But Really, What of Best Practices?
I have found this essay to be difficult to conclude. I’d like to close with a snappy solution that teachers can use on Monday, but abandoning the universal idea of a best practice makes that impossible. Ultimately, I think that the best resolution to the question of what constitutes a “best practice” is to shift the terms to what Arthur Applebee calls principled practice (“Musings”). Teaching through principled practice challenges teachers to think about what is appropriate given the unique intersection that their classroom provides for their many and varied students; their beliefs Tag Heuer Replica about teaching and learning; the materials available for them to use; and the public, professional, and policy contexts in which they teach. The notion of principled practice focuses on the why of teaching: why teaching methods work in particular ways in particular settings.
Taking this approach invests a great deal of authority and responsibility in the teacher. A scripted curriculum, a centralized orthodoxy, or an abdication of judgment is not amenable to a principled practice approach. Teaching through principled practice might foreground different values—care for students’ emotional needs in one setting, attention to home and community literacies in another, adherence to conventional literacies in another—depending on what a teacher’s principled assessment of the situation produces. It might attend primarily to local values or might result in a challenge to local values. Above all it should be informed: about available pedagogies, about students both generally and particularly, about community and administrative values and priorities, and about how to make wise and prudent decisions within the contested political environment of schooling.
Inevitably, such an approach involves reflective practice, a term Hillocks (Teaching) borrows from Donald Schon and many others. Through reflective practice a teacher continually considers the effects of instruction on students’ learning, or on whatever other outcomes might be produced through a teaching and learning relationship. The focus might be on teaching methods, as Hillocks urges in promoting the idea of frame experiments: teachers’ studies of what students learn based on how they are taught. Evidence of quality teaching might come through the products of students’ work, through evidence of greater engagement (e.g., the number of students who participate in activities and discussions), or through the presence of other qualities that the teacher hopes will follow from a particular instructional approach.
Other reflective practitioners have sought to change the quality of classroom relationships, as when Sarah Freedman et al. introduced multicultural themes into urban classrooms to force simmering issues out into the open. Evidence of change came through the teachers’ systematic observations of how such topics altered classroom dynamics with respect to who contributed, what sort of emotional timbre followed, which issues emerged, and so on.
Undoubtedly there are additional ways in which teachers may reflect on their own practice. I see principled, reflective practice as a way to increase the likelihood that an effective practice—although not necessarily “the best” practice—will be employed for further reflection and reconsideration. Taking this approach involves, I think, a teacher’s continual involvement in some sort of professional growth through reading and discussion, and so keeps a teacher in touch with what’s possible as students, fields, communities, and other factors change over time. It further involves teachers in paying attention to how their students experience their classrooms. And so a principled, reflective practitioner who employs lectures might learn that students are not paying attention, or that they can repeat information from books and notes but not think constructively when presented with new material.
When instruction is tied to principled, reflective practice, “anything goes” becomes untenable: Things only “go” if they work according to the teacher’s thoughtful standard of learning or other desired result. Best practices then are comprised of the methods that a teacher determines, through principled reflection on how instruction works, to be effective in his or her unique setting. This notion is not tied to Tag Heuer Replica Watches any specific pedagogy but rather to the teacher’s informed, verified judgment of what students need and how to provide it instructionally. These judgments needn’t be published like those of Gallas and others, although I wish that more were publicly available. The product of such teaching comes through the benefits afforded to each new classroom of students that benefits from the experiences of the last.
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