Best Practices

Best practices tend to be those that are suggested by respected professionals as well as those for which there is some level of research regarding the usefulness of the practice. Although evidence-based practice is used in various fields such as medicine and nursing, it has not always been used in curriculum in particular or in education in general. At one time, teachers based their curricular decisions on their personal perspectives as well as on their knowledge about the students in their classrooms. This personal perspective served as a filter or lens through which they either accepted, rejected, or interpreted new practices for their classrooms. A further consideration for teacher practices was that the external expectations imposed policies that did not usually correspond to the teachers' ...