[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] Justin Baeder:
I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Tom Sherrington. Tom has more than 30 years of experience as a maths and science teacher and head teacher in the UK and around the world. He co-hosts the podcast Mind the Gap, Making Education Work Across the Globe with Emma Turner, and he consults with schools around the UK and internationally and is the co-founder of Teaching Walkthroughs. He's the author of several books, including Rosenshine's Principles in Action, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:42] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:44] Tom Sherrington:
Tom, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really honored to be on your podcast.
[00:50] Justin Baeder:
Well, I'm excited to speak with you because I feel like you're at the forefront of a movement that we have largely missed in the United States that pays very close attention to the evidence about effective teaching. And I feel like in the profession as it exists in the U.S., often we have been driven by fads. I will just say, vibes that have not always aligned with the evidence about effective teaching and learning. And you have been now for quite a few years teaching schools around the country and around the world how to implement some effective principles that you learned from a source that many of our audience members may not have heard of.
[01:31]
Take us into Rosenstein's principles a bit and kind of how you came across them and how you've used them in your work. Well, Rosenstein's principles...
[01:39] Tom Sherrington:
in action is a book I wrote on the back of a talk that I gave actually at an event in Philadelphia, a research ed event. A group of schools were there with some professors and it's a movement in the UK called research ed. This was one of the early US ones. There's been several since. And I was celebrating Rosenstein's principles in this talk. And somebody actually said to me there, it was a US public.
[02:02]
He said, you should publish that for the US market, but make it really short. He said, I actually wrote the shortest book I dared write. And he said, just really like 8,000 words. And I pushed it to 12,000. So as a book, it's very short. But the reason I was so interested in it was because I was saying, look, this is, Probably the most condensed version of good sound evidence in fact, as you'll find.
[02:26]
It's very, very compact. Barrett Rosenschein researched it for decades. I mean, he was from Chicago. He worked doing studies in schools and working with cognitive scientists in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And various versions of his ideas were out there. But this was for an issue of the absolutely classic American Educator magazine from 2012, where he'd been asked to sort of express it as 10 principles for sort of publisher reasons.
[02:56]
So his principles of instruction are really... informed partly by the need to have a neat number. And in that he basically says, this is what effective teachers do. He's not saying what they should do or lecturing people.
[03:09]
He says, look, we have studied teachers. We've been to classrooms. We've looked for where teachers are getting great outcomes. And then try to decode, you know, what is it that they do? And we've compared them with teachers who are getting less good outcomes. And what do they do?
[03:25]
What are the differences? If I have an opposition, he sets up, he says, more effective teachers typically do these things and less effective teachers typically do these things. We can talk about what those are. But cleverly, he then says, but this is how it links to research about cognitive science. So in a cognitive science, studies to do with memory and so on. also have some suggestions that the things that teachers ought to do.
[03:47]
And what he says is there's no conflict between them. So he says it in those principles. So that's why I was so into it. I was thinking, this is interesting. And I came across it first about 2017 in the UK. Became very popular.
[03:59]
So in England now, probably you go to schools and say, how many people have read Rosenstein's principles? And probably you get about 30 or 40% of people have said, yes, I have. And, but obviously that was more, and that's my most recent experience. But even then, they don't necessarily act on them or know them. But it's because it's such a simple expression of everyday practice that people seem to relate to it. It's like, oh, yeah, that makes sense to me.
[04:25]
I can say more about it. But that's how I came across it. The first time I noticed it was on Twitter, people posting this poster, which is actually my colleague who I now work with called Oliver Caviglioli. And he had made a poster, which is blue, the 10 principles with a little graphic. And this blue poster was everywhere. There was a time when you couldn't go into a classroom in England without seeing this blue poster.
[04:45]
Like, what's that? And even though people weren't actually doing it, they were kind of interested in it. And it's like 10 things. It's got this sort of power of being a well-communicated set of ideas. So, I mean, I could say lots more about Rose to Sharon's principles, but that's where I came across it. And it always surprises me to hear that in the US, it's less well-known than it is in the UK.
