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). In future blog posts this term, we’ll explore Rosenshine’s principles and Sherrington’s strands in closer detail. Rosenshine suggests that a success rate of around 70% is too low. In the only issue he raises with Rosenshine’s principles, Sherrington suggests that we shouldn’t worry too much about the precision here; we might find that a lower success rate is in fact optimum.

The idea behind scaffolding is that ‘cognitive supports’ are provided and are gradually withdrawn as a student gains competency.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). Modelling helps with learning by, for example, helping students see how to solve problems or structure essays. Modelling complements the second principle because it can help to clarify the specific steps involved in learning. Modelling can be carried out by, for instance, the use of ‘worked examples’: 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’ (p. 15). Rosenshine argues that the most effective teaching involves many worked examples. 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. Objective: to engage all students in teacher-student dialogue with time to think, preventing students from being overlooked, dominating, or hiding from involvement in dialogue.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. Sequencing concepts and modelling: Sherrington’s third strand, involving Rosenshine’s second, fourth and eighth principles 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).

In this stage, Rosenshine explains the principle and the research findings supporting the importance of the principle. Rosenshine describes the advantages of the principle for teaching and learning and often outlines specific case studies to demonstrate effective uses of each principle. 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. In the section on ‘In the classroom’ under the third principle, ‘Ask questions’, Rosenshine includes a set of stems for questions that teachers of literature, social science and science might ask students, based on the research of A. King (p. 15). [4] Basically, I’m just not sure Sherrington should have listed any type of staging framework here. It’s potentially misleading for less experienced teachers, it contradicts his comments on variety, and from an ELT perspective it is certainly a questionable framework to have chosen. One misleading aspect of this model might be that ‘basic’ may be seen as synonymous with ‘essential’, and very important stages that are not listed here are seen as optional add-ons. For example, there is no mention of context building or accessing prior knowledge before the presentation stage. 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).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. This image features on p. 19 of Rosenshine’s article in its 2012 publication in American Educator. It’s also discussed in this blog post on Rosenshine’s principles by Tom Sherrington. Second, explore the implications of each principle at a subject-specific level. The principles and the strands into which Sherrington divides them need to be contextualised for successful implementation and applicability. They ‘have meaning’, Sherrington writes, ‘only in the context of curriculum content’.

then offers practical examples for how to apply each principle. The resource is short but provides concise examples of each ‘principle in action’ across a range of subjects. We forget information that we don’t initially store successfully in a meaningful schema or we don’t retrieve frequently enough. Nevertheless, the pamphlet is highly accessible for teachers and the principles are no doubt relatable for most teachers (I’m not sure they are necessarily common sense, as Sherrington suggests). It provides a succinct list of evidence-based core skills, and is a really useful document for CPD. 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: Rosenshine writes that less effective teachers asked fewer questions and almost no ‘process questions’ – questions about the process of learning, such as how students worked something out (contrast, for example, with factual questions) ( ibid.).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. New information typically only becomes stored if we can connect it to knowledge we already have; therefore, prior knowledge significantly influences our capacity to learn.