What, Then, of Best Practices?
What, then, of the “silver bullet”—the teaching method that works best regardless of setting? At this point I must consider the likelihood that there is no one best practice, even as my friends and I continue to write about the methods that we learned and built on through our studies and long relationship with Hillocks. For the right teacher in the right situation, we believe that these methods can produce some pretty powerful teaching; we still get enthusiastic responses when we present our ideas and materials, so something must be working. And yet the NCTE Annual Convention rooms are filled with sessions promoting other methods, so NCTE’s diverse constituents are seeing their instructional needs met in many different ways.
Even with this ecumenical approach, I don’t find a wide-open “to each his or her own” solution to be entirely satisfying. I’ve daydreamed through many a lecture in my day, and so I can’t agree that just because a teacher Cartier Replica is comfortable lecturing, it’s the right method for the setting (or, at least, a setting that includes me). I also can’t say that because a research study demonstrates something’s effectiveness, it’s automatically worth doing to the exclusion of all else, although it may be worth trying. Of course I was happy to know that Hillocks’s me-ta-analysis of experimental studies found the environmental or structured-process approach to be the most effective method of improving students’ writing. But rather than ending the discussion, his results produced a new wave of dispute, especially from those who found that the individualized, “natural process” methods that he questioned worked well in their classrooms.
Perhaps the current corollary to that dispute concerns the ways in which the federal No Child Left Behind Act has instituted research-based teaching methods as the “best practice” for improving reading test scores. And the research base upon which they draw is limited to only one method, the experimental design that uses statistical tests of significance to determine an experimental group’s degree of effectiveness. But many question the idea that reading scores are the best indicators of reading improvement, that reading “understanding” or “comprehension” is precisely definable or measurable in any way, that experimental designs are the best and only research method available to identify effective teaching practices, that scripted lessons designed to raise test scores comprise good teaching, or that good teachers would want to remain in a profession in which their good judgment is trumped by the imperative Omega Speedmaster Replica Watches to stick to the script that someone else has written to guide their teaching. I think that the splendid teaching narratives provided by Cynthia Ballenger, Karen Gallas, Karen Hale Hankins, Greg Michie, and many others reveal that quality teaching requires a greater sensitivity to students than any scripted lessons can afford.
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