Rosenshine’s Teaching Principles emerged from a desire to enhance learning outcomes and offer a systematic approach to learning. By synthesizing various aspects of teaching, Rosenshine developed an approach to teaching that optimizes effective instruction.
Over time, these principles have evolved to accommodate diverse learning styles, incorporating cognitive science insights to further improve their efficacy. Teachers who adopt Rosenshine’s Principles can expect to create a more engaging learning environment that caters to students’ individual needs and fosters better understanding and retention of subject matter.
A professor and expert of Educational Psychology, Barak Rosenshine (1930 – 2017) at the University of Illinois explored teacher instruction along with Robert Stevens and identified the effectiveness of methods and approaches that were practised by the most successful teachers. Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’ (2010) are based on the following three sources:
- Research on scaffolds and cognitive supports, such as the use of instructional procedures and models, enabled students to grasp difficult tasks.
- Directly observing ‘practices of master teachers’, those effective teachers whose students made the most educational progress as calculated by the attainment tests. These directed on characteristics such as how these teachers taught new information and made precise links to previous learning, how they monitored and examined the knowledge of their students, how they offered opportunities for practice and rehearsal, and the kinds of support used for scaffolding the knowledge retention and development of understanding.
- Research on Cognitive Science on how the human brain acquires and utilizes new knowledge. This offers knowledge of how to endure the limitations of students’ long-term memory when trying to learn new conceptual ideas.
Through the above sources, Barak Rosenshine specified seventeen effective methods of instruction, used as the teaching practices of ‘master’ teachers within their effective lessons to facilitate the most effective student learning to occur. If you are tasked with the job of moving the principles forward in your school then this article will help you think about the implementation of the principles and the professional learning that needs to accompany it.
These broad principles offer educators high-level concepts to focus on and they shouldn’t be seen as a tick box exercise. If you have responsibilities for teaching and learning across your institution then we encourage you to think about the educational theory that sits behind the principles. Once educators have a grasp on these ideas, then they can choose instructional practices that meet the classroom demands they face.
Within this article, you could also download a top-level PDF that explains these principles in an easy to understand graphical format. Please do feel free to download this and use it for your CPD activities.
Rosenshine’s most effective methods of instruction
In recent years, the principles of instruction have received a lot of interest. They provide a welcome set of broad principles that can be adapted to meet most contexts. They are not meant to be seen as ‘instructional straitjackets’ but guiding principles that can be embraced by teachers from all backgrounds. In the UK, schools are moving towards an evidence based profession. The methods outlined by Rosenshine are a great first step for a school that wants to adopt evidence-informed teaching behaviours.
As with all teaching frameworks, it’s important to develop a strong understanding of the rationale behind the methods otherwise teaching staff are left using the methods without any clear direction.
- Start a new lesson with a brief review of the previous lesson.
- Introduce new material in brief steps with student practice following each step.
- There needs to be a limit to the number of material students deal with at one time.
- Give easy to understand and detailed instructions and descriptions.
- Ask many clear questions and test students understanding.
- Guide students when they start to practice.
- Offer a high-quality and active practice to the students.
- Model steps and think
- Use worked-out problems as models.
- Ask learners to demonstrate what they have learned.
- Check each student’s response to the teaching.
- Provide corrections and systematic feedback.
- Spend ample time of the class in providing explanations.
- Provide concise explanations
- Re-teach complex material whenever needed.
- Students must be prepared to perform the independent practice.
- Students must be monitored during the independent practice.
For more on this topic see:
https://www.structural-learning.com/post/rosenshines-principles-a-teachers-guide