Rosenshine's Principles in Action

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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. 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. Anyway, Sherrington’s practical suggestions are insightful and his style highly personable. His coverage of each principle reads a bit as a blog post. It wouldn’t surprise me if they originally were – not a criticism in any way as the author’s voice really comes through.

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. If students ‘don’t know or get things wrong, they should be given the opportunity to gain confidence by consolidating correct or secure answers’. Stages of practice: Sherrington’s fourth strand, involving Rosenshine’s fifth, seventh and ninth principles 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).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). 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. 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. explicit narration of teachers’ thought processes (e.g., when problem-solving) (Sherrington, p. 17).

E]ffective questioning lies at the heart of great instructional teaching. … [I]t’s clear that this needs to be a highly interactive, dynamic, responsive process.’ (Sherrington, p. 27.) 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). 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: Daily review supports the process of building up the amount of effective practice required to reach the level of mastery where recall is automatic. Rosenshine writes that thousands of hours of effective practice are required to reach this level (p. 13).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. 15). Rosenshine suggests that ‘more effective teachers’ often ‘provide students with many worked examples so that the general patterns are clear, providing a strong basis from which to learn’ (Sherrington, p. 21). By contrast, Rosenshine argues that ‘less effective teachers’ often do not ‘provide enough worked examples’, which adds to cognitive load, leaves students unsure of procedures and how to apply them (Sherrington, p. 21). An example of a daily review practice exhibited by the most effective teachers is that ‘they would begin their lessons with a five- to eight-minute review of previously covered material’, and would provide ‘additional practice on facts and skills that were needed for recall to become automatic’ (p. 13). At the end of ‘Daily review’, Rosenshine offers an additional five recommendations for classroom practices, the final of which recommends that teachers should ‘Review material that needs overlearning (i.e., newly acquired skills should be practiced well beyond the point of initial mastery, leading to automaticity)’ (p. 13). Rosenshine observes that there was no conflict between the evidence emerging from the above sources. Indeed, the findings from the above sources ‘supplement and complement each other’ (p. 12) and the ‘sources overlap and add to each other’ (p. 39). He states that the ways in which the evidence from the sources relate to one another supports the claim ‘that we are developing a valid and research-based understanding of the art of teaching’ (p. 39). 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.