[05:03] Justin Baeder:
I think anyone who spends any time on education, Twitter or X as it is called now has probably come across these posters and may not have known where they're from, but you have a company with Oliver where you publish these, these visual five-step guides. They're very striking, often yellow or blue, very difficult to miss. Tell us a little bit about. the principles themselves. As you mentioned, they don't sound strange at all reading the list. It's a very concise list and probably seldom consistently practiced list of practices, but nothing on here seems out of left field to me.
[05:38]
Take us into some of those principles of instruction.
[05:41] Tom Sherrington:
Yeah, so essentially there are 10, but they started off in his actual paper, there's 17. 17 is a very awkward number and way too many to remember. But I categorize them into four categories. So I'll use my categorization because it's the easiest to sort of hold onto, I think. So the first group is Reviewing materials. So effective teachers regularly review material involving all students.
[06:04]
So Rosenstein calls them daily review and weekly and monthly review. So daily review would be like a recap of what we did yesterday or last week, because we're going to build on it today. So we need to activate that knowledge in order to then get it doing, get our kind of stuff flowing into our working memory and so on. And to make sure we haven't forgotten what we just learned. taught yesterday so we can carry on building on it and importantly he's always saying things like all students so a lot of teachers will say well of course i checked what we did yesterday But the tough thing is a lot of teachers will say, okay, guys, so who can tell me something we did yesterday? And a student will put their hand up.
[06:42] Justin Baeder:
Right. At least one student remembers.
[06:44] Tom Sherrington:
Yeah. And the teacher will say, okay, so Sebastian, so what did we do yesterday? And Seb, yeah, well done. That's great. He knows. And we move on.
[06:52]
Literally one student says a couple of things and that's it. So we haven't actually activated the prior knowledge of all the class. And that's different. So it's about doing it for all the students, not just a few. Weekly and monthly review is more about Like they did this topic a month ago. Let's not forget it.
[07:07]
Let's make sure we can connect it to what we're doing now. Let's build on it. Let's continue to practice it. That would be like, say, in math or languages or something where you're constantly building on the stuff you've learned. It's so important. In other subjects, you have to choose the things to constantly refer back to if they're cumulative and things where you just...
[07:26]
You know, you have to try to build connections more. So then that's the first section, review. And most people go, well, of course I do a bit of that. But it's like, how well, how intensively? And then what do we do if we find students have forgotten things? The second section is, I think this is the prep for teaching.
[07:42]
He talks about presenting material in small steps. So you've got to plan. How do I break things down into small, learnable steps? But he also says, get students to practice after each step. And that's again, the thing where teachers think, well, of course I'll break it down into small steps, but the practice after each step is demanding. So for example, if you're teaching a dance, you don't just keep showing people the whole dance or show them all the steps and then say, right now, practice all the steps.
[08:08]
You say, here's step one. Let's see if you can do that. And then here's step two. See if you can do that. And then let's see if you can do step one and two. You practice in stages as well.
[08:16]
And that's like if you're teaching writing, teaching small skills, a few little writing skills at a time, and then weave them together later. But you break it down to small practicable units of teaching. the type of sentence and that sort of thing provide models so show people how to do things and this is again very obvious this is one of the cornerstones of instruction i'm not going to say hey guys see if we can work this out i'm going to say here's exactly how you do it and it's a massive difference for a lot of kids and the evidence there is very strong that the students who are just learning how to do something being shown exactly how to do it accelerates them far faster than asking them if they can work it out. Problem solving comes later when you have got the skills and the knowledge to do the problem solving. But in the early phase of a lot of curriculum areas, showing by modeling and models that have lots of forms, it could be examples, contrasting examples.
[09:09]
Here's a piece of writing, here's a piece of artwork. Here's how you do a maths problem. And this has provided scaffolds for difficult tasks. So a big theme of Rosenstein is you need a high success rate. You need children to feel successful. That's partly for psychological motivational purposes, but also because of practice.
[09:27]
If you're getting, say, 50% of your maths problems wrong, you're practicing getting them wrong. You're getting really good at getting them wrong. So a high success rate is important for consolidation. We have to practice doing things correctly. So you have to scaffold for that often, like in order to practice it correctly, you do it with help. For example, looking at worked examples as a scaffold and following the example exactly, getting it right.
