Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction provide teachers with a useful set of ideas to incorporate into their lessons. Back in 2010, Barak Rosenshine (2010) identified 17 instructional procedures, the things that master teachers regularly employed within their lessons based on years of research into what works. From these he formulated 10 research-based key principles which underpin any effective approach to instruction in lessons (Rosenshine 2012).
These are:
- Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
- Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step.
- Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students.
- Provide models.
- Guide student practice.
- Check for student understanding.
- Obtain a high success rate.
- Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
- Require and monitor independent practice.
- Engage students in weekly and monthly review.
You can read the full article to find out more about these principles. These 10 principles can be adopted in all your lessons to improve the quality of teaching and learning in your classroom.
You don’t have to adopt all 10, and I would suggest trying to bring them in one at a time and evaluating how effective they are.
Let’s look at each of these and see how they could be used to glow up your primary science lessons.
Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
Make sure every lesson starts with a quick activity to recall the learning from the last lesson. Science is often taught once a week, so pupils will need to be reminded of what they did in last week’s lesson.
This does not need to be a long task. Choose quick activities that are short and simple: Tell your partner, label the diagram, write 3 things you remember about plants on your mini whiteboards. Sometimes this is called retrieval practice, short low-stakes quizzes and tasks. You could use some of the activities on Explorify to help.
- Label the diagram of the solar system
- Give three ways in which a whale and a shark are the same. Give three ways they are different.
- Tell your partner three animals that are herbivores.
Present new material in small steps
Don’t overload your pupils with lots of new content in one go. This can overload their working memory and lead to cognitive overload. Chunk the information into manageable steps, and deliver one step at a time. Give your pupils a chance to practice each step along the way. Check that they are confident with that step before moving on to the next one.
For example, when talking about the process of digestion.
Step 1: Digestion
- Begin with a simple definition of digestion. Explain that digestion is the process by which our body breaks down food so we can get the nutrients we need.
- Explain that the chemicals in our food are too big for our bodies to deal with and that they need to be chopped up (broken down) into smaller pieces that the body can then use. Model with a piece of string being cut up with scissors, or a lego tower that can be broken down into blocks to build new things.
Step 2: The Mouth
Chunk: The role of the mouth in digestion.
- Explain: Explain that digestion starts in the mouth. Describe how teeth chew food and saliva mixes with it to begin breaking it down.
- Check for Understanding: Have pupils describe what happens in the mouth when they eat. Ask questions like, “Why is saliva important?”
Step 3: The Stomach
Chunk: The role of the stomach in digestion.
- Explain: Explain how the stomach mixes food with gastric juices to break it down further into a substance called chyme.
- Check for Understanding: Show a simple diagram of the stomach and ask pupils to explain what happens to food once it reaches the stomach.
Step 4: The Small Intestine
Chunk: Nutrient absorption in the small intestine.
- Explain: Describe how the small intestine continues to break down food and absorbs water and nutrients into the bloodstream. Use a sieve with something large and small (marbles and flour) to show how small things pass through the sieve and large things don’t.
- Check for Understanding: Use a visual aid to show the length of the small intestine. Ask pupils, “What happens to the nutrients in the small intestine?”
Step 5: The Large Intestine
Chunk: Water absorption and waste formation in the large intestine.
- Explain: Explain the role of the large intestine in absorbing water from the remaining food matter and forming waste.
- Check for Understanding: Ask pupils to summarize what happens in the large intestine and why it’s important.
Step 6: Put it all together
With their knowledge of the digestive system in place, pupils can then explore a model of the digestive system and can use their understanding to explain what is happening at each stage of the model.
Ask a large number of questions
Questioning is an integral part of the teaching process, particularly in science. Questions provide a major way of allowing the children to practice new material and process new information. Ask lots of questions to engage the children and make them think.
Teachers can use questions in different ways:
- Questions for finding out pupils’ ideas: “What do you think is happening…?”
- Questions for encouraging predictions: “What do you think will happen if…?”
- Questions to encourage planning: “How will you make this a fair test?”
- Questions to encourage further questions: “What other things would you like to know about rainforests?”
