Best Practices in Education
Parent/Community Involvement - Parent and community involvement is vital in education because the same work ethic, subject-area skills, and social skills that are learned and reinforced in the schools need to be also learned and reinforced at home in order for them to be remembered and internalized by students .
High Standards and Expectations – All students need to be held to high standards and expectations because often as soon as they suspect that they are being held at a lesser standard they will underperform. Providing students with challenging material will often increase motivation as well.
Block Scheduling- Nearly all the research that I have read about brain theory has stressed the importance of pre-exposure, previewing, engagement, framing, acquisition, elaboration, review, and revision information as part of the learning process. With class periods that sometimes do not even reach forty minutes I have trouble seeing how teachers can implement this research into the classroom. Block scheduling provides the additional time that students need in order to learn and remember subject matter.
Best Practices in Instruction
Provide differentiated classroom instruction using a variety of instructional methods and interventions- Too many times teachers fall in a rut of teaching material the same way, regardless of the content they are covering or the different learning styles in their classroom. This an ineffective method because it ignores the fact that each class will have a different student population with different classroom dynamics and learning styles. Not differentiating instruction is also dangerous because the lessons could become routine and boring to the students.
Assess to inform instruction and summarize learning- I think this may be the most important practice of them all. The teacher must be constantly assessing and evaluating their own instructional methods to see if they are the best fit for the students in their class. Angela Bunyi goes on to talk about how she uses her peers to better assess and inform instruction. I think it is important for teachers to collaborate consistently and to realize that their own practices should be tweeked and changed based on the input of others. Unfortunately, at my student-teaching site there doesn’t seem to be a collaborative effort at all and the math teachers seem to be unaware of what the others are doing.
Marzano’s essential 9
Setting objectives and providing feedback- Although objectives were not a part of my student experience, I can see the value of giving students an idea of where the lesson is going and what they are trying to achieve. When students understand the overall concept that they are trying to learn from a particular lesson, they can pick out the individual parts of the instruction that make the most sense to them in understanding the overall concept.
Sources:
Bunyi, Angela (2010) Implementing Best Practices for Math Instruction retrieved September 18,2011 from http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2010/12/implementing-best-practices-for-math-instruction.html
NEA Research Spotlight on Best Practices in Education retrieved September 18,2011 from http://www.nea.org/tools/17073.htm
SERC Best Practices in Education retrieved September 18,2011 from http://www.ctserc.org/s/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=8&Itemid=28
Varlas, Laura (2002) Nine Essential Instructional Strategies retrieved September 18,2011 from http://www.middleweb.com/MWLresources/marzchat1.html
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