[09:52]
And then later I'm going to try to do it without looking at the examples and that's the next step, but you don't start there. You start by getting it right. So that's the second section. This is for me, the most important part of Rosenshine is my strand called, I call it questioning. But basically Rosenstein says, ask lots of questions. Effective teachers interact extensively with the class during instruction for two reasons.
[10:18]
One of them, it makes everybody think, and that's sort of key. Like literally everyone has to be involved in the questioning. But secondly, it tells the teacher the sorts of things the students are getting wrong and right in the moment of the teaching. So they can adapt the teaching in real time, not just wait to do a test and then find out. And Rosenstein says, teachers who get good outcomes spend a lot more time asking questions and checking for understanding than teachers who get the lower outcomes in the same setting. And a link to that is this of checking for understanding.
[10:47]
Rosenstein is brilliant on this. Check for understanding is you telling me what you've understood, not me asking you, Okay. So Justin, did you understand that? Yeah. So I explained to you, you know, how to solve simultaneous equations or explain why the sun rises in the East or whatever. And you say, do that make sense?
[11:06]
Yeah. All happy with that. And teachers do that a lot. They'll say, are you all good with that guys? Yeah. Yeah.
[11:11]
All good. Rather than say, okay, let's check Justin, run through it for me then. How did I solve that equation? Or Justin, tell me now. Why does the sun rise in the east? Let me hear your version.
[11:22]
And it's that type of thing. So I'll keep going because there's only one more section. The last one is practice. And again, I love this because it's so obvious and necessary. He says you guide practice first. So guide practice means making sure we're getting it right, making sure we know what to do, making sure no one's floundering or struggling or in a panic.
[11:41]
You know, just practice guiding, helping them get it right. With a high success rate, he sort of says normally it's about 80% is what you're aiming for. And then, crucially, take scaffolds down, withdraw the guidance. Right, now can you do it independently? So we go from guided practice to independent practice. And that's the kind of arc we should be on.
[12:01]
And this is where a lot of teachers I find get sort of confused about this, the ideas and instruction. They characterize it wrongly as it's all teacher, but it's not. The teacher is there to get you ready to do it by herself. And the way you do that is on a journey through a high success rate. So getting it right, feeling good, feeling confident. And now we take the stabilizers off the bike and now you're ready to go on your own.
[12:24]
Brilliant. And that's the feeling. So that's what it's about. And anyone listening to this thinking, isn't that just like teaching?
[12:32] Justin Baeder:
Well, no.
[12:32] Tom Sherrington:
That's what often people say. It sounds so intuitive, so obvious, so common sense. And yet it's harder to do all of those things than it sounds. But that's essentially it. I mean, that is, those are the 10.
[12:46] Justin Baeder:
Well, and I want to get into maybe what we do instead of those things, but I wanted to first ask, how do you see these principles and these practices applying to subjects other than math? Because I think many of our listeners will have the same reaction I did when they hear that, like, okay, yes, I can see how that would apply to math. I break it down. I review, I present small bits of information. I have students practice. I ask a lot of questions.
[13:11]
I provide models. I check for understanding and so on. We want students to practice getting things right, have a high success rate, have scaffolds but remove them, have independent practice. All of that is very easy to envision in a math class, but a lot more difficult to envision in, say, a social studies class, a history class, a science class. Take us into what that can look like in other subjects that are not broken down in that same way that math is.
[13:40] Tom Sherrington:
What I think is it depends on how you break down what it means to understand the subject. So for example, let's take geography or something. Now, what does it mean to understand geography? Well, there'll be certain things you have to be able to explain, certain phenomena, like, you know, the classic one would be hazards. The earthquakes, volcanoes, for example. How do they happen?
[13:59]
What's the causes? What impacts do they have? And you have sort of heuristics like, you know, a volcano and an earthquake will have social effects, economic effects, and environmental effects. And so you'd say you've got this heuristic, social, economic, environmental. And so you scaffold and you say, okay, you need to be able to explain how the Kathmandu earthquake affected people and what the effects generally. So can you explain why there was an earthquake in the Himalayas?
[14:26]
So the geography of it, the plate tectonics and everything. So how do I know that? Well, I'd have to break it down to knowledge elements, which I want to check. So we could teach it. We could check for understanding. We're getting a whole class of students with their pairs say, right, this is how earthquakes work.
