You might be familiar with Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, but are you are aware that the similarly named Rosenblatt also had principles of instruction some 60 years earlier? In the interest of revisiting educational history, Rosenblatt’s principles are as interesting to review as Rosenshine’s.

To start with, Louise Rosenblatt didn’t collect her own principles together. They were spread out amongst her seminal work on transactional theories of literature and Probst put them together. Indeed her most famous text from 1938, Literature as Exploration, is still in print . These principles emanate from the teaching of English (she is best known for the concept of ‘Reader Response’), but the principles can also be explored through the lens of other subjects by considering the notions of epistemic curiosity (Litman, 2008). The main principle to note here is that there is an element of the learning that cannot be placed in a knowledge organiser and cannot be directly instructed for. In English we refer to it as reader response. The idea that every person’s experience of the text is unique. The text sits alone until a reader comes along and consumes it. In doing so, they have an experience. That experience then makes up part of the meaning of the text. So, let’s look at the Rosenblatt’s principles of instruction as put together by Probst (1987).

Thus, you can see how it contributes to contemporary debates over knowledge, “knowledge…is not something to be found, not something the teacher can give to the student…”. Here, I don’t mean that one cannot organise and plan knowledge for lessons – planning and organising knowledge ahead of a lesson is a very good approach to teaching. I am saying that not all knowledge can be organised and planned for in lessons. For English, this is fairly well enshrined in our subject. Each student, when writing about literature, will offer a personal response over and above those efferent aspects of the text that the teacher can plan and teach to the student. It’s not enough, in English, for the student to learn about characters, plots, contexts and themes in literature: they must also personally respond to it. Take the recent real life story about Lord of the Flies – it makes people question their response to the original text. Do humans forever have a touch of the animal within them? Or is it not so inevitable? Our personal response when we read the text forms part of the meaning of the text. And further, that meaning changes as we change and the world changes.

The next step I want to take this to is as a lens through which to look at other subjects. Litman writes extensively about epistemic curiosity. Both the desire to learn more about something one is passionate about and also the desire to fill a perceived gap in knowledge. When learning within a subject, experiences happen. These experiences also feed into epistemic curiosity. The reader response can therefore be applied to other aspects of the curriculum. When learning about the horrors of slavery or the civil rights era, many of us felt compelled to know more. Sometimes, as Litman points out, that compelling need is because we feel a deficit of knowledge. We feel it is important to know more about this topic. It drives our own self-regulated learning with the metacognitive engine running at full speed. On other occasions, a teacher might expose you to a topic and you find it compelling. I still recall the experience of being taught the Norfolk crop rotation method from medieval history in year 9 and deciding I wanted to find out more – independently.

The concepts behind Rosenblatt’s principles of instruction therefore play an important part in a teacher’s planning. When is this going to happen in the lesson? How can we use discussion to facilitate this ‘experience’ and response. It’s not enough to learn that knowledge which we have planned for them to learn. There is more – the experience of learning that knowledge and then further: what is that experience like? By this, I don’t mean gimmicky things which makes a lesson ‘interesting’ – I’m on record as saying our subjects are interesting in their own rights. But that ‘interesting’ actually means it feeds into curiosity. What we want to achieve in our lessons is an experience where the students themselves find our subject interesting and that bits of our subject knowledge are attached to these experiences of curiosity.

I’m interested to know how other subjects approach this unique idea of the triangulation between the student, the knowledge and the experience. I have written before that knowledge alone is insufficient (see our article on Disposable Knowledge). When learning knowledge, students will have an experience of learning that knowledge and that experience becomes part of the knowledge. We can’t say in advance what that experience will be, but it is something we can plan for and even look to enhance.