This article was originally published on 4 September 2020

Up until a month ago, I had never heard of “Rosenshine”. I did not know whether Rosenshine was an “it” or a “them”. I did not know that the word had come to be on the tip of every teacher on Twitter’s tongue. I did not know that its influence had extended beyond that, far from the educational speakeasy of social media and into the CPD discussions of schools.

I knew nothing. But now I know a lot. I know the story of how Rosenshine’s 10 principles of instruction came to be. I know that, though the principles have permeated education, from teacher training courses to head’s offices, and though they have come to be seen as a framework for the entirety of “good teaching”, their context - and their evidence base - is poorly understood.

And I know that the informed viewpoint of a storied academic has become more than its author perhaps intended it to be - as something definitive, when it should be something we view with a lot more nuance. In short, I now know we need to take a closer look at Rosenshine’s principles of instruction.

What are Rosenshine’s principles?

When I started looking into Rosenshine, I wanted to know what his principles were, how they had come to be and what all the fuss was about. I began, as so many beginnings now do, on Google.

It didn’t take long to discover that the one person who may have been able to best answer all my questions was not going to be able to: Professor Barak Rosenshine, of the department of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, passed away in 2017.

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A “historical note” on the university’s website told me he was a high-school history teacher for six years, that he left teaching in 1963 to do a PhD in education at Stanford, and that he later moved to the University of Illinois to teach educational psychology. Exploring the university archive, I discovered he also wrote poetry and fiction, and he ran marathons. Bit of an underachiever, then.

Curiously, the university fails to mention the thing he is now most famous for: his 10 principles of instruction. There are hints - it mentions that he collaborated on the identification of five characteristics of teacher behaviour, as well as a “six-function teaching mode” - but the principles we now know him best for are not cited or celebrated.

The 10 principles are, however, the first thing that come up when you Google his name. From numerous websites, you are directed to a single publication to read the principles: American Educator, the magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers. When you load up the PDF, you’re greeted with “Principles of Instruction”, written in a blue serif font, and there is an illustration of three green people in a box with their legs popping out of the bottom. They seem to be following orange footprints.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Under the green people is a byline - “By Barak Rosenshine” - and an opening line: “This article presents 10 researched principles of instruction, along with suggestions for classroom practice.”

I read it all. Then I read it again. My reaction? “Is that it?”

Principles uncovered

The 10 principles include such methods as asking questions, providing models and checking for student understanding (see box, below). References to research are peppered throughout, and Rosenshine gives examples of how his principles might play out in class.

It felt straightforward, uncontroversial, the kind of thing I imagined teachers did in schools up and down the UK already. I couldn’t see how it had come to be something that teachers needed books, webinars and events about. What was I missing?

I called Christian Bokhove, associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a former teacher. He is known for his overviews of education research (many of which appear in his monthly Tes columns) and he has discussed Rosenshine’s principles at length on social media. While he has nothing against the principles, he told me that his initial impression was similar to my own: “They’re all right, nothing earth-shattering - good teachers will be doing these things already.”

At a loss, I turned to one of the biggest advocates for the principles, former headteacher and now education consultant and writer Tom Sherrington. He told me that his book, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action, has sold more than 60,000 copies in a year. And when, during lockdown, he released a YouTube version of the training sessions he gives on Rosenshine in schools, the videos had more than 100,000 views within just a couple of months.

Sherrington explained that the simplicity of the framework and the fact teachers will probably be doing these things already is exactly why the principles have become so popular. “There are some things teachers have been asked to do over the years that are showcase things, you feel sceptical about why you have to do them. But Rosenshine’s principles aren’t that,” he told me. “Most teachers I’ve encountered think ‘Yep, these are things I do when nobody’s looking’. It’s got nothing to do with Ofsted or the senior leadership team. It’s something sensible that they trust.”

