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Teaching and Learning

Teaching and Learning 
(inc. key foci for the coming academic year)

Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction

At The John Warner School we acknowledge the clarity and simplicity of Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’ (1986, 2010 and 2012). In keeping with this acknowledgement and our Autumn Term 1 ‘Behaviour and Attendance Repair Plan’, from September 2023, we will be focusing upon one of each of the EEF’s ‘5 a day’ starting with ‘Explicit Instruction’.  INSET time across the academic year will be dedicated to further developing colleagues’ practice, both through external expertise and that harnessed from within the school through the Quality First Teaching Team (QFTT).

Autumn Term 1 focus: Explicit Instruction

Effective teachers:

  • recognise the limitations of working memory
  • begin a lesson (possibly using the ‘Do Now’ Starter) with a short review (5-8 minutes) of   previous learning to reactivate recently acquired knowledge and reduce cognitive load
  • break concepts and procedures into small steps
  • specify the knowledge that needs to be learned (knowledge organisers may support here)
  • give students the opportunity to practise each of the steps
  • move from the big picture of a subject to a detailed area of focus and back again

Autumn Term 2 focus: Scaffolding 

Effective teachers:

  • model, coach and support students to develop a level of independence
  • provide guided practice before students can display independent practice
  • use writing frames to scaffold writing tasks
  • use exemplar material from previous students or the teacher
  • model and scaffold strategic thinking to develop student confidence
  • anticipate common errors and misconceptions

Spring Term 1 focus: Cognitive and metacognitive strategies

Effective teachers:

  • provide models to help with good explanations
  • draw from physical representations of completed tasks, conceptual models and explicit   narration of thought processes
  • utilise the memory-building power of narrative structures
  • provide concrete examples of abstract ideas
  • develop experiential activities in the most appropriate place to maximise learning once       basic concepts have been learned
  • model their own thought processes when engaging in a task
  • use ‘compare’, ‘contrast’ and ‘categorise’ to organise information into schemata
  • provide worked examples and partially completed problems to assist students in   completing regular problems for themselves

Spring Term 2 focus: Flexible grouping and collaborative learning

Effective teachers:

  • create opportunities for students to rephrase, elaborate and summarise new material
  • understand that when students are engaged in ‘seatwork’ they circulate to check for early   errors and successes
  • use choral repetition as a means of quick-fire questioning, for example

A.    fronted adverbials such as ‘Quick as a flash’ are called out and students respond with a      variation to complete the dramatic sentence, ‘he climbed the tower’, ‘she conjured up a potion’

B.     number bonds to 100 – teacher calls out a number between 0 and 100 and the class chant back the bond to one hundred – 56…44, 87…13

  • understand that effective questioning has to be a highly interactive, dynamic, responsive   process and ask a large number of questions
  • ask students to explain what they have learned and check the response of all students
  • involve all students in review activities
  • ask students to think aloud and to defend or explain their position
  • exploit opportunities for students to assist each other (cooperative learning)
  • use a repertoire of questioning strategies
  • ​Cold calling (no hands up!)
  • No opt-out (don’t accept, ‘I don’t know’)
  • Say it again, better (finesses answers)
  • Think, pair, share (time to rehearse and develop responses)
  • Whole-class response (e.g. using whiteboards)
  • Probing (asking multiple and follow-up questions)
  • Summarise (main ideas/concepts in one-two sentences)
  • Stems (writing frames for questioning)

Summer Terms 1 and 2 focus: Using technology to support students

Google Classroom roll-out to include exploration of…

  • effective use of instructional apps—apps that provide instruction, modelling, or practice   opportunities for a wide range of skills
  • effective use of non-instructional apps—apps that provide tools to aid learning, such as   note-taking apps
  • effective use of speech-generating apps to augment the communication skills of pupils   with communication difficulties.