Use strategies such as Think-Pair-Share, Cold Calling, Bounce It and more. This guide explains more about questioning techniques. Use Mini whiteboards to get more children involved in answering the questions.
Provide models.
We want our pupils to be good at solving problems and carrying out scientific enquiry, but how do they know what good work looks like? Pupils need cognitive support to help them solve problems. Worked examples can help the children to focus on the necessary steps and reduce cognitive load.
Model how to plan an investigation, write a prediction, draw a graph etc. Demonstrate how to use a newton meter to measure force. Use the I do, We Do, You Do strategy to make it manageable.
- I Do: The teacher demonstrates, with thinking aloud.
- We do: The pupils repeat as a whole class (same or similar example).
- You Do: Pupils get time to practise this themselves.
Guide student practice.
After you have taught the children something new, they will need time to practice this for themselves (as above). Provide support while they carry out the task. Move around the class and check they are doing it correctly.
Check for student understanding.
Build in opportunities to check whether pupils understand the content you have just taught them. This can be a quick self-assessment, “Hands on your head if you know”, or use other strategies such as mini whiteboards, talk to a partner etc.
Hinge questions can be used at key points in the lesson to check understanding of content before moving on to the next piece of content. I’ve written more about Assessment for Learning techniques here.
Obtain a high success rate.
Make your lessons accessible to all. Set tasks which the pupils are able to complete successfully. Make the content too easy and they will get bored, too hard and they will get frustrated. By teaching content in smaller steps, providing scaffolding (see next) and checking for understanding regularly, teachers can help limit the development of misconceptions.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
Science can be diffcult. Planning a science enquiry, making a prediction or producing a conclusion can be daunting. Provide scaffolding for children so they can practise these skills, and then remove the scaffolding as they get more confident.
Provide writing frames for making a prediction: “When I change _________, the helicopter will fall faster/slower. I think this because:” etc. Use sentence startes and gap fills in other contexts too. Use graphic organisers for research tasks.
Practice using a forcemeter in different situations before using it in an experiment. Use a thermometer to measure the temperature of different liquids first.
Perhaps spend some time working on individual parts of an enquiry. Give some examples of experiments and practise making predictions. Give them data and ask them to draw graphs. Make conclusions from other data you provide. (Ofsted has said it’s a good idea to teach these skills explicitly).
Opportunities for Independent Practice.
Following guided practice, pupils need independent practice of the skills/content to embed their learning. The more they practise, the more this skill can become fluent and automatic. Don’t do this step until after the guided practice has been delivered.
Monitor them as they carry out this independent practice. Circulate the classroom and make quick checks. Live mark as you go.
Review Regularly
As discussed at the top, provide opportunities to review the learning. Retrieval practice, low stakes quizzes and activities can be good for rehearsing and reviewing important concepts. Organising content into more automatic schemas frees up space in our working memories.
This often takes the form of low stakes quizzing, which could include many different forms, such as
- multiple choice questions,
- short-answer fact questions,
- short problem-solving,
- labelling diagrams,
- recitation of quotes or definitions,
- list creation
In Summary
Rosenshine’s principles are 10 simple things that have been backed up by research to improve learning in the classroom. They can be applied to all subject areas, not just science. Think about which of these you already do, and which ones you could easily introduce to make the learning in your classroom even better.
References
Education Endowment Foundation (2021) Cognitive Science Approaches in the Classroom. A Review of the Evidence https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/evidence-reviews/cognitive-science-approaches-in-the-classroom
Rosenshine, B. (2010). Principles of instruction; Educational practices series; Vol.:21; 2010. The International Academy of Education, 21(2010). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000190652
Rosenshine, B. (2012) Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36(1), p12-39. Rosenshine, B. and Stevens, R. (1986) Teaching Functions. In Witrock, M.C. (Ed). Handbook of research on teaching, 3rd ed., pp376-391. New York; MacMillan. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Rosenshine.pdf
Further Reading
Earle, S., and McMahon, K. (2022) Applying Cognitive Science Principles to Primary Science. https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/applying-cognitive-science-principles-to-primary-science/
Willingham D (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
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