Barak Rosenshine is most famous for his principles of instruction, but what did he have to say about building knowledge? 

In his writing on ‘Advances in research on instruction’, he put forward the important – and familiar notion – of ‘knowledge structures’. Put simply, this is how information is organised and stored in our long-term memory.

Most importantly, when considering ‘knowledge structures’, Rosenshine emphasises the size of these structures, the strength of the connections between pieces of knowledge, along with the richness of the relationships, so that learners can process new information and solve problems. 

What Rosenshine was emphasising, decades before the recent interest in cognitive science, was that building knowledge and retrieving it was crucial, but making it meaningful, and applying it, was just as vital.

For example, you may be able to remember quotes from 'Romeo and Juliet' for an exam, but the trick is to be able to connect, explore, and apply the evidence from the play to the exam question. You can recall the prologue about the ‘star-crossed lovers’, but also connect it to Shakespeare’s aim to forceful grasp the attention of his audience. 

For Rosenshine, emphasising the importance of cultivating ‘knowledge structures’ meant three implications for teaching:

 1.        The need to help students develop their background knowledge.
2.        The importance of student processing, and:
3.        The importance of organisers.

Now, these three implications sound familiar to those leaders and teachers exposed to the promotion of a knowledge-rich curriculum. And yet, perhaps the necessity to support ‘student processing’ was perhaps obscured by the dominance of curriculum sequencing and promoting retrieval practice?

Rosenshine cites Palincsar and Brown, as they aimed to describe how to support a deeper processing of information:

“Understanding is more likely to occur when a child is required to explain, elaborate, or defend his position to others; the burden of explanation is often the push needed to make him or her evaluate, integrate, and elaborate knowledge in new ways.”

What is striking is how active the requirement is for explanation and argument. It poses a challenge to notions that developing knowledge is the mere stacking of information in quiz after quiz, or that building knowledge is somehow passive.

Promoting processing

Rosenshine goes on to share an array of practical teaching strategies for promoting ‘processing’: 

  • Extensive reading of a variety of materials. It is apt that reading comes first when it comes to knowledge structures. The special language of reading is dense and packs in more rich information than most verbal explanations. It is therefore essential to carve out curriculum time for wider reading. Identifying ‘reading clusters’ around specific topics can help, along with finding as many opportunities for extended reading as possible.
  • Explain the new material to someone else. The call for explaining promotes high quality classroom talk, such as ‘Think-pair-share’, or ABC feedback, where pupils are expected to share their ideas, offer evidence, and more. The ability to explain and teach someone else aids pupils’ attempts to cohere and express their knowledge. 
  • Write questions / answer questions. It is common practice to answer questions on a new topic, but less so to generate questions for a topic you’re learning. This minor shift to getting pupils to generate questions can prove a powerful way to process a tricky topic (we don’t need to obsess about exam-type question framings to do this well either).
  • Develop knowledge maps. Devising concept maps, mind maps, or other graphic organisers are a familiar strategy to teachers, but perhaps we are less explicit about training our pupils to use these strategies for more consistent use. In a subject like science, using concept maps for biomes or similar can help pupils cohere and organise a mass of seemingly unconnected knowledge.
  • Write daily summaries. Summary writing appears to be powerful for reading comprehension and understanding complex new knowledge about a topic. Even single sentence summaries can help organise and evaluate what has been learned and to better process it. 
  • Apply the ideas to a new situation. Pupils can find it difficult to apply knowledge to new scenarios or questions (it is a common reason why they fail with an unfamiliarly worded exam question that seems new to them). Intentional application of knowledge to new situations and questions is therefore essential for meaningful knowledge structures. For example, when learning about ‘adaptation’ in biology, you can apply the concept to different environments that haven’t been explored in the lesson.
  • Give a new example. Generating new examples, like applying new ideas, forces pupils to cohere what they knowledge and extend upon it. For instance, if you used an example of a deep sea adaptation, you could then pose the task for pupils to process an adaptation in a desert biome. 
  • Compare and contrast the new material to other material. The power of comparing examples with non-examples is well known, as it hones a pupil's ability to really understand the nature of a concept. For example, when exploring the Great Fire of London in history, you might compare primary sources with secondary sources, to understanding the changing views of the fire, its causes and significance. 
  • Study for an exam. The ‘testing effect’ is a well-known concept. We all know that being given a goal and a deadline for a test makes you organise your learning and attempt to process what you know. Making the testing low stakes can build momentum, whilst 'real' exams (love 'em or hate them!) create a meaningful goal to apply one's knowledge.

Rosenshine’s strategies are not exactly novel – decades ago or now – but they still prove to be essential teaching approaches to best help pupils better process and develop their knowledge structures. I'd speculate they don't all happen regularly or are implemented with consistent success.

As curricula change, trends pass, and language to describe teaching shifts, it is reassuring to explore enduring insights into the importance of knowledge and how pupils can actively organise into structures that are likely to lead to success.