“Just wanted to say a genuine thank you. Your course is magnificent.” That arrived on Friday, from someone who downloaded the scheme of work. Week 1 is now up — click here . I changed week one a lot. It needed to be right. It wasn't. My original plan had learners working out the IELTS test format from a matching task “through active discovery rather than lecture”. It sounded right. It wasn’t. Rosenshine’s evidence base includes Kirschner, Sweller and Clark on precisely why minimal guidance fails. And his seventh principle asks for roughly 80% correct during guided practice. A worksheet set cold on unfamiliar content delivers neither. So the stage now presents the material in two small chunks — Listening and Reading, then Writing and Speaking — with the same handout used after each chunk as practice rather than before it as discovery. Same materials. Same twelve minutes. Opposite logic. What’s in the lesson: Stage 1 · Welcome and prior knowledge. A first lesson has no prev...
This series of blog posts grew out of my desire to introduce Rosenshine's Principles of Education into EAL lessons. As Head of EAL/EAP, I spend much of my teaching day on in-class support and one-to-one instruction. The content of a lesson can change at short notice: one moment I might be helping a student with GCSE History, the next with Key Stage 3 Physics. That style of teaching makes it difficult to introduce the ten principles. This creates a particular challenge when trying to apply Rosenshine’s ten principles consistently. Principle 1 recommends beginning a lesson with a short review of previous learning. While this is straightforward when teaching a planned sequence of lessons, it becomes more difficult when I do not know which subject I will be supporting until I arrive in the classroom. I might walk into a History lesson without knowing what the student covered previously, making it difficult to revisit earlier learning before helping them tackle the task in front ...