The best piece of feedback I ever received from a lesson was
in relation to one of the least commented of Rosenshine’s principles of
instruction: ensuring a high success rate.
I was giving some whole class feedback and pupils were
giving some generic analysis of the impact of a subsidy on a market rather than
making it specific to the industry in question. After going through some
examples, I gave pupils an example answer and asked them to improve it by
making it more relevant to a particular industry.
As pupils were completing work, it was clear that they had
slightly misunderstood what they were to do and believed that they needed to
include quotations from an extract (which was one example I had used) rather
than the more challenging work of making their analysis relevant to the
extract.
The fundamental problem was that I was using the activity
and the feedback from it to determine if pupils understood how to improve
rather than ensuring a high success rate before they started. This then meant
pupils were embedding misconceptions that were then a lot harder to fix.
At this point, I tried to re-explain but pupils thought they
understood already so I had to make them ‘unlearn’ what they thought they had
understood me to say before I could effectively re-teach.My process was:
In his excellent summary of the principles, Tom Sherrington speaks about students getting things wrong are “effectively practising making errors.” For me, this was my main mistake. By checking for understanding too late, pupils were just allowing mistakes do become habits which are then much harder to remedy.
Rosenshine himself spoke of a success rate of 80% being
optimal so students can learn material but remain challenged. He uses an
example of a teacher observing pupils making errors in independent work and
then stopping everyone so material could be retaught later so pupils do not
practice mistakes. Within my practice, I try now to take this a step further
when ensuring a high success rate.
Independent Practice, not Independent Work.
The best way for me to conceptualise this is to consider
working independently to be independent practice of what pupils have learned
and to think hard about what they have learned rather than as a way to assess
if pupils have understood something.
Much in the same way that if a football coach was doing a
session on dribbling, this is so players can practice their dribbling to master
the technique, it is not to see if players understand what the coach wants the
players to do.
What this means in practice for me is that during my
explanations, I need to get to that 80% success rate. Tom mentions this as
being a rough guide rather than anything scientific, but the key is that I keep
explaining and modelling until I am confident pupils are getting to this rate.
This is done through questioning (and Pritesh speaks about
‘one question, one fact’ in his piece on teacher led instruction which I find a very useful way to consider
just how much checking for understanding there needs to be.) Various techniques
are then used to ensure we get an understanding from the entire class like
bouncing questions around, utilising ‘show me’ using mini whiteboards and so
on.
Crucially at this stage I do not move on until there is that
success rate. Even if I effectively start again (which I suppose also gives me
some feedback on the quality of my initial explanation!) and only when there is
this high success rate do pupils move on to independent practice.
So now my process looks like:
It seems like a nuanced change but it has transformed the learning in my class.
Now pupils are practising explaining and
manipulating knowledge that they do understand and keep practising until they
master it to ensure it is embedded into their long-term memory. This doesn’t
mean that pupils don’t get feedback on this of course and it’s inevitable there
will still be misconceptions that I’ve missed but thinking of a high success
rate as something to be achieved before pupils complete independent work
and work really being the practice of already acquired knowledge has had a
significant impact on my teaching practice.