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' opinions or conceptions of what constituted “good” teaching.

Prior to the current climate of a standardized curriculum and best practices as defined by others than the classroom teacher, best practices tended to evolve from workshops, professional development series, and from research. Because teaching is a personal and private endeavor, teachers viewed a change in their practices from the perspectives of what they changed and what prompted the change. Thus, teachers were the ultimate arbiters of what was taught (and how). They made decisions about how much time to allocate to a particular school subject, what topics to cover, when and in what order, to what standards of achievement, and to which students. Collectively, these decisions and their implementation defined the content of the curriculum. Using their best judgment in making these decisions, teachers received advice and support from a variety of sources, including and perhaps especially from each other, as to what constituted best practice in the classroom.

That has changed, however, since 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk and even more so since the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law in 2001. Now federal and state education agencies have directed huge resources into identifying and promoting the use of best practices by teachers and other educators so as to improve student achievement as measured by standardized tests. The argument for best practices is that they represent the hope that a systematic comparative [Page 80]evaluation of different programs or program components would yield definite conclusions about what were the most effective, best ways to teach, to deliver the curriculum, and to improve test scores.

Critics contend that such a comparative analysis is difficult when programs have different goals and schools serve different populations with different needs. Best practices need to be specific in identifying best for whom, under what conditions, for what purposes, in what context, with what evidence and criteria were they judged to be best, and in comparison to what alternatives. At the heart of best practices is the concept of generalizability that means that the practice can be successfully transferred to any other similar setting.

Clearly, the concept of best practices was conceived of and touted to be the simplification of the complex task of teaching. As a nonlinear task, however, teaching does not easily lend itself to being reduced to a formula or to a recipe. Nor is teaching a dispassionate act having no emotional connection to each other or to the topic being studied. Finally, teaching at its best and with its most potency calls for a search for meaning, for significance, and for making a difference in the lives of students. The identification of best practices by other entities outside of the personal classroom makes the teaching and learning process external. As scholars in the field of curriculum studies have demonstrated, best practices also deskills teachers, and it leads them to question the relevance of their work over which they now have such little control. The argument could be made that best practices are the culmination of the 1960s movement that moved curriculum studies away from the center of school work toward the error proofing of the teaching-learning process.

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