Well said and thank you for your input and feedback. Sometimes I feel all alone in my thoughts and understandings and then I get to hear thoughts/understandings/beliefs of others that let me know that I am not alone... Cyd
"Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back." Chinese proverb >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/04/07 12:21 PM >>> Your first grade colleague has an interesting dilemma to explore and one I wish more graduate students would spend time studying. I think we have confused "standards", "curriculum", "learning tools" and "instructional strategies" in many states and districts. I suspect this teacher's professor is urging them to uncover that issue. Standards and curriculum should be the content we teach - what we intend that our students will learn following instruction. Objectives may break that content down further, into more manageable chunks, but it really is the content that should be represented in our state standards and curriculum documents. We have plenty of research to suggest what content is most essential and that essential content should be the focus of daily instruction. When states include a bunch of instructional practices and learning activities into standards and curriculum, it distracts us from the essential content, but that is another rant! Instructional practices, by contrast, are the tools we use to communicate the content. So, a read aloud, shared reading, reciprocal teaching, etc., are instructional practices - pedagogy. In comprehension instruction, the most effective (correlating to long term retention and reapplication of concepts) are thinking aloud, modeling, demonstrating, conferring, etc. Reciprocal teaching has a ton of good research behind it, we know scaffolding to be effective, the gradual release of responsibility model is a useful instructional framework into which all of the aforementioned can be woven. Unless the professor has made a distinction in class between instructional methods and practices, I'm not aware of a technical distinction, but the place we often get confused, I think, is in using instructional practices interchangeably with learning practices. When a child creates a two-column note chart to hold her thinking or completes a Venn diagram to show an inference, those are not instructional practices - they aren't teaching her to comprehend better. Teachers teach children to comprehend better, not activities. Activities or ways to hold thinking may be useful if a teacher wants to review/assess/decide on a direction for further instruction, etc. Hope that's helpful clarification - encourage your colleague to look into thinking aloud - I believe it's enormously important in comprehension instruction. ellin keene _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.