Craig’n’Dave ROSENSHINE’S PRINCIPLES IN ACTION

Craig’n’Dave

ROSENSHINE’S PRINCIPLES IN ACTION

How Craig’n’Daveapply

principles of instructionCAS London 2020

This presentation considers Barak Rosenshine’s, “principles of instruction” and looks at how Craig and Dave have applied these principles in their classrooms.

We do this by exemplifying our own resources, but everything we discuss can be done with other resources too, not just ours. We also explore beyond resources to our classroom practice, “filling in the gaps” with the thing we call teaching.

1

Craig’n’Dave


WHAT

HOW

About Craig’n’Dave

WHY

We want to be the best teachers.

So that our students can be the best students.

You are all great teachers. If you weren’t you wouldn’t be here on a Saturday! We also believe we can all be better. Most teachers think about what they have got to teach, but for Craig and Dave we start with why, and then think about how before we consider what.

So why do we teach? Sure it is about inspiring young people in our subject, but it is also sadly about getting through exams! You don’t download knowledge into a student’s mind like a file from a file server, instead, learning is a generative, cognitive process of developing long‐term memory.

The “how” is extremely important and that’s what we are focussing on today through Rosenshine’s principles.

2

Craig’n’Dave


Who was Barak Rosenshine?

History teacher.

Professor of Education, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois.

Researched teacher performance and student achievement.

⁻ Teaching Behaviours and Student Achievement, 1971

⁻ Teaching functions, 1982

⁻ Principles of Instruction: research‐based strategies that all teachers should know, 2012

Rosenshine’s principles have been around for a long time. Much of what we present is based on these influential publications.

Tom Sherrington provided a useful summary of the work in his 2019 book, “Rosenshine’s principles in action” which is why it has recently gained traction again amongst senior leaders in school today.

The value in the principles is not that they are new, on the contrary, it is because they have stood the test of time that makes them very useful.

3

Craig’n’Dave


Rosenshine’s conclusionsWhat the research says is this...

In the classroom it looks like this…

More effective teachers typically do more of these things…

Less effective teachers typically do less of these things…

Cognitive Science

Observing teachers

Studies of interventions

Rosenshine gives us a simple and useful framework:1. What the research says is this…2. In the classroom it looks like this…So more effective teachers typically do things, and less effective teachers do less of those things.

His research was based on three aspects of study. The findings in these three aspects complimented each other which we might expect, but it is important that research resonates with a teacher’s experience if they are going to have confidence and believe in it. How many times have you sat in an inset session and wondered if it was a complete waste of your time? Or let me rephrase, you knew it was a waste of your time!

That’s because you don’t have time and space to think, question, evaluate, reflect, adapt and try. Or the luxury to fail. You can’t do what it takes to be a good learner yourself!

4

Craig’n’Dave


What successful teachers will be doingDaily review Check student understanding

New material in small steps Obtaining a high success rate

Ask questions Scaffolds for difficult tasks

Provide models Independent practice

Guide student practice Weekly & monthly review

So here is the essence of what Rosenshine says successful teachers will be doing more of: 10 key principles.

These will look very familiar to you. It’s the foundation on which you probably learned to teach, and it’s what you do every day.

5

Craig’n’Dave


Using the principles as a reflection tool

Ask questions

Less effective questioning

More effective questioning

There are few teachers that couldn’t do this:

‐ More intensively

‐ More consistently

‐ To better effect

There are probably no teachers that couldn’t do these things even better, more intensively or more consistently, and that’s the key to understanding and unlocking the secret of Rosenshine’s principles.

6

Craig’n’Dave


The misconception about principles in actionIt’s not about a ground‐breaking new initiative, instead it’s about asking yourself, how well you do what effective teachers do.

When do you teach great, well prepared, well thought‐out lessons?When you are observed, or when nobody is looking?

It’s about our daily teaching habits.

At last, no new initiative from a member of SLT just advancing their career, here today and gone tomorrow!

We need to get away from this idea that leaders have the monopoly on “how to teach”. Teaching a lesson one way to impress my HoD or SLT and then another way when nobody is looking. It’s about looking at our habits and trying to make those as effective as they can be day in, day out. Not changing what you do because someone is observing, but instead having confidence that what you are doing is best for your students.

Crucially, it’s not about whether you are doing things or not doing things, because you are doing these things! Instead it’s about asking yourself how well are you doing what you are doing? For example, we all ask students questions, but how well do we do it, and how do we create opportunities to do it more?

7

Craig’n’Dave


What does it mean to be an effective teacher?“Clank” always got the best results in the team.

