Rosenshine's Principles in Action

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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. These ideas are usefully summarised by Tom Sherrington in his book, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action.

Rosenshine describes the advantages of the principle for teaching and learning and often outlines specific case studies to demonstrate effective uses of each principle. This is a type of modelling where teachers explicitly narrate their thought processes in tasks, such as solving mathematical problems (Sherrington, p. It’s reassuring this headteacher recognizes that practitioners shouldn’t take the principles as gospel. It wouldn’t surprise me if they originally were – not a criticism in any way as the author’s voice really comes through. Scaffolds’ are temporary instructional supports used to assist learners, which should be gradually withdrawn as students gain competency (p.

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.

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. 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.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. I’m not a fan of the way that Bloom’s taxonomy is (mis)used in language learning / teaching contexts. The Principles will be more directly relevant to the parts of a curriculum where the learning relies on teacher modelling; when there is a specific knowledge base that is best delivered by teacher instruction; where learners are more definitely novices relative to the teacher. In a CLIL context like mine I feel less inclined to consider language learning as something separate from subject content or something that doesn’t require deliberate learning at times.

As I’ve outlined in this post about the five Wiliam/Thompson strategies Revisiting Dylan Wiliam’s Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies. 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.

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. 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. If a teacher were, for example, setting class tests and the whole class were regularly scoring 95-100%, the teacher should make the tests harder, to ensure the class is sufficiently stretched and challenged. Rosenshine’s second principle emphasises the importance of learning material in small steps, given the limited capacity of our working memory.

How relevant these principles are to the language classroom might depend on your stance re: interface or your views towards direct instruction.Most importantly, using questioning to check for student understanding helps teachers to gain feedback about how successful teaching and learning has been. Where there is more emphasis on collaborative learning, open-ended project work, devising, making and so on, then instructional teaching will be less of a focus. Different lessons in a learning sequence will require a different focus: some might have more explanatory modelling; more questioning or more independent practice. Effective questioning methods engage students and give them opportunities to explain what they have learned. By so doing, Rosenshine suggests that master teachers provide well-structured support for students as they build their schemata for new concepts (Sherrington, p.