Best Practices

Best Practices in Education:I came across several "best practices" that I found intruiging and some I recognized from my MAT classes. Among them are teaching for understanding (Bloom's and CAP); monitoring and assessment; parental involvement; individualized learning and (appropriate!) use of technology.

One link in particular, Connecticut's SERC (State Education Resource Center) listed several, but the one that caught my eye was Professional Development. I don't actively think about it too often, but the quote, "He who dares to teach must never cease to learn," came to mind when I saw that as a best practice. It also reminded me about an activity I did in my EdTech class in which we learned that we as teachers will be educating students to have the skills for jobs that don't even exist yet, and math/science/technology leads those types of jobs. So it is my responsibility to my students to continue learning myself about what's out there so that I am an effective teacher.

A second best practice is building a cooperative, collaborative classroom (a book, "Best Practice" offered a a good number of best practices, but I chose only one for the purpose of this post). When collaboration in maximized in the classroom, it opens multiple avenues for students to interact, can assist ELLs with understanding and improve classroom peer-to-peer relations. This is practice is adventageous for these and more reasons.

Best Practices in Instruction:
Searching this phrase along with "Marzano" revealed that this author has written several books about classroom methods, and he touts the following, as cited in this document about project-based learning:

1. Identifying Similarities and Differences

2. Summarizing and Note Taking

3. Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition

4. Homework and Practice

5. Nonlinguistic Representations

6. Cooperative Learning

7. Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback

8. Generating and Testing Hypotheses

9. Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
The three of these nine I find most relevant to me are the reinforcement/recognition; nonlinguistic repsresntations and cooperative learning. Already having discussed cooperative learning earlier, I will focus on the other two here. Nonlinguistic representations of lesson assists understanding among ELLs and other intelligences who may need other types of sensory data to process information, which is necessary when trying to reach every student. And providing the appropriate reinforcement and recognition of effort instills in students the inherent desire to learn and achieve without the external behavoral incentives that often lose their effect over time.

Another link I found discussed multi-sensory instruction, modeling and class collaboration. I also believe differentiated instruction is important. Teachers need to adjust their strategies to meet the needs of different groups, individual student learning styles and levels of readiness. Best practices in education and instruction are strategies that have shown to increase student participation, understanding and achievement, and because a solid educational foundation is so critical to so many arenas of success, as a teacher I must be willing to implement as many of these best practices that I can to reach the most number of students the most effective ways.