[14:41]
This is where we'd find them on the planet. And then see if they can do that. You could then say, well, take the scaffold away. Like, no, it's just off. From memory, could you do it? Can you sketch it out?
[14:50]
Can you like complete this diagram? And so using your knowledge, so you check. And then you might review weekly, like I said, next week. Okay. Let's see if we can remember, here's a quick quiz about some facts that we learned about the Kathmandu earthquake, some data, some things you should know. Which of these is true, which is false.
[15:06]
There's all sorts of ways you could check their understanding of whether they could still remember it. questioning so during during the exposition so you can say rather than say okay so that's that's what happened in Kathmandu everyone got that yeah you'd say okay let me just check then so I'm going to cold call this question so everyone have a think everybody um why why after that why did some buildings collapse and some not now what was that in the in the story we told what what was the difference between the buildings that collapsed and the buildings that didn't have a thing what was that about And then we cold call. We say, okay, so Justin, let's hear from you. And we're questioning. If Justin doesn't understand, we go, okay, so we weren't sure. Let me clarify because you've shown me that you didn't fully understand.
[15:45]
So I'm going to reteach that bit. And that could review. So we use questions to see whether our explanations were good. We use review to see if they can still remember the detail later. We break it down into the knowledge elements they should have in the first place. And then you might feel, well, the real goal is to be able to write a kind of paragraph or so.
[16:03]
So you've got some writing elements and you'd scaffold that. You might just say, the heuristic is social, environmental, economic. Write a paragraph. I've actually seen a lesson on this, like grade seven, where the teacher started a lesson. She said, write a hundred words about the earthquake that happened. Their case study was a different one, but...
[16:21]
and remember the heuristic she didn't even tell them what it was she just said run use the heuristic right so these guys write it okay so this girl next to me the first thing she did she wrote out social environmental economics she just wrote it down she remembered the scaffold and she wrote this really like great paragraph like wow amazing the boy next to me had forgotten the heuristic and he was like all over the place it was like he just started writing stuff you know so it's like these are the things that we do and So she was walking around guiding, noticing he was struggling. And it's that type of thing. So I feel like that's a scenario. But it all comes down to what knowledge do you want the students to have and do they have it? What skills do they have? So writing skills, factual knowledge.
[17:04]
And I'll give you another example, if I may, from a very radically different situation, which I often use when I'm doing my training, is in a college of further education in England where people do largely technical courses. And there's a boy in front of me in the canteen at lunchtime who turned out to be on a sort of pre, like a course that you just, it's like an access course where you get, he'd have had no qualifications from school because he wasn't able to access those courses. And here he was in a very, he had some learning issues. And he bought his lunch in front of me. I noticed he was fumbling for change, but he immediately ran over to these guys. So they were about...
[17:40]
10 of them and his tutor was in that group and they were all high-fiving him and he was going, I did it, I did it, I did it. That was the first time he'd ever bought his lunch. And I was discussing with the tutor saying, what was the process he had to go through? And I actually thought this feels like Rosenstein's principles. Like you have to break down the whole thing. Everything was hard for this boy.
[18:01]
Speaking was hard. Handling the money was hard. The personal confidence to say the right thing, counting the change, everything was difficult for him, but he had been broken down. He practiced. This was like six months into him being there. He'd been through the canteen many times before, but each time someone had had to help him with a part of the process.
[18:19]
And he'd finally learned certain aspects, and then through practicing them every day, got better at them. And finally, he managed to handle the change, which was the last pith So this is like, I just thought, well, if you look at those principles, they're all in there, you know, they checked for checking his understanding. And you think, well, that's a bit of a loose connection, but I don't think it is. I think you find Rosenstein's principles kind of in everything. They just, you have to sort of interpret them fairly broadly to match the domain you're teaching. That's why I like them, because you can do a training session with a whole group of teachers of different subjects and find residents that review, practicing things we've learned before, breaking things down into steps, modeling, showing how it's done.
[19:01]
And this lovely thing of guiding the practice, that boy would not have been as good if he'd just been told to Get on with it. Go and see how you get on in the canteen. He was a very challenged young man. He found social exchanges incredibly difficult. And this was like a massive deal thing. So I feel like that's the whole focus on high success rate is very, for me, is very important.
