Week 6: Principles of Instructions

Week 6: Principles of Instructions

This article provides ten principles of instructions and suggestions for classroom practice. Based on three sources of research on cognitive science, master teachers, and cognitive supports, the author Barak Rosenshine presents specific and effective strategies for teachers in teaching process. 

In the article, the author suggests that teachers need to provide daily review at the beginning of the class, because "daily review can strengthen previous learning and can lead to fluent recall". It helps learners automatically and effortlessly recall what they have learned when they solve problems and understand new material. For example, reviewing the concepts and knowledge that are relevant for the new lesson, correcting homework, or reviewing the knowledge that are certain to do the homework. This makes me recall the days when I was studying in my middle and high school.

As an experienced learner, I think it is far from enough for teachers providing daily review in class, it is also necessary to help students develop their habits of automatically reviewing what they have learned in the whole day and the habit of daily preview for new lessons on next day. For daily review, it helps students deeply know their understands and misunderstands; and for daily preview, it increases students' attention to and carefully listening to the class.

The author also suggests that teachers can use the strategy of scaffolding as a form of guided practice, when students are facing difficult tasks. During the process of scaffolding, teachers can model the steps or think aloud when they help students solve problems. Students will gradually become competent learners as they following the guidance and learning the strategies.

I think scaffolding is helpful for learners to gradually understand the problem in their learning process. This strategy cannot be confined to classroom instructions, but also can be used in parents' instruction. It is more effective when adults quite understand a child's level and randomly reply to the child in a learning situation. Furthermore, as learners facing different kinds of tasks under various circumstances, instructors can guide and help learners in specific and appropriate ways to promote learners' potential development within specifically cultural and social environment.

As a result, learners gradually increase their understanding of the problems they face in the process, internalize the techniques taught by instructors, and become more competent with the guidance of instructors. As learners continue to develop their skills, instructors constantly modify their responses to learners. Learners then finally are capable of mastering the skills and solving the problems by themselves.

Another important suggestion provided by the author is that teachers can engage students in weekly and monthly review. It helps develop students' well-connected networks of ideas in their long-term memory, when they get involved in extensive practice in rehearse and review. Moreover, students become more easily to solve new problems when they have well-connected networks of knowledge.

I highly recommend this principle because it helps develop a good habit of weekly and monthly learning planning for students. Through weekly and monthly review, students can receive systematic feedback and be familiar with their learning progress and regress. In this way, students will gradually improve their ability of learning reflection. Meanwhile, it is also important for encouraging students to develop their independent thinking about their learning methods and learning effectiveness.


Comments

  1. SteveFebruary 20, 2019 at 7:34 PM

    Thank you for your blog! As has been brought up in class before, reviewing what happened yesterday is an important way to start the day, so that students can begin to automatically recall the information that is reviewed. This is particularly relevant for me as a language teacher. I often begin lessons by going over the vocabulary or grammar concepts that were covered yesterday or even weeks ago to try to keep them fresh in students' minds, particularly if they are going to be relevant to the current lesson. Can't be stressed enough how important review is! Thank you!

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  2. AnonymousFebruary 21, 2019 at 10:03 AM

    Thanks for sharing. I highly agree with you that it is necessary for teachers to help students develop their habits of automatically reviewing what they have learned in the whole day and the habit of daily preview for new lessons on next day. As a student, I think the daily review can help me better understand what I learned in the class and the questions will also be resolved. Daily preview can provide me space to raise questions before class, so my classroom learning will become more targeted. More importanly, I think the teacher's guidance is very necessary. As teachers, we should always change our teaching methods in accordance with students' aptitude and should be as flexible as we can.

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  3. AnonymousFebruary 21, 2019 at 11:51 AM

    Thank you for your blog. I think the strategy of providing daily review in class for students that you mentioned is important to help students recall the knowledge they have learned and strengthen the memory of new information. However, I think what is more important during this teaching process is that, teachers should not only lead students to review and let them rely on teachers' guidance to recall the information, but help them to grasp this way of learning. Students should be required to be able to raise questions towards what they have learned and build connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge in order to on the one hand, internalize the content that teachers transfer; on the other hand, develop the ability of addressing problems independently.

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  4. April McFaddenFebruary 24, 2019 at 5:21 AM

    Your thoughts about parents using scaffolding is very interesting. My PR brain is thinking, "How can we bring awareness to the public about scaffolding as a parenting technique?" I'm thinking a grassroots approach, starting off with parenting blogs and moving on to magazines as we pick up steam. And working with writers to create books to popularize the methods. The messaging would be simple, "scaffolding is not just for the experienced teacher, but parents do it everyday and here's how you can pick up this learning technique."

    Also I think Sydnie's comment about daily review is really important. Her in-class experience is importing. Reinforcing daily, may be redundant for some students so maybe over the course of the month so students can connect the dots and find trends. This is the perfect marriage of theory and practice. How curriculum should be designed. This reflects all of our in-classroom conversations about who should be involved in the curriculum design process.

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