But is there any value in telling teachers what they already know? I heard from some teachers that one factor in Rosenshine’s appeal is that it’s simply nice to read a professor validating what you already do, especially if you’ve been worn down by shifting goalposts and high-stakes accountability.

Mark Enser, head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College, and a Tes columnist, explained to me that Rosenshine assisted him in providing an evidence-informed argument for a different way of working.

“A lot of the things in there are things that, over the years, I’d started to realise were important but that contradicted advice I’d received as a trainee teacher and during CPD,” he said. “There’s a part that says the most effective teachers talked for 23 minutes out of a 40-minute lesson and the least effective talked for 11 minutes.

“But we’d had the message drilled into us that if you’re talking, the students aren’t learning. In my first job, we were timed with stopwatches to make sure we didn’t talk for more than 10 per cent of a lesson.”

For Enser, Rosenshine’s principles had given him a licence to teach in ways that felt intuitively right.

Sherrington added that there’s also a huge difference between what you know to be good sense and what you actually do (consider how often you floss your teeth, for example).

“It’s worth being a fly on the wall in your own classroom and thinking, ‘how well do I ask questions to involve everybody? Do I really model and scaffold well?’ There’s always room for improvement.”

Digging deeper

It seemed that Rosenshine was a framework to permit experienced teachers to do the best things well - and to reflect on them - and a way to ensure that trainee teachers were using the right instruction methods from the off.

OK, I thought, fine. But who says these 10 choices from Rosenshine are the “best” or “right” things?

Rosenshine himself seems to avoid any notion of finality in relation to his list. He writes in the American Educator article that the contents represented only “some” of the instructional principles taken from the research fields of cognitive science, cognitive supports and classroom practice.

And in another article he co-authored, “Teaching functions”, he states that findings from these research areas should have a very specific application rather than a universal take-up. It reads: “It would be a mistake to claim that the teaching procedures which have emerged from this research apply to all subjects, and all learners, all the time.

“These explicit teaching procedures are most applicable in those areas where the objective is to master a body of knowledge or learn a skill which can be taught in a step-by-step manner…[and] less relevant for teaching composition and writing of term papers, analysis of literature, problem-solving in specific content areas, discussion of social issues, or the development of unique or creative responses.”

How do you go from this nuance and caution to a “listicle” of 10 must-do teaching practices? Well, the key is to look at the article on which the American Educator entry was based.

As many readers will know (though some won’t), Rosenshine’s popular article is actually a version of a piece that he had written two years earlier, in 2010, for the International Academy of Education (IAE), a not-for-profit association that promotes “educational research, and its dissemination and implementation”.

In the introduction to the pamphlet, you see the caution once more. The IAE editors explain that they “are aware that this booklet is based on research carried out primarily in economically advanced countries”. They suggest that it is still “likely to be generally applicable” but that “the principles should be assessed with reference to local conditions and adapted accordingly”.

They conclude: “In any educational setting or cultural context, suggestions or guidelines for practice require sensitive and sensible application, and continuing evaluation.”

So why did Rosenshine and his editors opt for the format of a list of 10 things that meant they were less able to convey that nuance, which left the list vulnerable to becoming a definitive checklist of must-dos?

To find out more, I tracked down one of the original IAE series editors, Susan Paik, currently professor of education at Claremont Graduate University.

She explained that Rosenshine’s pamphlet was the 21st in a series of booklets with titles ranging from Motivation to Learn to Parents and Learning.

Rosenshine “was a leading authority in his field in terms of what good teaching means, so we wanted to spotlight one of the booklets on his work”, she recalled.

She also explained to me that the pamphlet was the result of a very tight commission.

“Our goal was to reach as many countries as possible, the developed world and the less developed world, so we wanted these booklets to be accessible - simple, practical, with 10 easy principles to read,” she told me.

“Secondly, they had to be research-oriented. Thirdly, we wanted to bridge research and practice.”