[19:27]
It challenges this idea that instructional teaching is all about the one-way traffic. You know, you kind of teach a lecturing and the kids are sitting there receiving. It's just totally opposite to that, really.
[19:37] Justin Baeder:
And I think, you know, perhaps our preferred or more common way of thinking about learning is to think in terms of Bloom's taxonomy and to think, well, I really only want my students to do the higher order tasks. I want them to analyze, evaluate, create. I want them to do that higher order intellectual work. because it seems more authentic, it seems more real world, it seems more applied, and it seems a better use of time than focusing on those lower level things like understanding concepts, recalling information, you know, just the factual review. But you did not skip those foundational levels, right? You did not skip talking about concepts, knowledge.
[20:15]
And really in the first part of the book, you talk about sequencing concepts and modeling. Why do you think it's so common, especially in the US, to skip the question of what do students actually need to know and understand in order to do all the things that I want them to be able to do?
[20:30] Tom Sherrington:
I know. It's interesting because philosophically, I don't really understand it. I feel like there's this sort of horror of telling people things. And I've come across it in the US when I've done some training there. And this idea that you're just spoon feeding them. And I think, well, no, you're teaching them.
[20:44]
You've got to think the goal is independent learning. The goal is students who can find things out for themselves. The goal is students who are empowered to have agency over their own learning and make choices, of course. But the route to that for all students, remember, I think this is the key of it.
[20:59] Justin Baeder:
It's
[21:00] Tom Sherrington:
There are some students that we've all taught probably who didn't need us to tell them everything. And we can kind of get carried away with that. And I'll tell you one of the analogies I often use is skateboarding. Like you go to a skateboard park, you have these incredibly risk-taking, risk-orientated students. They learn by observing what each other does to see what's possible and try to emulate. And no one's teaching them directly.
[21:22]
They're kind of observing, going, oh, cool, I'll try this, I'll try that. And they fall off the whole time. And they get better and better at it. But the truth is most...
[21:31]
kids are not at the skate park at all because that's too like like some of them just need lessons some of them would need you to say like that's okay don't have a go try this break it down to small steps show them guide them to get them up to the point where they even have the courage to go down the first ramp you know it's like that's the problem and people pick up on the hey cool look at all those guys being so independent and thinking that's that's the universal solution but it isn't the universal solution because like i said most people don't succeed at skateboarding in fact most people are terrible at it
[22:01] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, I'm thinking about skiing. We've only gone skiing as a family once, but you do a lot of falling down if you haven't had any instruction and you get on skis. And just a little bit of explicit instruction, really breaking it down. Here's how to slow down. Here's how not to fall over. Here's when to fall over on purpose.
[22:18]
I mean, it made an enormous difference compared to just kind of discovering how to go down the big slope on our own, which I don't think we It's been very successful.
[22:26] Tom Sherrington:
And I also feel like there's an interesting thing about, there's also a thing about control and power and people are not always entirely comfortable with their responsibility and their power, which is a true concept in selecting the curriculum that the students should know. And you sort of feel like, well, of course we're connected to the community that we're in. We're connected to the community of practice. So for example, if you are a math teacher or a science teacher, you're connected to the community of maths and science teachers. And we have a shared understanding of the sorts of things which constitute our discipline. And so, of course, we have this.
[22:57]
And we're opening doors to children by saying, here's some stuff you should know, right? And sometimes people feel that's, like, constraining them. But what if the children have got different ideas? You think, well...
[23:07]
One of the most ridiculous conversations I've ever had with somebody was who was in the UK. She was saying, I don't really think we should always teach Shakespeare. I mean, I would prefer to teach something else like Christopher Marlowe. And, you know, he was a better playwright. And I said to her, the irony about that is you're only able to have that discussion with yourself and your colleagues because you have studied Shakespeare. So why would you deny that to the children you're teaching so that they can also be involved in this discussion about whether or not to teach Shakespeare?
[23:33]
It's like you kind of have a duty to teach Shakespeare, don't you? So that the children know about him because he's kind of quite important in the field of English literature. So it's like there is a canon. There is a set of knowledge which represents all of our subjects. And of course, there's important issues around sort of Um, diversity and, um, areas of choice, you know, which artists do we study and so on. But we do have that responsibility.