His lessons were amazing…

It’s worth taking a little segue here to ask what we mean by “effective teaching” and “success”. The assumption here is that we are talking about student achievement or results. The simple memory of facts and understandings. Indeed, Rosenshine assumed this too. He was interested in teacher performance and student achievement.

I once worked with a teacher who did exam questions from day 1. Not at the end of the lesson, that WAS the lesson, every lesson. Just exam question after exam question, nothing else. Surprisingly, he achieved the best results, consistently. He was clearly doing something right – if that’s how you measure success. The students performed exceptionally well, but they were bored and hated the lessons. They didn’t want to pursue the subject at a higher level beyond school.

8

Craig’n’Dave


1. Sequencing conceptsDaily review Check student understanding





We’re going to simplify ten principles to four related discussions. The first is sequencing concepts: new material in small steps, providing models and scaffolds.

9

Craig’n’Dave


1. Sequencing concepts: small steps

#Program to output the lowest of two numbersnum1 = int(input("Enter the first number: ")) num2 = int(input("Enter the second number: "))

if num1 <= num2: lowest = num1

else: lowest = num2

print("The lowest number is:")print(lowest)

#Function to return the lowest of two parametersdef lower_num(num1,num2):

if num1 <= num2: return num1

else: return num2

first_num = int(input("Enter the first number: ")) second_num = int(input("Enter the second number: ")) lowest = lower_num(first_num,second_num) print("The lowest number is " + str(lowest))

In what order should we teach programming concepts?

In what order should we teach programming concepts? Functions first? The program on the right creates reusable components and can be thought of as a better solution.

Is it right to teach about creating robust programs or do you leave exception handling until much later?

Should we teach iterations before conditions or vice versa?

Model your thinking with students – how do you go about bug fixing a program? Talking about what thought processes are you going through as you do it with a student.

Is continual programming from day 1 until the exam useful given that students struggle most with algorithms?

10

Craig’n’Dave


1. Sequencing concepts: small steps

Defold is great, but its tutorials are not written by teachers!

We recently created some tutorials for developing games using Defold and Lua because the built‐in tutorials started students from the middle of a development rather than the start. It was simply too confusing or left too many unanswered questions. Small steps are critical to successful understanding of new and difficult concepts. Don’t make too many assumptions about prior knowledge.

11

Craig’n’Dave


For programming we like:

• PRIMMWe have adapted this to TIME: programming takes TIME to learn:Try, Investigate, Make, Evaluate

• Parsons problems

• Partial solutions• Paired programming

• Write the code to produce this output

1. Sequencing concepts: scaffolding

The problem with programming is that students pick it up at very different speeds. It is hard not to be holding some back if you are leading this from the front.

These are all great strategies for scaffolding, providing models and learning new material in small steps.

12

Craig’n’Dave



With theory, there is too much waffle in teaching! We make videos that are 12 minutes long at most. Students capture only the things that matter in their work. Simple workbooks become knowledge organisers and their own revision guide.

Model how to take notes by showing them how. This helps students learn to filter what is important and what is not important from what you are teaching them.

At GCSE we structure workbooks quite strongly. Students rarely start from a blank sheet to provide a high level of scaffolding and quality outcomes.

We show them how notes can be used in their classwork, but it is more powerful that that. It also enables another key principle, recall:Listen (to video) > write (notes) > think (about questions and keywords) > read (notes again in class) > write (using notes). By doing this you are covering the theory twice in one lesson.

13

Craig’n’Dave



At A level we remove this scaffolding because they have had lots of guided practice at taking notes and producing quality work. This also introduces more challenge and differentiation.

All lessons have a key question, and students must evidence learning by illustrating their answer to the key question. Students can do this in lots of different ways using lots of different exercises and sources of information.

We might still show them what a good piece of work looks like to ensure we get quality work produced that is at the right level of detail.

Using a flipped classroom approach frees the teacher up to spend more time questioning and guiding as students are working.

14

Craig’n’Dave


1. Sequencing concepts: models

How can an office be wired using a star network?

Provide models of what a solution could look like.

What “good work” looks like. Showing a model answer from a completed workbook.

High expectations but showing how to achieve that before pulling scaffolding away.

You can use these models later to have rich questioning. E.g. What is the impact of having two switches on this network? Why might we choose to cable the network in this way? Why might this not be necessary?

15

Craig’n’Dave


2. Asking questionsDaily review Check student understanding





The second concept is questioning. Rosenshine says more effective teachers ask more questions than less effective teachers.

16

Craig’n’Dave


2. Asking questionsA framework for questioning:

Who• Cold call, no-hands.• Hands up if you agree with that… disagree with that.• Mini whiteboards.

