Equals - Realising potential in mathematics for all

Vol. 25 No. 1 Spring 2020 31 Resource reviews Kirsty Behan and Mark Pepper have kindly taken the time to reflect upon the usefulness of the two resources below. Do you agree with them? Please let us know what you think and if you have a resource you feels deserves wider use then please send in your own review. Making sense of ‘The Rosenshine’s Principles in Action’ by Kirsty Behan Tom Sherrington’s booklet The Rosenshine’s Principles in Action is a recent addition to the plethora of educational books that aim to bring research into the classroom. Like many books, Tom’s is a general education book that aims to improve any teacher’s practice which is, in his case, through applying Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’. The book goes through the key strands of the principles grouped into four different strands and discusses not only different applications in different subjects through a variety of useful examples The first strand Tom discusses is the area of sequencing concepts and modelling. The two areas I took away from this section were maybe not revolutionary, but something I have definitely been rethinking recently. Firstly, we must present our new learning in small steps. This is nothing new but something for the nurture teacher to really consider. Something that is missing from the book in particular is what do they need to already know and be secure on to learn this new skill? And should we even be teaching this before we have learnt and established these pre-skills first? The smaller parts the skills can be broken up into the better, from my experience. Linking with this, my other takeaway is but how these are we must present our new something that I think applicable in the maths learning in small steps comes alongside this classroom. Particularly if the classroom is not the typical make up of students, like many of our nurture classes (these may be called something else in your setting, but I am referring to a class that contains the lowest attaining students). Here I discuss some of what I view to be the key takeaways for these classrooms to make us, as Tom states, more effective practitioners. ability to break down skills, is the ‘curse of knowledge.’ As experts, particularly at secondary schools, we sometimes overlook this breaking down as we are often using implicit knowledge and understanding that we intrinsically have, maybe we are not even sure how we acquired it e.g. a sense of number. One solution that is presented is using lots of examples, trying to create lots of opportunities