Since I have been using Rosenshine’s principles, I have found that less of my teaching time is wasted, my lessons have become more efficient and students have been making more progress. Each of Sherrington’s strands contains two or three of Rosenshine’s principles. Sherrington argues that these four strands run throughout all of Rosenshine’s principles: Rosenshine didn’t intend this paper to be the final word on instructional functions, more as an opening gateway to further research. As Rosenshine himself said:

It does an excellent job in helping teachers to link practice to cognitive psychology, supporting the formation of a sound theory of action– that mental model teachers need providing a link between their actions and the learning process. There are multiple explanatory references to ideas about memory and cognitive load theory. For each practical strategy, there is an underpinning model based in evidence. This strategy aims to give those students who don’t know the answer or get an answer incorrect opportunities to learn from others in the class and to practise. It also avoids fostering the defensive habit of ‘I don’t know’. How do you go from this nuance and caution to a “listicle” of 10 must-do teaching practices? Well, the key is to look at the article on which the American Educator entry was based. Scaffolds’ are temporary instructional supports used to assist learners, which should be gradually withdrawn as students gain competency (p. 18). Modelling can function as a form of scaffolding, as can teaching methods such as the teacher thinking aloud. ‘Thinking aloud’ is a form of scaffolding where a teacher shows the thought processes they go through as they undertake a task which students need to learn how to perform themselves (p. 18).If students ‘don’t know or get things wrong, they should be given the opportunity to gain confidence by consolidating correct or secure answers’. 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. 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). Rosenshine “was a leading authority in his field in terms of what good teaching means, so we wanted to spotlight one of the booklets on his work”, she recalled. But we’d had the message drilled into us that if you’re talking, the students aren’t learning. In my first job, we were timed with stopwatches to make sure we didn’t talk for more than 10 per cent of a lesson.”

Meanwhile, Professor John Hattie says he had similar issues with his book, Visible Learning. “My fundamental argument - and the reason we wrote the book - is that it should be about how teachers think, how school leaders think, as they do their job,” he told Tes in January. “That is a message I probably did not get as well across in the first book. The idea behind scaffolding is that ‘cognitive supports’ are provided and are gradually withdrawn as a student gains competency. In this way, scaffolding can help to develop a student’s expertise and mastery in a subject. Rosenshine writes that thinking aloud is an example of ‘effective cognitive support’ (p. 15).But he is in good company. There are plenty of high-profile examples of this, two of the biggest being the growth mindset and visible learning theories. In the blog post discussed above, Sherrington writes that Rosenshine’s principles provides ‘the best, most clear and comprehensive guide to evidence-informed teaching there is’. Among the reasons Sherrington offers for why all teachers should read Rosenshine’s ‘Principles’ are that it ‘resonates for teachers of all subjects and contexts’, ‘because it focuses on aspects of teaching that are pretty much universal’, including‘questioning, practice [and] building knowledge’; it ‘makes direct links from research to practice’; it ‘does an excellent job in helping teachers to link practice to cognitive psychology’, through, for example, Rosenshine’s ‘references to ideas about memory and cognitive load theory’; and the research ‘is often based on linking classroom observations to student outcomes’. As we saw in the previous blog post, Rosenshine also recommends that teachers often think aloud, as a form of modelling. This involves the explicit narration of teachers’ thought processes – for example, when problem-solving (Sherrington, p. 17). This form of modelling relates to the eighth of Rosenshine’s seventeen ‘instructional procedures’: ‘Think aloud and model steps’ (Rosenshine, p. 12). Rosenshine condenses those procedures into his ten principles. In actual fact, scaffolding is an effective way of doing this. Rather than handing learners the answers, scaffolding involves putting procedures and structures in place that guide learners through tasks, making new knowledge accessible and boosting their independence through practice. As many readers will know (though some won’t), Rosenshine’s popular article is actually a version of a piece that he had written two years earlier, in 2010, for the International Academy of Education (IAE), a not-for-profit association that promotes “educational research, and its dissemination and implementation”.

This article originally appeared in the 4 September 2020 issue under the headline “In search of the real Rosenshine” References 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. Weekly and monthly review is about longer-term retrieval practice – to continue the process of building long-term memory to support future learning. Questioning Beatty sees Rosenshine’s arguments as leading towards a “drill and practice” model of instruction and a move away from “student ownership of and initiative within the learning design, further entrenching the synchronous factory model of instruction.”

Enser, too, thinks that the principles can be applied to pretty much any teaching approach. “The only thing I can think is that some are so wedded to a radical constructivist approach to teaching - where teachers should be facilitators - that Rosenshine’s principles get under their skin,” he explained. These explicit teaching procedures are most applicable in those areas where the objective is to master a body of knowledge or learn a skill which can be taught in a step-by-step manner…[and] less relevant for teaching composition and writing of term papers, analysis of literature, problem-solving in specific content areas, discussion of social issues, or the development of unique or creative responses.” The free space in working memory helps us to perform other tasks, such as learning something new. Our working memory is limited; if we use much of it for recalling what we have learned, we have less available to engage in other mental activities important to learning. ‘The available space can be used’, Rosenshine writes, ‘for reflecting on new information and for problem solving’ (p. 19).