Rosenshine's Principles in Action

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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. 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.

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: Rosenshine’s ‘Principles’ provides a highly accessible bridge between educational research and classroom practice. The principles are research-based, extensively drawing upon research in education and cognitive science. Rosenshine expresses the principles succinctly and offers suggestions for the implementation of the principles in the classroom. He provides many examples of activities employed in the teaching practices of ‘master teachers’ – i.e., teachers whose students made the highest gains in achievement tests (p. 12). 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’The process of teachers narrating their thought processes involves, as Sherrington puts it, making ‘the implicit explicit’. By this, Sherrington means that those who have achieved mastery over a particular task or skill do not need to make their methods or ways of thinking explicit for them to complete the task or engage in the skill proficiently. Making these explicit can help others learn how to better complete the task or engage in the skill in question.

This being the case, there is also a research consensus that language acquisition is mainly driven by attempting to do communicative things with language, such as learning another subject matter in CLIL or involvement in communicative tasks in more general ELT contexts (rather than learning ‘facts and information’). It’s in that sense that I wonder about the applicability of Rosenshine’s principles to language learning in a communicative classroom. I would agree that there is a need for some deliberate learning, but we probably shouldn’t overstate the case. Working memory is finite and quite small; therefore, we can only take in a limited amount of information at any one time. Like anything, it’s what you do with it that matters. I have a horror of SLTs that have already morphed this into a set of rules – expectations for every lesson, even to the point of them representing a linear sequence to form a lesson plan. That’s just a failure of understanding. 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.As our schemata become more fully formed and interconnected, we can explore our knowledge and retrieve it more fluently. Bruce Joyce and Martha Weil, quoted in W. Huitt, ‘Classroom instruction’ ( Educational Psychology Interactive) (Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University, 2003). Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step: Only present small amounts of new material at any time, and then assist students as they practice this material’ (p. 13).

Rosenshine reduces those seventeen procedures to his ten ‘principles of instruction’. The fourth of those ten principles is: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). The teacher provides students with temporary supports and scaffolds to assist them when they learn difficult tasks’ (p. 18). research from cognitive science – specifically, research concerning how the brain acquires and uses new information; 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:

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. 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. First published in 2010 by the International Academy of Education; republished in 2012 as‘Principles of Instruction: Research-based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know’, in American Educator. References are to the latter. explicit narration of teachers’ thought processes (e.g., when problem-solving) (Sherrington, p. 17). Re: ‘explicit to implicit’ and the connection between the two (if any)… while this may be equally refutable, I feel more aligned with Ullman’s research on this one – these are distinct memory systems that play different roles (I’m referring to declarative v procedural knowledge there). Yes, my views do tend to flit around, but the idea that declarative knowledge leads to procedural knowledge has always seemed a bit convenient/simplistic in all honesty. It has been a long while since I formally studied this area though so my current views are a tad bitty.There is a danger that by suggesting this is a ‘basic flow of many learning experiences’, the author (as an experienced teacher) is suggesting it is preferable, and it is very much taken out of subject context. 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). 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. Sherrington uses the strands to explain 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 practical advice for their implementation, in addition to that offered by Rosenshine. This week’s blog post explores Sherrington’s strands and Rosenshine’s principles in more detail. In that article, Rosenshine lists seventeen ‘principles of effective instruction’; these serve as a synopsis of the article (Rosenshine, p. 19). Two of those concern modelling: