Are there any downsides to Barak Rosenshine’s principles of effective instruction?
Rosenshine’s research highlights the importance of active learning, systematic teaching, and continuous assessment in the teaching process.
With some disclaimers, I am a big fan of Barak Rosenshine’s seminal research, the 17 Principles of Effective Instruction.
I first came across the research in 2015 despite its first publication in 1982; it has reached national popularity across England and, in some cases, has morphed into a methodology for teaching and learning in many schools.
This isn’t a bad thing. However, how these principles are evaluated in the classroom is really the greater problem.
I want to ignore the quality assurance processes for now and in this blog, turn to another paper published by Rosenshine himself and Robert J. Stevens, a retired professor of educational psychology at Pennsylvania State University.
Teaching functions teachers should employ
The research paper is titled, Teaching Functions (1986)
This paper discusses the roles of a teacher in a classroom, the principles of instruction, and the methods teachers should employ to achieve their teaching goals effectively.
The purpose of this research was to study those successful teacher training and student achievement programmes and identify any common teaching functions which they emphasised.
For teachers who are familiar with any academic research, all published research comes with limitations and context. It is those I wish to focus on.
For now, at the time of publication, 9 principles were identified:
- Begin a lesson with a short review of prerequisite learning.
- Begin a lesson with a short statement of goals.
- Present new material in small steps, with student practice after each step.
- Give clear and detailed instructions and explanations.
- Provide a high level of active practice for all students.
- Ask a large number of questions, check for student understanding, and obtain responses from all students.
- Guide students during initial practice.
- Provide systematic feedback and corrections.
- Provide explicit instruction and practice for seatwork exercises and, where necessary, monitor students during seatwork.
The major component included systematic feedback, which is today commonly known as ‘check for understanding’.
There’s a good reason why I’ve published my next book, Guide To Questioning – you can read my research to date on this very topic. Teachers can pose up to 300 questions per day in the classroom.
Therefore, it is essential teachers regularly check the learning; the ability to have a range of techniques to hand and to be able to do it well requires conscious effort. Sometimes I do wonder if this is the critical aspect of all the principles put together?
If you have ever read the original paper (1982), the phrase check for ‘understanding’ features (coincidentally) 17 times!
Potential pitfalls of Rosenshine
Here is a bold disclaimer from Rosenshine on page 2 of the above paper:
It would be a mistake to claim that the teaching procedures which have emerged from this research apply to all subjects, and all learners, all the time.
It’s important not just to cherry-pick things that suit your bias but approach all research recommendations with a broad perspective, developing a methodology for identifying research, selecting and taking recommendations forward.
The research continues:
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.
This is an interesting one because when we think about domain-specific knowledge, in my opinion, this underpins everything that we learn to be able to do, whether it’s knowing arithmetic, vocabulary, or the ability to understand grammar in a foreign language.
The greater challenge for us all is, when we get into the realms of metacognition, how do we explicitly teach the skills that we need to be able to solve new problems or unfamiliar situations?
The Rosenshine paper mentions:
These findings are least applicable for teaching in areas which are “ill-structured”, that is, where the skills to be taught do not follow explicit steps, or areas which lack a general skill which is applied repeatedly.
For example, it’s one thing teaching you how to structure a blog post (like this one) with various paragraphs laid out; the greater challenge is how to teach you as a reader to appreciate this blog post. Whether I would call this “ill-structured” or not, I must reflect on this statement and will respond in the comments below.
Either way, this is a short 22-page paper I would encourage you to have a look through.
Conclusions and recommendations for teachers
Rosenshine and Stevens conclude:
… now that we can list the major functions or components which are necessary for systematic instruction, we can turn to explore different ways in which these functions can be effectively fulfilled.”
So, how should schools use Rosenshine in an early years context, primary, secondary or further education?
Well, I hope for starters, that the schools who have used Rosenshine’s principles to guide their teaching and learning policies have frequently discussed the principles with all teachers to determine what these look like across all subjects, year groups and at different times of the academic year.
When we think about the research on retrieval practice (check for understanding), the task, format and time of day are all connected with retrieval strength.
This looks like in a primary or secondary clash and requires contacts, and how this is evaluated requires deeper nuance.
Given that it is now 40 years since the original paper was first published, I’d hope that there was an abundance of recommendations available for us all.
At last, a main stream commentator willing to question the cult of Rosenshine.
So Rosenshine is not the silver bullet? Reassuring to say the least.
Yes, and the view that the specialist subject doesn’t matter, and that one technique is universally applicable. If you teach a ‘discursive subject’ – humanities, social sciences, it can be very hard to break the subject down into skills etc, as in Maths.