First Principles of Teaching and Learning

A recurring theme in professional learning is exploring what it really means to be evidence informed. Too often, this is interpreted as teachers needing to wade through endless research papers or hunt for evidence behind every classroom technique.

In practice, the real power lies in grounding ourselves in a few fundamental ideas about learning that can then guide a wide range of teaching strategies. The reading this week is from former Head Teacher and education consultant, Tom Sherrington and attempts to clarify First Principles of Teaching.

Key points

• Many models have tried to simplify teaching and learning (e.g. Great Teaching Toolkit, Making Every Lesson Count, MARGE, Rosenshine’s principles).
• Underpinning all of them is a cognitive model of how learning happens – drawing on thinkers like Sweller, Willingham, and Cottingham.
• The central challenge of whole-class teaching is ensuring that all students, not just some, are actively learning.
• To cut through the complexity, we can frame teaching around three simple prompts:
  • 1. Is everyone thinking? – Are students focusing attention, activating prior knowledge, and genuinely engaged?
  • 2. Is everyone making meaning? – Are they connecting new ideas to prior schema, making sense of material in ways that stick?
  • 3. Is everyone practising? – Are they consolidating knowledge through rehearsal, retrieval, and application with increasing fluency?

These three questions sit within the broader idea of Responsive Teaching: strong instructional input, eliciting evidence, and adaptive feedback loops.

Why it matters
If we can keep those three prompts alive in our planning and classrooms, we give ourselves a simple yet powerful way to check whether learning is really happening – for every student, every lesson.

Read the full article.

Head of English Faculty opportunity
Brighton Grammar School is hiring! If you are interested in evidence-based teaching practices, explicit instruction, a knowledge-rich curriculum and instructional coaching, please apply. Don’t worry about too much experience; if you are intelligent, humble and hardworking, we can support you with the rest.

Learn more here.

Happy coaching.

Kind regards
Mark

Upcoming events

• 5-7 October – Instructional Coaching Group: Teaching Learning Coaching Conference (Arizona, USA)