This was the format given to Rosenshine (and all the other booklet authors). And initially he struggled with it, Paik recalled. He actually had 17 principles he believed in and wanted to include, which led to the somewhat confusing boxed-out list of 17 “ideas” that appears at the start of the booklet (see box). But after that, he dutifully followed the commission and produced only 10 in detail.

The real deal

So was he making compromises from the start? Paik stressed that though she and her co-editor may have shaped the article, the substance was still all Rosenshine. And rather than the format being key, what was important was the fact he was a researcher and former teacher. In her eyes, that made him the “real deal” when it came to bridging the academic/practitioner gap.

“Rosenshine took his own work and other people’s research and was able to synthesise it in a way a lot of people didn’t. Without that, it’s a lot of research that’s hard to digest for people who are not in the research world,” Paik explained.

Of course, a lot of the “hard to digest” elements are where the nuance sits. So did Rosenshine stray too far from the uncertainty and sow the seeds for false certainty?

Bokhove told me he had some concerns. Like Rosenshine, he started out in teaching, so he understands the tension between research and the classroom application of it. He has written for this magazine about that tension frequently, and he talked at length on a Tes podcast about the dangers of the simplification process that happens when complex ideas are packaged in tidy formats for consumption. In the case of Rosenshine’s principles, he fears that blurring the lines between an academic paper and a magazine-style article was problematic.

“For example, Rosenshine references a seminal article by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, which is quite a polemic,” Bokhove explained. “There have been academic reactions to it, then another answer from the authors, but that nuanced discussion is not divulged in the article. Basically, 10,000 words are summarised in a few lines.”

Bokhove was clear that all academic papers are prone to this “Chinese whispers” effect. But his concern was that Rosenshine’s article is not always viewed with the critical eye with which one would approach a research paper. Rather, it is taken as read that what is written is conclusive “evidence”.

“Because the article has this evidence-informed layer, I feel compelled to say something about this oversimplification and not everyone likes that,” he told me. “It’s often pointed out that I’m not a teacher anymore. But that’s the point. If you want that credibility, you have to let people like me comment on it. You can’t have your cake and eat it.”

I asked him what he would like to see become more prevalent in the discussion around Rosenshine’s choices.

“Out of the 25 references, there are only three newer than 2000 and, given that he wrote it in 2010, I think that’s quite skewed to relatively old material,” he offered. “And all of these principles have been explored in research in a certain way. For example, Rosenshine talks about providing feedback. It makes a big difference if this feedback is immediate or delayed. If you give the feedback later, but the underpinning research was about immediate feedback, you might counteract the effect. It’s a free-for-all to see what you can make of it which, in my view, is a bit risky.”

Another example is the research on what “good teachers do”.

“One of the sources for Rosenshine’s article is Brophy and Good,” explained Bokhove. “They tried to determine what good teachers do. So A implies B - good teachers come with certain features. But, of course, it’s not a given that if you do B, you become A, which is the way some people are interpreting Rosenshine’s principles.”

This is something Megan Dixon, acting headteacher of Sandbach Primary Academy and co-director of Aspirer Research School, told me she fears, too.

“The idea that this is gospel, and if you follow these golden rules you’ll be a master, is doing teachers’ skills a total disservice. It’s much harder than 10 or 17 principles,” she said. “Teachers sit in this glorious messiness that’s got all the spheres of influence that relate to the life of a child.”

What Bokhove and Dixon - and, indeed, many others - fear is that the 10 principles have been consumed as fact, despite the caution of Rosenshine and the IAE editors, and that no one is digging deeper or exploring them in the detail required for them to be useful. What’s more, they are being used as a checklist for the totality of teaching, when they were never intended as such.

On the latter, Rosenshine advocates say that is poor teaching practice, and not the fault of Rosenshine or his principles.

On the former, Sherrington thinks that trying to excavate all the evidence is asking a lot of teachers. They are time poor and they need to be able to trust that an academic is interpreting the research in a critical way on their behalf, he believes.

