Best Practice

Research has been conducted by many professional organizations in an attempt to understand what classroom practices best promote student learning. After studying reports from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the Center for the Study of Reading, the National Writing Project, the National Council for the Social Studies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or the International Reading Association (IRA), the fundamental insights into teaching and learning are remarkable congruent and form an unrecognized consensus. Suggestions include:

LESS…

• Presentational, one-way transmission of information from teacher to student.
• Prizing and rewarding of silence in the classroom.
• Classroom time devoted to fill-in-the-blank worksheets, dittos, workbooks, and other “seatwork”.
• Student time spent reading textbooks and basal readers.
• Attempt by teachers to thinly “cover” large amounts of material in every subject area.
• Rote memorization of facts and details.
• Emphasis on the competition and grades in school.
• Tracking or leveling students into “ability groups”.
• Use of pull-out special programs.
• Use of and reliance on standardized tests.

MORE…

• Experiential, inductive, hands-on learning.
• Active learning in the classroom, with all the attendant noise and movement of students doing, talking, and collaborating.
• Diverse roles for teachers, including coaching, demonstrating, and modeling.
• Emphasis on higher-order thinking; learning a field’s key concepts and principles.
• Deep study of a smaller number of topics, so that students internalize the field’s way of inquiry.
• Reading of real texts: whole books, primary sources, and nonfiction materials.
• Responsibility transferred to students for their work: goal setting, record keeping, monitoring, sharing, exhibiting, and evaluating.
• Choice for students (e.g., choosing their won books, writing topics, team partners, and research projects).
• Enacting and modeling of the principles of democracy in school.
• Attention to affective needs and the varying cognitive styles of individual students.
• Cooperative, collaborative activity; developing the classroom as an interdependent community.
• Heterogeneously grouped classrooms where individual needs are met through inherently individualized activities, not segregation of bodies.
• Delivery of special help to students in regular classrooms.
• Varied and cooperative roles for teachers, parents, and administrators.
• Reliance on teachers’ descriptive evaluations of student growth, including observational/anecdotal records, conference notes, and performance assessment rubrics.

Translated into practice Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde “identify thirteen interlocking principles, assumptions, or theories that characterize this model of education” (p. 7).

1. STUDENT-CENTERED. The best starting point for schooling is young people’s real interests; all across the curriculum, investigating students’ own questions should always take precedence over studying arbitrarily and distantly selected “content”.
2. EXPERIENTIAL. Active, hands-on, concrete experience is the most powerful and natural form of learning. Students should be immersed in the most direct possible experience of the content of every subject.
3. HOLISTIC. Children learn best when they encounter whole ideas, events, and materials in purposeful contexts, not by studying sub-parts isolated from actual use.
4. AUTHENTIC. Real, rich, complex ideas and materials are at the heart of the curriculum. Lessons or textbooks that water-down, control, or oversimplify content ultimately.
5. EXPRESSIVE. To fully engage ideas, construct meaning, and remember information, students must regularly employ the whole range of communicative media --- speech, writing, drawing, poetry, dance, drama, music, movement, and visual arts.
6. REFLECTIVE. Balancing the immersion in experience and expression must be opportunities for learners to reflect, debrief, abstract from their experiences what they have felt and thought and learned.
7. SOCIAL. Learning is always socially constructed and often interactional; teachers need to create classroom interactions that “scaffold” learning.
8. COLLABORATIVE. Cooperative learning activities tap the social power of learning better than competitive and individualistic approaches.
9. DEMOCRATIC. The classroom is a model community; students learn what they live as citizens of the school.
10. COGNITIVE. The most powerful learning comes when children develop true understanding of concepts through higher-order thinking associated with various fields of inquiry and through self-monitoring of their thinking.
11. DEVELOPMENTAL. Children grow through as series of definable but not rigid stages, and schooling should fit its activities to the developmental level of students.
12. CONSTRUCTIVIST. Children do not just receive content; in a very real sense, they re-create and reinvent every cognitive system they encounter, including language, literacy, and mathematics.
13. CHALLENGING. Students learn best when faced with genuine challenges, choices, and responsibility in their own learning.

Zemelman, S., Daniels, H., & Hyde, A. (1998). Best practice: New standards for teaching and learning in America’s schools (2nd ed). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. (p. 4-8).