Mrs Geography: Those who can teach

Rosenshine’s Principles in Action. By Tom Sherrington

Below is a brief summary of Rosenshine’s Principles in Action allowing teachers to reflect on their teaching practice, as well as support those seeking to engage in cognitive science and educational research.

Strand 1: Sequencing concepts and modelling

  • Present new material in small steps, allowing time for students to practice procedures or apply concepts at each stage.
  • Provide models. This is crucial when giving good explanations, allowing abstract examples to become more concrete. Using worked-examples reduces cognitive load, develops student metacognition and self-regulation.
  • Scaffold for difficult tasks. But be warned, if over used,  there is a risk students become too reliant on such practice.

Strand 2: Questioning

Ask questions. Effective teachers ask significantly more questions than those less effective. Asking more questions involves more students, probes knowledge in greater detail and allows time to explain, clarify and check understanding.

Strand 3: Reviewing material (daily, weekly, monthly)

Unless we review what we’ve learned, our memory of that information diminishes; we remember fewer details, fewer connections and find it harder to retrieve what we previously learned. Retrieval practice supports building our long-term memory and our level of fluency in recall. pg 35

We all want to ensure our students have learnt the content we intend for them to learn. So we need to provide students time to commit such content to their long-term memory by incorporating retrieval practice activities into our curriculum.

This may be in the form of a weekly quiz, geog your memory style homework, setting practice exam questions on previous content taught or even looking at your curriculum design to see where content and skills could be revisited.

Strand 4: Stages of practice

  • Guide student practice to develop understanding and confidence, whilst limiting the chance of errors and misconceptions.
  • Encourage independent practice. Effective teachers allow time for students to practice procedures and concepts independently, when they are ready, with many teachers adopting the ‘I do, We do, You do’ model.

 

If you are interesting in understanding Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction beyond the brief summary above, I would highly recommend Tom Sherrington’s short and concise overview!