The process of teachers narrating their thought processes involves, as Sherrington puts it, making ‘the implicit explicit’. Provide models: Providing students with models and worked examples can help them learn to solve problems faster. It can be useful to use pair discussion to allow students space to rehearse their thinking before volunteering public answers; sometimes you can question some individuals while circulating during a practice phase. 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.

To avoid cognitive overload, Rosenshine argues that teachers should present information in small steps and only proceed to the next step once the previous steps have been mastered.It may be the case that declarative knowledge can play a compensatory role for a lack of procedural knowledge, but it seems very unlikely that it is the primary driver of language acquisition. I think language works differently and in a very basic way, the fact that we can learn a language without studying it, or without being fully aware of the bits that form the whole, seems to support that and go against the idea of teaching units of knowledge *about* language. While the paper rightly supports the need for guided practice, it was critiqued for failing to understand the nature of guidance in constructivist approaches. Model the techniques: get volunteers to show how the principles are enacted in lessons, bringing them alive, inviting questions and challenges, exploring potential obstacles. Sherrington connects the third and sixth of Rosenshine’s principles, ‘Ask questions’ and ‘Check for student understanding’.

You set a question or task that makes all of your students think about ideas they’ve encountered before, related to today’s lesson, so that they can start to make new links; to continue to build their schema. For the ninth principle only, ‘Independent practice’, Rosenshine includes a third stage, ‘Students helping students’. While such questions can be addressed to all students, they don’t help a teacher to figure out what, exactly, might not have been understood, nor by whom.He uses the strands to explain each of Rosenshine’s principles by connecting the principles with those to which they bear the closest relations, illustrating how the principles complement and support one another, and offering additional practical advice for their implementation. Discuss how they apply in the context of each subject area – they need to make sense in the context of the material the instruction relates to. After listing the seventeen instructional principles above, Rosenshine outlines his ten principles of instruction (pp. Modelling complements the second principle because it can help to clarify the specific steps involved in learning.

The ninth principle, ‘independent practice’, involves students practising tasks without guided practice from the teacher. 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. Our blog last week offered a brief introduction to Barak Rosenshine’s influential ‘Principles of Instruction’ and Tom Sherrington’s division of Rosenshine’s principles into four ‘strands’, in his book, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action. Also, sequencing concepts, modelling and scaffolding should allow all students to gain access to the ideas in hand and make steps towards understanding and fluency.Objective: for students to feel safe offering answers of which they are unsure and not form a ‘habit of … “I don’t know” … as a get-out’. Rosenshine’s principles are supported by a learning model from contemporary cognitive science, which Sherrington summarises as follows (Sherrington, pp. The process of sequencing can aid the process of gradually removing the scaffolds, hence the connection between the second and eighth principles. I’m not a fan of the way that Bloom’s taxonomy is (mis)used in language learning / teaching contexts. Here, there is a huge amount of work that has been done on the relationship between explicit knowledge (of ‘facts and information’) and implicit (or procedural knowledge) and the extent to which there is any mental interface between the two.

So, for most ELT contexts, that would mean grammar rules and initial learning of form-meaning pairings with vocabulary. 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. Effective questioning methods engage students and give them opportunities to explain what they have learned. In his ‘Principles of Instruction’, [1] Barak Rosenshine emphasises the importance of questioning in effective teaching and learning.The more often we do this, the greater ease we have when we try to connect any new material we learn with our existing knowledge. A ‘worked example’ is a form of modelling where a teacher provides ‘a step-by-step demonstration of how to perform a task or how to solve a problem’ (Rosenshine, p. I flicked through this book at a friend’s house (he’s a history teacher) and thought it might make interesting reading. For instance, for a student to feel comfortable airing their initial thoughts or confessing their lack of knowledge, they might need to be paired with a student of not too dissimilar a level of ability to themselves; and students who tend to dominate discussion might be best paired with students who are not easily dominated in discussion. 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.