The Problem with "Best Practice"

 Article: "Best Practice - the Enemy of Beteter Teaching" Link

1. "Best practices" can encourage a plug-and-play approach. Teachers are encouraged to adopt new methods and use them as often as possible, but they're often given few opportunities to analyze or develop a better understanding of those methods. For example, textbook publishers, professional development providers, and math specialists have been pushing greater use of conceptually rich mathematical problems. "Rich problems" or "concept tasks" have received the best practice label on the basis, in part, of the mistaken conclusion that higher-achieving countries teach a greater number of rich problems than the United States does.

2. "Best practices" can uncouple learning goals from instructional methods. The seven countries involved in the TIMSS used different teaching methods because they valued different learning goals. This finding reveals a principle worth highlighting: Good teaching must always be associated with a welldefined learning goal. A good teaching method for one learning goal might not be effective for another. Without specifying learning goals, there's no way to sort out which teaching methods are better than others. Suppose the goal for 10th graders taking second-year algebra is high performance on a unit test that contains a number of mathematical procedures that students must execute correctly. Research has shown that a good way to prepare students for recalling facts or procedures is repeated, error-free practice with immediate feedback. But suppose the learning goal for these same 10th graders is not just to perform well on the unit test, but to remember these procedures for the rest of the year and be able to modify them to solve slightly different problems that will come up in the future. Research has shown that this kind of learning goal is better achieved if students are required to exert some intellectual effort in making sense of the procedures, perhaps wrestling with the question of why the procedures work

3. "Best practices" focus on activity instead of achievement. In many school contexts, the idea of sharing best practices represents a search for ways to keep the classroom environment lively and stimulating. In this context, best is sometimes labeled fresh, innovative, or high interest. Although there's nothing wrong with employing high-interest activities, it's counterproductive to make them a focal point and primary objective of instruction rather than a means of fostering student learning of specific content and skills. Ends can be confused with means; activities can be substituted for achievement. Introducing new technologies is a prime example. Thousands of districts and schools have adopted one-to-one initiatives with new laptops or mobile devices and introduced interactive whiteboards, assessment clickers, and software applications, all of which are potentially powerful tools. But without careful planning and training, these devices and resources can quickly become expensive and colorful accessories for existing instructional methods— and one more reason teachers may not be focused on continual improvement of instruction through planning, trying out, evaluating, and refining better practices. The same narrative describes popular best practices, such as problem-based learning, cooperative groups, or handson activities and manipulatives. Gravitating toward the latest and greatest ideas with hopes of keeping students on task, interested, and engaged is not a bad thing. These can be effective instructional approaches—for certain learning objectives. But that nuance often is ignored, so teachers don't receive the training or aren't given the time to learn how to leverage these new approaches to foster student learning and understanding. Evaluative observations of teaching—for high stakes or not—often mistake the mere presence of specific instructional practices as meaningful, rather than attending to whether students are learning something: Did the teacher use higher-order questioning in the lesson? Yes or no? How many times? It would be better to ask, When the teacher used higher-order questioning, did it create a powerful learning opportunity? Perhaps an even more important question is this: Was the lesson planned and executed so students had challenging learning opportunities that higherorder questioning enabled?