Rosenshine's Principles in Action

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Sherrington offers two important pieces of advice on how to best engage with Rosenshine’s principles: 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.

Sherrington writes that the first principle is important for recalling learning from the previous lesson. Activating relevant prior learning in the working memory is particularly important when teachers wish to introduce new learning. Sherrington suggests that daily review is also important for developing students’ fluency and confidence in a subject.Agree a focus on small number of the principles – perhaps one of the four strands I explore – with individuals committing to develop and practise them in a specific series of lessons.

In relation to the above learning model, Rosenshine suggests that more effective teachers recognise the need to deal with the limitations of working memory by breaking down concepts and procedures into small steps, and ensure that students have the opportunity to practise each step (Sherrington, p. 15).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. 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. The final of those concerns a type of modelling where the teacher ‘thinks aloud’. Rosenshine suggests that more effective teachers are ‘able to narrate the decisions and choices they make’ – for example, where to begin with a maths problem or how to start an essay (Sherrington, p. 20). This is a type of modelling where teachers explicitly narrate their thought processes in tasks, such as solving mathematical problems (Sherrington, p. 17).

Rosenshine writes that review ‘can help us strengthen the connections among the material we have learned’ (p. 13). An idea Rosenshine emphasises throughout his principles is that recalling prior learning should ideally be automatic. ‘Automaticity’ is the stage where learning and practice has been undertaken such that recall is effortless, thereby freeing working memory capacity (p. 13). Working memory is the area of memory where we process information. It has very limited capacity and can only handle a few pieces of information at once (p. 13). However, the tasks and techniques you use for any review process might be the same – there’s a whole repertoire of retrieval practice techniques teachers might use including these: 10 Techniques for Retrieval Practice The process of a student gradually gaining independence through modelling and scaffolding as their mastery over a skill or task increases is sometimes called ‘cognitive apprenticeship’. This is the process where a ‘master’ of a skill – i.e., someone who has achieved a level of mastery – teaches that skill to a student (‘apprentice’). The master also supports the apprentice as they become independent at proficiently completing the task or engaging in the skill in question (Rosenshine, p. 18). 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:The teacher provides students with temporary supports and scaffolds to assist them when they learn difficult tasks’ (p. 18).