reorganise their mental models. It demands that teachers become skilled diagnosticians, capable of recognising not just what students know, but how they know it and where their understanding might be brittle or incomplete. In our book How Teaching Happens, we focused a few chapters on Lee Schulman’s idea of PCK and the idea that the superpower of teachers is not just that they know the content they are teaching, but that they know it in several ways.

They know how 8 year olds can misunderstand photosynthesis, they can spot those misunderstandings and then they have a repertoire of explanations, analogies, illustrations to respond to that misconception and clarify it for the student.

Lethal Mutations: What Responsive Teaching is NOT

Like many powerful educational ideas, responsive teaching has suffered from what we might call "lethal mutations”, well-intentioned misinterpretations that fundamentally alter its DNA. These mutations are particularly dangerous because they often masquerade as the real thing, leading to implementations that not only fail to improve learning but can actively undermine it.

Understanding what responsive teaching is not is therefore crucial for its effective implementation. These misconceptions aren't merely academic—they represent the difference between principled practice that honours how learning actually occurs and educational romanticism that might feel good but ultimately fails students.

• Responsive teaching is not following every student interest without structure. This confusion stems from misunderstanding "student-centred" pedagogy. If we’re focussed on what students are truly capable of then we’re thinking of what they’re yet to know, not just what they think they know. We’re introducing them to brave new words beyond their own interests.

• Responsive teaching is about learning not activities. Truly responsive teaching maintains clear learning intentions and curriculum coherence while adapting the pathway to those goals based on student understanding. It's about empowering teachers with a range of instructional strategies to use in real time to meet the needs of their students. One way to plan a bad lesson is to start with activities instead of learning.

• Responsive teaching is not differentiation by ability grouping. While differentiation often focuses on providing different content or tasks based on perceived ability levels, responsive teaching focuses on understanding how all students are making sense of the same important concepts. It's about adjusting instruction based on student thinking, not sorting students into fixed categories or prejudging what they are capable of.

• Responsive teaching is not just questioning techniques or "wait time." While skilled questioning is certainly part of responsive practice, reducing it to simple techniques misses the deeper diagnostic work required. Responsive teaching demands sophisticated understanding of how misconceptions develop, where students are likely to struggle, and how to interpret the evidence of student thinking in real time.

• Responsive teaching is not reactive teaching. Perhaps most importantly, responsive teaching is not simply reacting to whatever emerges in the moment without pedagogical purpose. Reactive teaching bounces from student comment to student comment without maintaining focus on learning goals. Responsive teaching uses evidence of student thinking to make deliberate instructional moves that advance understanding toward clear objectives.

• Responsive teaching is not abandoning curriculum progression. Some educators mistakenly believe that being responsive means letting student interests dictate the curriculum sequence. Instead, responsive teaching works within coherent curriculum progressions, using evidence of student understanding to determine when to advance, when to consolidate, and when to approach concepts from different angles.

These misconceptions often arise when responsive teaching is implemented as a collection of techniques rather than understood as a principled approach grounded in how learning actually works. The recursive nature of learning demands systematic responsiveness, not pedagogical permissiveness.

In the next post, I'll explore checking for understanding, the key lever of responsive teaching what it looks like in practice and later how schools can develop the systems and culture needed to support it.