Teaching and Learning by Rosenshine
Vol 1: Issue 2
Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction
Rosenshine’s 2012 article for the American Educator outlining some research-based principles of instruction had a huge impact on pedagogical practice, probably because each principle was presented with clear practical guidelines. There is a brilliant graphic version of the principles here and they are quoted below
Begin each 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 and worked examples
Guide student practice by overseeing the amount of practice
Check for student understanding regularly before moving on
Aim for a high success rate (but not too high): As a rough rule of thumb you want students to be getting around 80-85% of questions, drills etc correct.
Provide (temporary) scaffolds for difficult tasks
Require and monitor independent practice from your students
Build in weekly and monthly review
Exit Tickets by Google
Exit tickets are a powerful and super time-efficient way of providing you with usable data as to whether to reteach or move on. Use this editable google forms exit tickets template to check whether students have grasped the main concepts from your lesson. At JIS we see tech as a support for quality pedagogy rather than an end in itself, so here is some great advice for constructing and using exit tickets from Doug Lemov
Is how you deliver feedback doing more harm than good?
A crucial part of middle and senior leadership is the ability to help develop your team and high-quality feedback is one of the best ways to do this. This interesting article from HBR, has these five indicators of bad feedback:
Does not increase self-awareness
Does not give enough negative feedback
Is not based on robust data
Doesn’t give people a story.
Is not personalised.
The final advice is that the feedback cycle should not end once the session is over and be followed by actual coaching, co-constructing actionable targets and defining measurable change.
Struggle means learning
This interesting article is perfect for an intercultural high school like ours as it looks at the differences between Eastern and Western attitudes towards failure. The main idea is that in Japanese maths classrooms as described in the article, failure is normalized as part of the learning process rather than stigmatized.
Here is a short extract:
In Japanese classrooms, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach.
Hat Tip to Mrs Hennard for the article
Study Skills
Study skills remain a vital part of success in High School and university. One of our teachers recently attended a study skills webinar from ANU and here are her notes.
Hat Tip to Ms MIRECKA-JAKUBOWSKA for sharing the notes