[23:59]
It is down to the school community and the teachers to make those choices because the children don't know what they don't know. Right. So we have to adapt a building blocks of say maths, you know, deciding to go really super concrete with. physical resources and building to a pictorial and abstract and knowing the journey that you have to go through to understand how big a third is or two fifths. And that is really hard. I talk about that in my book because for me, adding fractures is one of the emblematic aspects of knowledge from school, which a lot of children struggle with.
[24:30]
It's sort of, it's not a straightforward thing to learn how to do. Even adults panic a bit when you ask them in public, you know, what's a quarter plus a third? And they go, oh, please don't mind. But other things like, you know, which aspects of history do we study? That's wide open, isn't it? You have to have a In fact, you could have two schools in the same town who study a totally different history curriculum and they'd still be studying history and they could be excellent and both curriculums could be excellent, but they wouldn't be the same.
[24:55]
So there are so many subjects where there are choices of why. But in science and maths and geography, there are some standard things you need to learn. And in English, there's a few, but... Anyway, I mean, I've been on about that, but for me, the knowledge base is key.
[25:11]
And I think teachers should celebrate that aspect of their craft, that they are the kind of, the hand is on. So one of the things like you have to sort of turn it into something inspiring. So one of the things I always say to people is I used to teach, the lesson where you teach Pythagoras, you think this is kind of profound. This is their lesson. This is the first time we've actually talked about triangles and the sides and the equation. I'm the one that gets to share this with them.
[25:36]
That's pretty amazing. I get to be the guy that tells these people about Pythagoras. This is the moment. Wow. Like, isn't that a great honor to be that one? So I feel like you have to turn knowledge transmission, if you like, into something that's kind of a duty and an honor and not some sort of oppressive thing.
[25:53]
And then people roll into it more. But yeah, the whole thing about analysis. I had this debate on a panel, a learning in the brain conference in New York, where this guy was saying, I can't even remember his name, if I'm honest, but he was saying what's best important to him is not what we're discussing in a class, but making sure each child's debate style was kind of honored and respected in the space. And he was all about this sort of empowerment. And I was saying, Because for me, if I'm debating, say, climate change, I'll be saying, well, first of all, before I listen to you, I want you to understand it. Do you know how the greenhouse effect works, for example?
[26:32]
Because if you can't explain that to me, your opinion about climate change doesn't really matter much to me because you don't understand it. So the knowledge base is the kind of the gateway to you having an opinion anyone should listen to. And that's true about a lot of things that we have to make sure they've got the knowledge before we can start worrying about their debate style. Like next week, should they understand things? And that comes from the teachers showing them and being clear they understand them. So I feel like that's sort of a duty.
[26:59]
I think that would be a neglectful to let a child debate climate change, without them understanding it, that scene would be woeful. I don't think this becomes political. So that's why some people reject this sort of thing and they push it away and they don't want to go there. But I think it's challenging for us to accept the responsibility of making sure that the things we want the kids to learn are what they learn. Always remembering that it's the platform for a daily wider later.
[27:26] Justin Baeder:
Right. And I think those are legitimate debates to have about what deserves to be in the canon, who decides what content is worth spending time on. And of course, those are societal level questions. We don't have the full autonomy to decide whether to teach Pythagoras or not. If it's in the curriculum, if it's in our standards, then we need to teach it and not worry about it too much. But it is an honor.
[27:47]
I appreciate your perspective there, that it is an honor to pass on that legacy that we've received from all of human civilization to know how triangles work, to have Shakespeare, to have the various concepts in math and science and every subject. I mean, it is exciting and fun to teach kids stuff. And I feel like we have a lot of philosophies and a lot of predispositions in our profession that make us forget that, that make us think, well, everything that matters comes from the child. And certainly there's a lot that comes from kids. Kids bring a lot to the table. We are teaching real human beings, but there's a lot that kids don't come in with that we actually do get to share with them.
[28:24]
And that's pretty exciting.