“From a teacher’s point of view, you are trusting his research background to a high degree, which is fine,” he told me. “There are citations to read if you want, so it’s not like the evidence isn’t available.”

As well as the research criticisms, though, there are also ideological concerns. There have been accusations that the principles try to force teaching into a singular cross-phase, cross-sector box, striving for the universality of a particular approach to teaching.

This criticism began almost as soon as the American Educator article was published. For example, education researcher Ian Beatty wrote in a blog in 2012 that the 10 principles “seem to make a frontal assault on a broad swath of ‘reformed’ teaching approaches”.

Beatty sees Rosenshine’s arguments as leading towards a “drill and practice” model of instruction and a move away from “student ownership of and initiative within the learning design, further entrenching the synchronous factory model of instruction.”

Strong words. And they’ve been echoed by many on social media since, who see Rosenshine as a Trojan Horse that is bringing a much more direct and traditional approach to teaching into schools.

But was Rosenshine really pushing for scripted lessons and a dictatorial approach to teaching? Bokhove doesn’t think so.

“Some people, I think, react a bit too allergically to the word ‘instruction’,” he told me. “It can be used pejoratively to mean lecturing. I think Rosenshine describes it as more interactive teaching.”

Enser, too, thinks that the principles can be applied to pretty much any teaching approach. “The only thing I can think is that some are so wedded to a radical constructivist approach to teaching - where teachers should be facilitators - that Rosenshine’s principles get under their skin,” he explained.

“Otherwise, Rosenshine allows for almost any other approach to teaching.”

It ain’t what you do…

There are plenty more criticisms of the 10 principles in the space between evidence critiques and ideological assertions.

What began life as an attempt to help teachers has, at times, become a tool to pit them against each other. How far is that Rosenshine’s fault?

Clearly, his principles were never meant to be a checklist to judge teaching. It is also clear that the format of the 10 items and their practical communication was more about bringing a dash of evidence-informed teaching to the most people possible worldwide rather than the creation of a framework to be placed upon school structures.

But with the pressure of accountability so high, and time so limited, a nuanced idea can soon become a simple quick fix.

“You do see schools that try to turn this into a checklist,” noted Enser. “So the senior leaders can walk around classrooms and check if these things are being done. And that’s not what it’s designed for.”

Should Rosenshine and his editors have foreseen this issue? They are in good company in not spotting the potential for trouble. Losing control of an idea is a challenge that Professor Carol Dweck has cited with her growth mindset theory, that Professor John Hattie has cited with visible learning and that Professor Richard Mayer has cited with multimedia learning. There are plenty more instances (see box, below).

Because of these examples, academics are now working more closely with teachers to ensure that translation happens more cautiously and that misinterpretation is minimised. If Rosenshine was putting his principles together today, they would perhaps look quite different.

However, there is also a responsibility on teaching and learning leads to be more cautious about what they dictate and how they interrogate their sources. Using Rosenshine’s 10 principles as an example, Louise Lewis, senior research lead and deputy curriculum lead for science at Beverley High School, told me how the translation of research should work.

“You want to look at each principle individually and other research that went into it,” she said. “For example, his 10th principle is about weekly and monthly reviews, so you look at other researchers that have done extensive research into retrieval practice.”

Lewis’ school, she said, teachers have a “journal club” in which they share how things land in the classroom.

Essentially, the right way to use the 10 principles, or any other research, Lewis told me, is to consider them as one strand to inform the judgements of teachers, forming part of a wider view of teaching.

Would Barak Rosenshine have been happy with that approach? Is that how he would ultimately see his creation being utilised?

“I can’t speak for Rosenshine, but if I were experiencing a similar situation, I would probably feel honoured our work was being used,” reflected Paik. “But, at the same time, I’d want to explain that there’s more than these 10 principles.”

Jessica Powell is a freelance journalist