So, it’s better not to set up a choice between them. Taken together, the ‘Rosenshine ten’ plus the ‘Wiliam five’ make a great framework. These principles are centrally concerned with the acquisition of knowledge. So, for most ELT contexts, that would mean grammar rules and initial learning of form-meaning pairings with vocabulary. My question, then, is how relevant is this to language learning? Obviously, language learning entails a lot of learning of knowledge, but we know that deliberate learning is often not the best way of going about it. No?

Objective: to engage all students in teacher-student dialogue with time to think, preventing students from being overlooked, dominating, or hiding from involvement in dialogue. Sequencing concepts and modelling: Sherrington’s third strand, involving Rosenshine’s second, fourth and eighth principlesFirst published in 2010 by the International Academy of Education; republished in 2012 as‘Principles of Instruction: Research-based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know’, in American Educator. References are to the latter. Mathematical problem solving is … improved when the basic skills (addition, multiplication, etc.) are overlearned and become automatic, thus freeing working-memory capacity. (p. 13) Each of Sherrington’s strands contains two or three of Rosenshine’s principles. Sherrington argues that these four strands run throughout all of Rosenshine’s principles:

In the section on ‘In the classroom’ under the third principle, ‘Ask questions’, Rosenshine includes a set of stems for questions that teachers of literature, social science and science might ask students, based on the research of A. King (p. 15). [4] For recall to become automatic, Rosenshine writes that sometimes we need to overlearn. ‘Overlearn’ is certainly not a pejorative term; rather, overlearning is an important concept for the level of learning required to achieve mastery of some task, skill, the use of concept or to know or understand something with fluency (p. 13). For example, in discussion of the process of gaining mastery at mathematical problem-solving, Rosenshine writes:Rosenshine’s ‘Principles’ provides a highly accessible bridge between educational research and classroom practice. The principles are research-based, extensively drawing upon research in education and cognitive science. Rosenshine expresses the principles succinctly and offers suggestions for the implementation of the principles in the classroom. He provides many examples of activities employed in the teaching practices of ‘master teachers’ – i.e., teachers whose students made the highest gains in achievement tests (p. 12).

Bruce Joyce and Martha Weil, quoted in W. Huitt, ‘Classroom instruction’ ( Educational Psychology Interactive) (Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University, 2003). Mainly, it’s the contradictions. In the conclusion the author shares some ‘improvement agendas’ which roughly focus on each strand of principles. Sherrington makes it clear that teachers and leaders should focus on one thing at a time, rather than aiming for improvements across multiple areas. This contradicts his earlier comment that there is likely crossover between the principles themselves, making it hard to focus on development in one particular area. If you are focusing on developing scaffolding techniques then you might well end up working on ways to support learners moving from guided/controlled practice to independent practice. There doesn’t seem a need to focus on developing individual strategies only, just an awareness that you can’t focus on everything at once.Thanks for framing your response – even though I’ve followed your blog for a while and have a fair idea of your views on certain topics it’s still useful to work out where you’re coming from!