[28:26] Tom Sherrington:
I agree. I mean, it is exciting. And I think this is where, again, coming back to Rosenshine, there's a few things in there. He says the word all a lot. And to me, I just love this because it is the hard thing. And this is a bit of a thing I'm going on about a lot in my work currently is...
[28:43]
The difference between being an inclusive teacher in sort of philosophical terms and being one that's truly inclusive is the extent to which you include all your children whilst you're teaching them. So I've met plenty of teachers who would say, I believe in equity and so on. But when you watch them teach, they don't teach in an equitable way. There are children who are not being asked to answer questions. Therefore, they're not thinking very hard. The teacher doesn't make sure that when they're talking in pairs that...
[29:11]
Every single child has a chance to rehearse the ideas. One person can dominate a group of three or four other children and they just talk and the others just listen and that kind of thing. So if you really want to be an equity-orientated teacher, do you listen to what Rosenstein and others say and say all, like check the understanding of all learners? Do you...
[29:32]
to make sure they all have a chance to rehearse and practice. And that's really, really easier said than done. So you've got to have techniques ready to go, which systematically involve all students. And I think that's where the territory is. I mean, for a lot of people, they're sort of getting some like, you know, you can kid yourself into thinking, hey, I'm getting some lovely answers here. Look at those beautifully articulate children saying lovely things.
[29:57]
I must be a good teacher, but actually that can be a third of the class doing that. And the others, you've got a third kind of listening in and the other third is like totally checked out because they can't follow it and they're not with it. And you see that it's very common. So as a teacher, you've got to sort of kind of be demonic and say, well, what would I need to do differently? So that literally all of them were doing that. And it's simple things like lots of turn and talks where both people speak.
[30:24]
And things like, you know, cop. Rosenstein doesn't mention cold calling, but he specifically, but there are techniques which you can use to make sure everybody's thinking and everybody can speak and everyone feels they might be asked, all those sorts of things. And I feel like those things matter because every child in the room matters. So this is where it gets to the sharp end. If a child is not being involved, you sort of think to the teacher, do they matter less than the other children? And they always say, no, of course not.
[30:56]
But you never ask them to be thinking and involved in the work there. So what's happening? And teachers go, well, how do I do that? And we have to discuss that. And Rosenstein's got some suggestions on that. But it's the idea that the teacher then adapts in relation to that.
[31:11]
So if you've got a third of your class that actually have no idea what you've just been saying, You have to do something about it. You have to go, okay, gosh, shame, because you guys got it, but you didn't. Okay, so I need to adapt and adjust and respond to that. And that's equitable teaching. Not, oh, well, too bad. You know, for the next time, listen better.
[31:28]
You know, it's like, it's kind of down to you. And I think people, a lot of teachers are really up for that discussion, but not everybody is. Sometimes people think, well, I worked hard. You know, I did what else am I supposed to do? And you think, well...
[31:40]
It's hard, but it's got to be done, right? We have to find that path to inclusion and everyone being on the journey with us. Otherwise, we leave them behind and they don't learn as much as they could and so on and so on. So I love that about Rosenstein. He's kind of pushing us.
[31:53] Justin Baeder:
it's a challenge we should rise to you know very well said and i think it's so tempting as a teacher to seek reassurance i want reassurance that i've taught it well i want reassurance that some of them understood me and that you know enough of them understood me to validate the effort that i made but that's a very different question that's a very different goal from making sure that all students understand and that we're actually discovering where they didn't understand and figuring out what we can do about it, which is not going to give us the same reassurance if that's what we're seeking.
[32:26] Tom Sherrington:
I remember this elementary school teacher, after a training day I did on Rosenstein's principles, he sent me a picture of his classroom and on the back wall and really big writing. So it was for him to look at, not his students. It said, what have you understood? Because this is our big thing from Rosenstein, not did you understand, but what have you understood? And he said, I need that prompt constantly because I'm always a say. Did you understand yet?
[32:50]
Is everybody okay? And he was really honest about that with himself. He was saying, that to me, for him, was a big change. He realized. And actually, this is what I thought was great. He said, do you know, when I sat in the training, I just thought, oh, come off it.
[33:04]
This is so obvious. What am I doing in this training? If he told me, that's what he was thinking. But then when he went back to his lessons, he realized. Oh gosh, I do do this all the time. I'm always just saying, did anyone, is everyone okay?
