This paper uses a four-noded quadrilateral Reissner-Mindlin plate bending element for mesh adaptation. To overcome the problems of ''locking'' in the thin plate limit and zero energy modes the transverse shear strains are not evaluated from the displacements and rotations but are separately interpolated. The element is used in a hierarchical mesh adaptation which uses a node-averaging-based energy norm error estimator. Several examples illustrate the use of the adaptive algorithm.