Best Practices & Methods of Teaching & Instruction

Beta Site for the Teaching Optimization Rubric & Choice (TORC) System: a Reflective Model for Identifying and Classifying Good, Better, Best Practices in Classroom Based Instruction

The Storied Content of Content Area Literacy

One of the best stories never told is the cornucopia of solutions to educational problems that are can be harvested from the quarter acre of the Educational field called Content Area Literacy. The fertility of CAL methodology is easily demonstrable. Using the CAL Solutions suggested in the Figure ahead, for example, would cause most any teacher, language arts to math, to be able to know some of the best ways to accomplish many of the fundamental goals detailed.

Representative CAL Solutions

1. Assessing and improving student skill in handling the various "language redundancy patterns in the prose," or language style characteristics of the various disciplines.
2. Be able to assess and quickly instruct students in how to more efficiently and effectively use the particular textbooks of their various content classes.
3. Know how to take virtually any textbook and make it more accessible to all students in most any heterogeneously grouped class
4. Teach students how to form a mind focusing purpose for reading a particular selection in a manner that imparts strategies for performing this crucial task for them.
5. Prepare a reading and discussion lesson on a piece of text that simultaneously teaches question raising, question answering and many of the fine points of instructional conversation, and in the process overcoming the sometimes vague irrelevancies and disconnected discussion that a class can lapse into.
6. Design a quick pullout and promptly back to class system that within as little as 6-8 weeks teaches and trains very needy students in the fundamentals of decoding, word recognition and analysis.
7. Utilize a teaching method that with one slight tweak of teacher behavior can convert even workbook or computer-based exercise activity into a more generative – positively disposed and more analytical and strategic levels of reading and thinking.
8. Know how to impart both interest in words and the acquisition of a vocabulary that within one semester could yield significant gains in virtually every area tested on typical scholastic achievement tests.
9. Conduct very brief and frequent exercises in writing from multiple perspectives which creates multiple and poignant written conversations and with a minimum of teacher reviewing of papers.
10. Teach for creative outcomes effortlessly, and often by just explicitly asking for it.

The professors, administrators and teachers who can provide the means and methods of satisfying just the obligations and solutions found in this Figure would instantly be distinguishable from even the most naturally talented but uncertified persons who would claim the privilege of being called Teacher. Ironically, the answers to these and a host of related technical questions can be found in most any solid Content Area Reading textbook, and could easily be woven into the many "Leadership" programs that now dominate doctoral studies throughout the nation, but are very light on pedagogical science. TORC is designed to advance pedagogical science.