[33:19]
And nobody answers me, just like Tom said in the show. So he was like, oh gosh, it does apply to me. And he just was really determined not to be that guy. He does that. So he was like, wow, I've got to break those habits. And I thought that was really interesting that.
[33:33]
Even when he was sitting there in the training, he didn't really think it applied to him until he got back in the room and sort of had to wrestle with it. And he could sort of self-monitor and see. These things sound obvious, which is kind of useful because if they didn't sound obvious and they sound, if Rosenstein's principles were saying, here's 10 weird things to do, which are kind of, no one does them, but I'm telling you, you should. Everyone would just say no, because you know, but he's saying here's 10 things, which everyone kind of does a bit. but we just need to do them better. And I find that helpful because everyone, you could say, checks for understanding a bit.
[34:06]
Everyone asks questions to some extent. Everyone reviews material from time to time. Everyone tries to scaffold things a little bit. Everyone does a bit of it, but it's like...
[34:16]
The intensity, the extent of it, the success of it across the whole room, which is the challenge. So it's just a smart idea to have these ideas that when we can refer to them to sort of just deconstruct a lesson. And I feel like that's the language you can then use when you're talking to each other. Teaching has a few little components, you know, modeling and scaffolding and questioning. These are ideas which we can then explore. And Rosenshine does a really good job of setting out what they might look like.
[34:44]
And I just tried to add subject examples to what he's done and said, like, it might look like this in maths, it might look like this in science, it might look like this in, you know, kindergarten or whatever. And you find examples everywhere, really, when you start to explore it.
[34:57] Justin Baeder:
Absolutely. And as you mentioned, this is a quick read. People can get through the book very quickly and they'll find Rosenshine's actual paper in the book, right? You've included the paper itself so people can read that firsthand. Yeah.
[35:10] Tom Sherrington:
Yeah, that was because when we realized how few pages my bit would take up, we thought, well, look, Rosenstein is brilliant. And his publishers at the time, they said that this is free, free access, open access, like share it widely. So we just stuck it and said, well, look, here it is. It's actually a free PDF. You can just Google it and get it off online, like for nothing. But we've included it in the book, so it's there to refer to, you know, alongside my bit.
[35:33]
But yeah, so it's there. And, you know, if you do nothing else, if you're listening to this, just Google Rosenstein's Principles, PDF, bam. And there's this beautiful, simple summary of really good ideas. And it's really well with 3D.
[35:46] Justin Baeder:
So the book is Rosenstein's Principles in Action. And Tom Sherrington, you also have, as we mentioned earlier, many visual guides that you call teaching walkthroughs. Now, not the kind of walkthroughs that I focus on that involve principals visiting classrooms, but tell us about your teaching walkthroughs and where people can find more information about those.
[36:03] Tom Sherrington:
Yeah, so walkthroughs, the meaning of walkthrough for us is a step-by-step guide. You might talk about walking through a process, and that's the phrase that we use in English. In England, that's what it means. We're a bit stunned to find that in the US, it's so strongly associated with principals visiting teachers on a sort of inspection type process. But no, it's not about that. So basically, it's a five-step guide to all the basic teaching techniques, including Rosenstein's principle, including behavior and so on.
[36:29]
Yeah, we have a website called walkthroughs.co.uk, and you can access them from there. And they're kind of like up there in the Amazon charts in the UK for teacher training because a lot of schools use them and basically teachers use them as a vehicle for discussing teaching techniques, training or teaching techniques and using them for coaching. So when you're coaching someone after you've observed their lesson, you might look at particular technique and help you sort of break down where you know where we where were things going well where we work further what steps might you take next it just helps you have a language for that but that's what it is the website is probably the best place to go through walkthroughs and we spell it t-h-r-u-s like you know drive through drive through walk through but that's the kind of that's the concept And it has very little to do with principles, unless they then follow that up with a coaching conversation where then it would be useful.
[37:22] Justin Baeder:
Right, absolutely. Very useful in professional development and feedback conversations and so on. So again, the book is Rosenstein's Principles in Action. Tom Sherrington, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Well, thank you so much for asking. It's been a pleasure.
[37:36]
Thank you.
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