Small Steps
Teach one small piece at a time, and check it before you add the next
Use this when
What is it?
Small Steps is the practice of teaching new material in small pieces, practising each piece straight away, and adding the next only once the current one is secure. It is the counterweight to covering a whole method in a single explanation. New learning has to pass through working memory, which holds only a few items at once, so each step is sized to fit within it.
The steps
- Split the material before the lesson. Find each place where a student could first practise something, and make a cut there. A step is small enough when most of the class is likely to succeed at the first attempt. If a step requires two new ideas at once, cut it again.
- Teach the first step only. Explain it, demonstrate it in an example, and stop there. Save the rest of the method until after the check.
- Practise that step straight away. Set two or three short questions on the piece you have just taught. Ask every student to answer, on boards or in books.That's the first step. Before we touch the next one, three quick questions on your boards.
- Check the whole room, then decide. Scan the boards or the books. As a rough guide, move on when about four in five are right, adjusting for how much the next step depends on this one. When more are wrong, teach the step again in different words and check again.About half of us slipped on that one, so it isn't ready yet. Watch one more, then we'll go again.
- Add the next step and connect it to the last. Teach the new piece, then set practice that runs the new and previous steps together.
- Lengthen the chain until it is the whole method. Make later practice run the full sequence from the beginning. If one step gives way, reteach that step on its own, then rejoin the chain.
What it looks like
Mrs Whitlock is teaching long multiplication to a class of 10-year-olds. She begins with the first step only: multiplying by the units digit. Three questions on boards; twenty-seven of thirty are correct. "Good. Next piece." She teaches the second row: write the zero, then multiply by the tens digit. Three more questions follow.
This time a third of the boards have no zero. That was too much for one step. "Boards down. New rule: the zero goes down before anything else. Show me just the zero." Thirty boards, thirty zeros. Then she checks the multiplying on its own, and it holds. "Now the whole second row." That holds too. The adding waits until tomorrow, which disappoints Amir. "When do we add them up?" "Tomorrow. Today the rows need to be easy first."
How you’ll know it’s working
- Teacher talk comes in short stretches with student practice between them; from the back of the room, nobody spends ten minutes doing nothing but listening.
- Each check puts a number on the room, and the teacher can say how many students answered correctly before the class moved on.
- When a check comes back wrong, the lesson visibly changes course: the same step is retaught and rechecked before anything new is introduced.
- Fewer hands go up for rescue during independent practice, because each piece of the method was secured before students encountered the whole of it.
Pitfalls & fixes
- Cutting by the clock instead of by the content. Pausing every five minutes achieves little if the pause contains no practice. Cut where a student could first do something, and let the steps be uneven in length.
- Checking with "got it?". Nods carry little information about the step. Make every check something students do: a board, a written answer, an explanation from a named student.
- Moving on at half the room. Each step has to carry the weight of every step that follows. Reteach a wobbly step in a different way and check again; the two minutes this costs are cheaper than reteaching the whole method next week.
- Never joining the steps. Weeks of practice on isolated pieces can produce students who can do every step and still lose the whole. Join each new step to the chain as soon as it is secure, and finish the sequence with full runs of the method.
Weigh it up
Why it’s worth it
- The class stays with you through new material. Each piece fits within working memory, so the students who are usually lost by minute five are often still with you at minute twenty-five.
- You find out where the method breaks down while you are still teaching it. The between-step checks tell you which step failed and for whom, while there is still lesson time to fix it.
- Success arrives early and often, which matters for students who give up quickly: each hurdle is small enough to clear, and clearing one makes them more likely to attempt the next.
- Attention holds better during teaching from the front, and low-level drifting shrinks, because nobody listens for long without having to do something.
- Running the growing chain revisits the earliest steps repeatedly, so by the end of the sequence the start of the method has been retrieved and practised many times.
The costs
- The planning effort is real. Finding the natural cut points in a topic is difficult the first time, and the right size for each step only settles after you have taught it once or twice.
- It is slower than a single polished explanation, and a curriculum plan that assumes one-lesson coverage will feel the drag.
- Step size is relative to the class. Steps sized for the students who need them can bore those who do not, so you need extension work ready at every check.
Adaptations
- Early years / lower primary: a step can be as small as a single action: hold the pencil, trace the letter, write it unaided. Children practise by doing the action, and you check by watching each child do it.
- Secondary essay subjects: treat the paragraph as the method. Teach and practise claim, evidence and explanation as separate steps before anyone writes a full paragraph.
- Post-16 / adult: very small steps can feel patronising to adults, so share the plan up front: "We'll build this in five pieces and practise each one." Once the design is visible, the pace reads as thoroughness.
- Music, PE and practical subjects: small steps are already the norm here: the bowing arm alone, the left hand alone, then both together. If you also teach a classroom subject, bring the same patience back indoors.
Where this comes from
Small Steps is the second of Barak Rosenshine's principles of instruction, drawn from classroom studies of the most effective teachers, who presented new material in small amounts and had students practise after each one. Cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller and colleagues, explains why the approach works: working memory holds only a few new items at once. No study fixes the right size of a step for a particular class, however; that judgement builds through checking and adjusting.
Sources
Related techniques
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