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Unpacking Rosenshine's 10 principles of effective instruction

Maths Trek 20/2/25

Educators seeking to enhance their teaching impact often turn to evidence-based frameworks for guidance in refining their instructional methods.

Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of instruction’^{1 2} has become a cornerstone of effective teaching, celebrated for its evidence-based, adaptable framework grounded in cognitive science, research and classroom observation.

These principles emphasise clarity, active engagement and consistent reinforcement. While this aligns with what educators intuitively know about effective teaching, the principles offer a structured approach for educators to use to refine their methods. When implemented thoughtfully, these principles can foster deep, lasting learning in your classroom.

So with this in mind, let’s take a closer look at what these principles are and how Maths Trek can help you to implement them.

Overview

10 principles of instruction:¹

1. Daily review
2. Present new material using small steps
3. Ask questions
4. Provide models
5. Guide student practice
6. Check for student understanding
7. Obtain a high success rate
8. Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks
9. Independent practice
10. Weekly and monthly review

It’s important to remember that you don’t have to implement all 10 principles in a single lesson! Instead, it’s about comprehensively integrating these principles across the year.

Daily review

Daily reviews are currently a hot topic among Australian educators. According to Rosenshine, conducting a short review of previously learned content helps students to strengthen their knowledge and build fluency.

Daily reviews are particularly important for reinforcing concepts and skills that need to become automatic, such as multiplication facts. They should be completed quickly, leaving plenty of time for the lesson ahead.

Maths Trek includes tools and resources you can draw from to conduct quick and engaging daily reviews with your students. These include Daily Number Practice activities to support fluency when using the four operations, as well as interactive tools such as a place value chart, hundreds chart and a clock that can be easily accessed online.

Present new material using small steps

Our working memory – the place where we process information – is small and can only handle a limited amount of information at a time. Too much information swamps our working memory.

In his article, Rosenshine explains, ‘The more successful teachers did not overwhelm their students by presenting too much new material at once’.^{1 2} Rather, successful teachers only present small amounts of new material, then assist students as they practise the material.

Maths Trek’s sequence of topics, problem-solving lessons and investigations are purposefully spaced to ensure material is delivered at a manageable pace and concepts are built upon throughout the year. This scaffolding can boost students’ capacity and confidence in tackling new challenges.

What’s more, Maths Trek teaching slides are carefully designed to present new information incrementally.

Ask questions

Rosenshine emphasises the importance of questioning as a tool for active learning. Thoughtful questions engage students, test understanding and identify misconceptions. By asking both open-ended and targeted questions, educators encourage deeper thinking and ensure all students are involved in the learning process.

While there are countless opportunities for questioning and discussion throughout Maths Trek, open-ended and targeted questions are provided in context. Every problem-solving practice unit includes targeted What if? questions to extend critical thinking about the problem. Investigations include guiding questions to help teachers check for understanding at each step. Topic lessons also feature open-ended and targeted questions where appropriate.

Provide models

While Rosenshine’s principles can work for any subject, this particular principle is imperative when teaching maths and should be embedded in every maths lesson wherever possible.

Modelling is a powerful way to clarify abstract concepts or processes. A worked example is one type of model that allows students to focus on the specific steps to solve a problem. Effective models help reduce the cognitive load for students when learning new concepts.

Maths Trek includes an abundance of worked examples that have been carefully crafted to ensure they’re clearly stepped out. They are presented in a format that allows students to clearly visualise the information and are easy for teachers to use as discussion prompts.

Check out this worked example slide sequence from Year 4, Unit 19.1 Addition:

Guide student practice

While independent practice is important, guided practice ensures students are applying new knowledge correctly. Teachers should provide structured and collaborative opportunities for students to engage in practice that allow for immediate feedback. This reduces the risk of reinforcing errors and supports students to build confidence in applying new skills.

Maths Trek follows the Gradual Release of Responsibility model, with structured I Do, We Do, You Do components built into each lesson. During the We Do or guided Work together part of the lesson, students work with the teacher to tackle questions based on what they’ve just been explicitly taught. The online teaching resource enables teachers to show correct answers with the click of a button. This allows for whole-class feedback and provides an opportunity to address any misconceptions before students move on to practise the concept independently.

Check for student understanding

Effective teaching involves regularly assessing whether students have grasped the material. This can be done through informal checks like thumbs up/thumbs down, mini quizzes or class discussions. Frequent checks allow teachers to adjust their instruction in real time, ensuring no student is left behind.

There are many tools in Maths Trek that help you monitor student understanding along the way. For example, the Work together step in all topics allows teachers to check for on-the-spot understanding, while Problem-Solving Progress Checklists guide teachers to track and make notes on student progress throughout the year. Investigations also include critical thinking questions that prompt students to reflect informally and provide teachers with opportunities for formative assessment.

Obtain a high success rate

Rosenshine suggests aiming for an 80% success rate during lessons. This ensures students are challenged but not overwhelmed. While this doesn’t mean that all students are expected to achieve success at the same level of difficulty, it does mean that teachers should differentiate their instruction to obtain high success rates.

Maths Trek makes this easy by including differentiation tasks in each topic lesson for both support and extension students. The majority of topics in Years 3–6 also include a built-in challenge activity, which provides an added extension for fast finishers.

Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks

Scaffolding is a critical strategy for enabling students to tackle complex concepts or skills. It involves providing temporary supports, such as prompts, graphic organisers or sentence starters, to help students complete tasks. As students gain confidence, these scaffolds can gradually be removed, fostering independence.

Maths Trek includes a variety of scaffolds within lessons – these include bar models to aid in solving addition and subtraction word problems, number expanders to support place value understanding and think boards to represent numbers in different ways. The program also provides many of these as printable resources that teachers can download for immediate use with their class.

Independent practice

Rosenshine puts it simply: ‘The best way to become an expert is through practice—thousands of hours of practice. The more practice, the better the performance’.²

But it’s not just about giving students plenty of practice; for independent practice to be effective, students should work with familiar material and have ready access to teacher guidance. Research found that students are more engaged when their teacher circulates the room and monitors their work (as long as the teacher doesn’t spend extended periods of time with just one or two students). For this reason, independent practice should involve the same material covered in the guided practice so that students can achieve success and teachers can provide support effectively.

Maths Trek incorporates independent practice activities extensively throughout the program. And – critically – its lesson content and guided practice flow seamlessly into the independent practice activities.

Weekly and monthly review

Learning is a process of continual reinforcement. Rosenshine’s research identifies that ‘material that is not adequately practised and reviewed is easily forgotten’.^{1 2}

Regular reviews, whether weekly or monthly, aid memory retention and allow students to build connections between concepts.

Maths Trek includes revision units that are strategically spaced throughout the year to reinforce concepts and support successive relearning. In addition, a typical Maths Trek week includes four explicit lessons, leaving a day for consolidation, remediation and review as required.

If you’re interested in exploring the Maths Trek program, head to our website, sign up for a free trial or contact your local education consultant.

References
1. Rosenshine, B 2010, ‘Principles of instruction’, Educational Practices Series, vol. 21, viewed 10 February 2025, http://www.iaoed.org/downloads/EdPractices_21.pdf↩
2. Rosenshine, B 2012, ‘Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know’, American Educator, Spring 2012, pp. 12–39, https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Rosenshine.pdf↩

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