Rosenshine's Principles in Action

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Rosenshine’s principles of instruction, divided into Sherrington’s four strands (image by Oliver Caviglioli) In discussion of Rosenshine’s fourth principle, Sherrington divides the models Rosenshine describes into three types: Rosenshine uses the term ‘schema’ to denote a well-connected network of ideas (Rosenshine, p. 19). Schemata play an important role in his principles, relating to the cognitive science of learning, particularly theories about the ways information gets stored in long-term memory. Was at your Research Ed presentation on Saturday about this – compelling stuff and I was particularly intrigued by your description of teaching about magnets and magnetism – fascinating phenomenon. And if we take Brian Arthur’s view that technology can be seen as the exploitation of phenomenon that have been revealed, explored and explained by science this provides an interesting opportunity for science d&t collaboration. Students explore the phenomenon in science lessons; take the results of their exploration into their d&t lessons where they are challenged with, “Well, how can you exploit the phenomenon of magnetism?” Some of the explorations might be on paper only, some might develop small-scale models and some might develop working prototypes. I think it is likely that such exploitations would lead to a significantly enhanced understanding of magnetism as well as providing the opportunity for some open ended D&T. These ideas are usefully summarised by Tom Sherrington in his book, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action. [2] Rosenshine’s principles are supported by a learning model from contemporary cognitive science, which Sherrington summarises as follows (Sherrington, pp. 10-12):

Mainly, it’s the contradictions. In the conclusion the author shares some ‘improvement agendas’ which roughly focus on each strand of principles. Sherrington makes it clear that teachers and leaders should focus on one thing at a time, rather than aiming for improvements across multiple areas. This contradicts his earlier comment that there is likely crossover between the principles themselves, making it hard to focus on development in one particular area. If you are focusing on developing scaffolding techniques then you might well end up working on ways to support learners moving from guided/controlled practice to independent practice. There doesn’t seem a need to focus on developing individual strategies only, just an awareness that you can’t focus on everything at once. After listing the seventeen instructional principles above, Rosenshine outlines his ten principles of instruction (pp. 13-19 and 39). The principles are clearly illustrated and briefly summarised in the poster below, by Oliver Caviglioli: Sherrington writes that this strategy is a ‘powerful mode of questioning and a form of guided practice’. This would need to be carefully incorporated into lesson planning for it to be successfully adopted as the default method of questioning, given the time it will take to ask each student several questions. Depending on class sizes, if it were the default approach, a set of students could be chosen each lesson to be asked questions, so there’s roughly an even balance across the students over a term or course. These principles are centrally concerned with the acquisition of knowledge. So, for most ELT contexts, that would mean grammar rules and initial learning of form-meaning pairings with vocabulary. My question, then, is how relevant is this to language learning? Obviously, language learning entails a lot of learning of knowledge, but we know that deliberate learning is often not the best way of going about it. No?Rosenshine reduces those seventeen procedures to his ten ‘principles of instruction’. The fourth of those ten principles is: Stages of practice: Sherrington’s fourth strand, involving Rosenshine’s fifth, seventh and ninth principles So, it’s better not to set up a choice between them. Taken together, the ‘Rosenshine ten’ plus the ‘Wiliam five’ make a great framework.

By language learning are you referring to some end state (like mastery), learning with an immediate goal/need to communicate, or something else?Working in an international school really makes me think about how some subjects are ‘content’ focused (facts and info), but language is something else. Sadly, this is where I can’t quite verbalise what I mean (and am not going the extra mile to study it more), so I stop talking about it! 😅 Get a response from all students in the class to a question, problem or task – e.g., multiple-choice questions, diagrams or calculations. This can be done verbally or through a written task. The free space in working memory helps us to perform other tasks, such as learning something new. Our working memory is limited; if we use much of it for recalling what we have learned, we have less available to engage in other mental activities important to learning. ‘The available space can be used’, Rosenshine writes, ‘for reflecting on new information and for problem solving’ (p. 19). Ultimately, I think a possible role for these principles in language learning is a matter of preference. That said, if your preference happens to be anti the type of core skills development that a teacher might encounter on an ITT course like the CELTA, then yeah, they’d be naff.

Teachers ask questions and … select students to respond based on their knowledge of the class, avoiding the pitfalls of hands-up or calling out.’ Sherrington adds some detail to the strand summaries in the poster above in a blog post where he argues that Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’ is ‘THE must-read for all teachers’.Rosenshine gives the name ‘more effective teachers’ to those teachers whose classrooms made the highest gains in standardised achievement tests (Rosenshine, p. 12). He also refers to more effective teachers as ‘master teachers’. The teaching practices of more effective teachers constitute one of the sources of evidence Rosenshine uses to support his principles. A free copy turned up at our house – they gave them out to all staff at my wife’s school. It is a good book, it’s just that half of it is already available for free anyway, so… This method of assisting students towards independent learning and mastery over tasks and skills relates to the concept of ‘scaffolding’: temporary instructional supports used to assist learners, which should be gradually withdrawn as students gain competency (Rosenshine, p. 18). As students gain mastery over a task or skill, less scaffolding is required and students can complete more of the steps in the learning process themselves. Rosenshine and Sherrington argue that using many worked examples supports the process of developing mastery. ‘Master teachers’

Rosenshine and Sherrington recommend that teachers provide many worked examples and then leave students to finish problems by themselves. The extent to which students complete tasks by themselves depends how far along they are in the process of mastery over the task or skill in question (Sherrington, p. 21). The extent to which students complete problems by themselves is expressed by Rosenshine in terms of the number of steps in a learning process students are expected to complete by themselves. Rosenshine writes that more effective teachers incorporate modelling and scaffolding into the process of offering explanations. By so doing, Rosenshine suggests that master teachers provide well-structured support for students as they build their schemata for new concepts (Sherrington, p. 15). ‘Schemata’Rosenshine suggests that a success rate of around 70% is too low. In the only issue he raises with Rosenshine’s principles, Sherrington suggests that we shouldn’t worry too much about the precision here; we might find that a lower success rate is in fact optimum. Sherrington divides Rosenshine’s ten principles into four ‘strands’. Each strand contains two or three of the principles. He argues that these four strands run throughout all of Rosenshine’s principles: Coaching in Pairs or Threes.. and why this can be much better than coaching individuals. October 17, 2023 Objective: to engage all students in teacher-student dialogue with time to think, preventing students from being overlooked, dominating, or hiding from involvement in dialogue.