Obtain a High Success Rate

Principle 7. Obtain a high success rate: It is important for students to achieve a high success rate during classroom instruction.

It is reasonable to assume that an aim of all classroom teachers is to obtain a high success rate, where student achievement is optimised; after all, we all want to do a good job. With Ofsted’s new focus on what Spielman calls the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ (Spielman, 2018), the time is ripe for teachers to engage once again with pedagogy (the how) and curriculum (the what), and the increasing prominence of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction in the education discourse is perfectly aligned with this new push.

Principle 7 is linked with the others; Rosenshine brings together some of the strategies to illustrate methods which can obtain a high success rate within lessons. He defines ‘success rate’ as being judged by the ‘quality of [students’] oral responses during guided practice and their individual work’, measured by the percentage of correct answers. He says that: ‘The research also suggests that the optimal success rate for fostering student achievement appears to be about 80 percent’ (Rosenshine, 2012, p.17), as it shows that students are learning, whilst also being challenged.

Wrong answers are great. Wrong answers enable the teacher to identify misconceptions and errors, enabling them to reteach where necessary.

A large number of wrong answers would suggest that the material was not being taught effectively in the first place, however. Rosenshine’s 80 per cent figure seems like a reasonable goldilocks zone where the teacher can be confident that the children are retaining the material and where they might therefore feel secure in their knowledge development.

So, how can one achieve this golden balance of 80 per cent? Rosenshine tells us that the most effective teachers attained a high success rate by:

• teaching in small steps (combining short presentations with supervised student practice);

• giving sufficient practice on each part before proceeding to the next step;

• frequently checking for understanding and requiring responses from all students.
  (Rosenshine, 2012, p. 17)

By way of an example, Rosenshine gives an anecdote of a teacher he once observed who whilst walking the room realised that the students were struggling and therefore ‘stopped the work, told the students not to do the problems for homework, and said she would reteach this material the next day’ (p. 17). She stopped the work in order to prevent the students practicing errors.

This principle is highly applicable in every subject domain, and not least in English where reading comprehension activities are plentiful. For an experienced teacher, these strategies might have become habit. However, for new and early career teachers, they may need deliberate planning and sequencing.

The steps outlined by Rosenshine provide a useful framework for lesson design, either within a single lesson, or across a scheme. Having said that, even experienced teachers would be well advised to be more deliberate in their structuring of lessons to obtain a high success rate and maximise learning.

References

Didau D (2017) Problems with the ‘zone of proximal development’. Available at: https://learningspy.co.uk/featured/problems-zone-proximal-development/ (Accessed 17 November 2018).

Rosenshine B (2012) Principles of Instruction Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator 36 (1): 12–39. Available at: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Rosenshine.pdf (Accessed 4 May 2018).

Spielman A (2018) Amanda Spielman speech to the SCHOOLS NorthEast summit – GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amanda-spielman-speech-to-the-schools-northeast-summit (Accessed 17 November 2018).

Source: https://my.chartered.college/early-career-hub/applying-rosenshine-to-the-english-classroom/