Rosenshine's Principles

Deans for Impact (2015) highlight questioning as an important aspect of teaching. Questioning is an essential tool for checking prior knowledge, identifying misconceptions and providing opportunities for pupils to practise. Hinge point questions allow teachers to check understanding and make decisions about whether knowledge is secure enough for them to move on.

One of Rosenshine’s (2012) strategies is to “ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students.” He notes that questioning and student discussion give students opportunities to practise as well as enable teachers to understand how well students have understood material.

Questioning is the most effective learning tool a teacher has for increasing challenge and deepening learning. Learning from resources alone can be shallow and is soon forgotten. Using questions to challenge pupils encourages the development of more complex schema by getting pupils to think deeply about a topic, to explore connections and support understanding. 

Questions can scaffold learning, helping to break down problems into individual steps in a process or aspects of a more complex idea. Qualifying a question or adding further questions supports pupil understanding. Just asking 'How do you know?' can have a profound impact on understanding.

Questions about how or why something happened focus pupils’ attention on the meaning of course content and deepen learning. (Deans for Impact, 2015)

For an effective questioning strategy:

• ensure each new question builds on the learning from the previous question, becoming increasingly difficult ( this also allows teachers to identify the limits of learning and required level of difficulty)

• start with yes /no or factual lower order questions (what? when? who?) to establish the foundations before moving onto reflective and evaluative higher order questions (why? how?) to encourage pupils to analyse, compare and justify

• provide plenty of thinking time. If pupils do not immediately respond to a spoken question, teachers should count to 20 before reframing the question or providing additional cues

• teachers should not be afraid of the silence when pupils are thinking hard about a question

• for short responses tools like mini whiteboards, sticky notes, online polls and quizzes allow all pupils to participate

• set aside plenty of time in lessons for questions requiring longer more complex responses to short essay style questions

Teachers need to make the best use of pupil practice to support recall and understanding. "Information is often withdrawn from memory just as it went in" but usually, we need pupils to remember "what information means and why it is important." (Deans for Impact, 2015).

Meaning and understanding are important. Deans for Impact found that "practice is essential to learning new facts, but not all practice is equivalent." (Deans for Impact, 2015)

To ensure practice supports recall and the development of understanding, they recommend:

• spacing practice over time, with content being reviewed across weeks or months, to help  pupils remember that content long-term.

• interleaving (alternate) practice of different types of content. For example, if students are learning four mathematical operations, it’s more effective to interleave practice of different problem  types, rather than practice just one type of problem, then another type of problem, and so on.

• providing retrieval practice in the form of low or no-stakes quizzes, for example, flashcards and self-tests, make memory more long-lasting than other forms of studying. 

A number of researchers also emphasise the importance of practice in learning. Coe et al.(2014) identify testing as a powerful tool for learning, emphasising the benefits of "desirable difficulty" and the need for pupils to think hard and struggle to recall information in order to remember it. Rosenshine recommends  beginning "a lesson with a short review of previous learning”. He gives the example of a project in which mathematics teachers in some classrooms spent eight minutes on daily review, including going over common errors and practising concepts and skills that needed to become automatic. Students in these classrooms had  higher achievement scores than students in other classrooms.

“Basically, any time that you, as a learner, look up an answer or have somebody tell or show you something that you could, drawing on current cues and your past knowledge, generate instead, you rob yourself of a powerful learning opportunity.” (Rosenshine, 2012)

Practice needs to be monitored and guided initially (Coe et al,, 2020). Teachers adjust their use of practice to suit the needs of their pupils, withdrawing support for pupils and increasing difficulty as the knowledge becomes secure.

"Practice begins as helping to learn the ideas, developing connections and understanding, and building schemas; then follows consolidation, gaining confidence and fluency, in which scaffolds and other supports are removed, as is the need for teacher guidance and monitoring; finally comes embedding, where practice becomes independent, fluent, accurate and automatic." (Coe et al., 2020).

Support practice by:

• monitoring practice to inform the amount of support required

• providing ongoing feedback and cues that encourage retrieval and understanding, without giving pupils the answers

• withdrawing scaffolds overtime, requiring pupils to work harder to retrieve information and fill in the gaps themselves

• using a variety of question types and reframing questions to support recall when require