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
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