Today marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of my Rosenshine’s Principles in Action booklet on May 17th 2019. The timing was such that it caught the wave in interest in Rosenshine in general so the level of interest in my booklet was just incredible; it raced to a peak ranking of 17 in all books in the UK. Since then the level of interest has continued steadily and I’m told that 158,000 copies have now been sold. This has massively exceeded anyone’s expectations.

The origin of the booklet was a talk. Back in 2018, I did my first talk about Rosenshine’s Principles at Rugby’s ResearchEd, where I enthused about them as a brilliant summary of teaching ideas, bridging theory and practice. Here’s the blog post I wrote at the time, introducing a way to think of the ideas in four strands:

Later in 2018 I had a chance to repeat this talk at ResearchEd in Philadelphia.

This turned out to be significant because, not only was Dylan Wiliam in the audience, so was the US publisher Mark Combes who suggested I turned my talk into a short book.

A US edition was released – in bright yellow- but then John Catt also wanted to publish an UK edition. It only took me a couple of days to write most of my 12,000 words and, after a rapid production process, the little (short and thin) red book came to life in May 2019, quickly finding its way into schools all around the UK and overseas. I’m still completely stunned by how quickly this all happened. A major fluke of timing.

Beyond writing the booklet, I’ve spend a lot of time in the last five years, delivering training where I explain how Rosenshine’s Principles translate into everyday classrooms. I’m fortunate enough to get regular invitations to lead CPD sessions for schools and, to me, it never gets old. I’m continually struck by how much material Barak Rosenshine packed into his brilliant summary. I regularly meet new audiences for the discussion about how these principles work in theory and translate into practice – so, for every group of people thinking this is old news, there are many more where it’s a fresh view of their everyday practice, or, as trainees, it’s the first time they’ve really explored them.

Only yesterday, I was at it again ,talking to another cohort of trainees with LETTA_Training in Tower Hamlets.

Of course, there is always work to do to overcome the sceptics… I’ve explored much of that in this post:

And, in 2020. just as we entered the first lockdown, I put a series of recordings of me talking through my slides online, free for anyone to access.

To-date, the five 30 minute videos have had 300,000 plays on Youtube. The level of interest is in part due to the popularity of Claire Grime’s superb workbook, written as a PD programme or reflection tool for teachers, linking directly to my videos via QR codes. It’s an excellent concept executed superbly which has now sold over 50,000 copies.

I”ve enjoyed finding out more about the origins of Rosenshine’s work and I”m a particular fan his early thinking – framed as ‘Instructional Functions’

The year after the booklet was published, we released our first Walkthrus book where Rosenshine’s Principles feature prominently in our ‘Why’ section –

And we now have a fully interactive ‘cluster tool’ as part of the toolkit based on suggestions by US educator Kent Wetzel.

Towards the end of the summer term 2023 I did another whole-day masterclass with some updated ideas about the principles. This is now available to anyone to watch for free – or via a small donation to Oxfam:

Every single time I talk to teachers about Rosenshine’s Principles I find that they provide a superb framework for exploring a wide range of issues that teachers face every day. I’m grateful to Barak Rosenshine and the American Educator magazine for making the principles so readily available. I’m grateful to Mark Combes and Alex Sharratt for bringing the booklet to life through their publishing know-how. And I”m grateful to Oliver Caviglioli for first drawing my attention to the ideas through his famous blue poster, then helping me with all the thinking and providing the images. The distinctive Olicav memory model image, with the schema-in-head element, first appeared in the Rosenshine booklet and has since been reproduced by multiple authors in multiple blogs and books.

I have no idea whether the booklet will continue to do well but I’m certain that Rosenshine’s Principles will continue to provide a superb basis for thinking about excellent instructional teaching long into the future. Thanks to everyone who has supported the little red booklet and to anyone out there who has run training on the principles for teachers anywhere, helping to spread the word and to support teachers to hone their instructional teaching in practice.