How• “Why do you agree?”, not “do you agree?”• No opt-out, use scaffolding, probe or scaffold back and forth.• Avoid moving to another student if they don’t know the answer without returning.

Why• Your question is either to affirm or to challenge.• Avoid useless questions, “is everyone OK with that?”• “Do you understand?” vs “What do you understand?”

When • Throughout the lesson.• Gain more time by doing less from the front and more with individual students.

A framework for questioning will ensure questions are worthwhile to ask.

Think about:‐Who you are asking to answer your question.‐ How you are asking your question‐Why you are asking your question‐When you should ask your question: in front of the whole class or individually while students are working?

17

Craig’n’Dave


Mini‐whiteboards are great for whole class involvement.

They look like they are for primary school children, but Sixth Form love them too!

Coloured borders gives you more questioning options.

2. Asking questions

Quick go with show‐me boards. In binary, I want you to write the number minus one.

On our board we secretly write either 1 (signed binary) or 11111 (twos complement) or 10001 (sign & magnitude) or 10000 (floating point) – the opposite of what it looks like the teachers are doing.

You can instantly see the understanding of everyone in the class, probe deeper with interesting answers and challenge all students to think too with questions like, “why is my answer correct?”

Boards that have coloured edges are also great for gaining quick answers and making everyone contribute: “hold up green if you agree, red if you don’t and yellow if you aren’t sure”.

18

Craig’n’Dave


3. Reviewing materialDaily review Check student understanding





The next group of principles is about reviewing material.

19

Craig’n’Dave


3. Reviewing material

Activate learning at the beginning of the lesson. Show‐me boards are great for this too. What keyword did we learn about last lesson? – Use jumbled letters on the board for more than one correct answer. Cache, register, clock.

Follow up with what do those words mean?

20

Craig’n’Dave


Term Description

The three actions a processor does.

Program counter

Small memory inside the processor enables the processor to work.

ALU

The place where instructions and data are held in case they are needed again.

Hertz


Another option is to have a grid to fill in using work from the previous lesson. This approach also helps develop logical, sequential, precise, well planned lessons because you can ensure your lesson covers all the words on the grid.

Consider Rosenshine’s process questions: “Why does a computer with more RAM execute instructions more quickly?”

Not just knowledge, but “how did you know it?” – The process of getting to the answer, not just the answer itself.

21

Craig’n’Dave



Allows sharing of data between the registers

Allows fast access to frequently used instructions and data without having to go to the RAM

Allows communication between the CPU and RAM

Allows the CPU to perform calculations

I don’t know

1.1 Structure and function of the processorWhat is the main purpose of the cache in a CPU?

The forgetting curve is a major problem. The best students retain more knowledge which enables them to see more links between concepts. This improves their success.

Quizzing and basic factual recall is very powerful. This is why Smart Revise makes a difference.

People may argue that multiple choice questioning isn’t very useful for preparing for real exams. They miss the point. This is about keeping things fresh in mind. Daily, weekly and monthly recall of facts that have been learned is essential. Deeper questions can come after the basic facts are well understood and committed to longer term memory.

22

Craig’n’Dave


4. PracticeDaily review Check student understanding





You don’t get good at anything if you don’t practice. “I can’t do programming” and how this relates to, “I can’t play the piano”.

Teachers were once told that rote learning and repetition is bad – no it isn’t! In my early days of teaching I was told, “Skinner learning isn’t great, but Vygotsky, well he has all the answers!” – FALSE!

Use teaching strategies that allow you to obtain a high success rate.We set tests at the end of each unit. Students must resit the same test continually until they score 80%.

Make students less dependent and more interdependent. That means they are independent under your guidance.In programming students work at their own pace, not one dictated from the front of the class. They move on only when they have mastered the current concept they are learning.

At A level there is no reason not to give students a significant amount of autonomy. This is not “leaving them to it”. It is guided and independent student practice.

23

Craig’n’Dave


In summaryCraig’n’Dave is about basic teaching techniques, well executed.

No gimmicks and no initiatives!

It is thinking about how we teach as much as what we teach.

By using Craig’n’Dave resources you already apply Rosenshine’s principles and many other proven pedagogies too.

So in summary, Rosenshine’s principles are not a set of new strategies.

Instead they are a useful measuring stick we can use as a tool for reflection on our own practice. When planning schemes of learning, when delivering lessons and when evaluating the impact of those lessons. When students under‐perform, we can consider which of the ten principles is under‐developed in our lessons.

Your questions…

24

Documents

Craig’n’Dave ROSENSHINE’S PRINCIPLES IN ACTION