Best Practice

As I was teaching this spring Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde's book, Best Practice: Bring Standards to Life in America's Classrooms, Fourth Edition, was given to me. Its been a crazy busy first part of summer, so I only just now finished it. It was published in 2012, shortly after the release of the Common Core Standards and reflects that time- disillusionment with No Child Left Behind and excitement about the advent of the Common Core. Six years later  we have seen progress continues to stagnate under new standards and people left scratching their heads about how to help American children be more successful in school.

Best Practice urges the use of evidence proven strategies and discipline based consensus about how to achieve success. The general message is that kids need to read and write more and engage in more inquiry and experiential opportunities to better grasp the curriculum. This book had much more of a focus on elementary and middle school programs. Only two examples address high school experiences. This is potentially due to the lack of these ideas being utilized effectively at the secondary level in spite people saying they are the goal.

Best practice begins with the basic principles:

• student centered classrooms
• authentic learning opportunities featuring experiences that allow them to construct ideas and systems
• holistic rather than part to whole
• challenging curriculum
• learning comes from cognitive experiences- based on prior knowledge, emphasizes the role of factual knowledge and conceptual frameworks, full of self-monitoring
• developmentally appropriate and self-reflection
• socially based- friendly and supportive, safe, collaborative, democratic
• multiple forms of expression to engage in ideas

Then they go on to explain the seven structures of teaching that support the principles-

• gradual release of responsibility
• classroom workshop
• strategic thinking
• collaborative activities
• integrative units
• representing to learn
• formative-reflective assessment.

I can find little argument with the ideas except that they are often out of step with how we approach much of our educational program- discrete subjects with a mountain of curriculum to wade through, little collaborative planning time and respect for teachers who want to preserve their silos. As the authors go through the chapters on reading, writing, math, science and social studies, these challenges become apparent. We might be able to appreciate the beauty of the examples provided, but find it nearly impossible to figure out how to implement it in our realities. The best advice, although not written in the text is to go slow and incorporate pieces that work for you and then move forward as you become more comfortable.

The authors support conferencing with students around reading and writing. Many of my peers pondered how to implement this when they had not read the book or student's paper. (After all, my son glories in stories of his peers who wrote about imaginary books or who watched movies in lieu of reading and wrote reports based on the film.) They offer these three questions:

1. What are you working on?
2. How is it going?
3. What do you plan to do next? or How can I help you right now? P. 49

These are springboard questions that stimulate a conversation that should only take about five minutes per child.

I also really enjoyed the description the authors used of an "emphasis on metacognition, taking responsibility for running your own brain" (p. 50). It gives the focus to kids. This past year I worked out a behavior self-monitoring sheet for the kids I had in one class. They had to give themselves a daily rating of how they did- accomplished the task for the day and behaved appropriately. There was a description of what it looked like to behave appropriately to help them gauge their day. I looked over their ratings every day and sometimes added comments about how the student rated himself. Behavior improved in the room. Students were more able to identify what they needed to do and how to do better.

From a reading point of view, they stated the four things children need to do in order to improve their reading:

• read a lot
• access to books they can read
• to learn to read fluently
• and to develop thoughtful literacy (p. 266).

I notice an absence of rigor, grade-level appropriate, or challenging when describing what kids should be reading. This movement of the Common Core is not what they suggest makes for better readers- reading motivating, accessible material does. The message applies to writing- write a lot about things they care about so they can do it easily (both from a graphomotor and text perspective) and be thoughtful about their writing. These are things we can do in every classroom- no need for long papers- a paragraph will do, if it is done everyday in every class.

We can help our children achieve new heights- but we need to look at things differently and we need to engage them in meaningful work.