The worst of "best practices"

Roxanna Elden:

District, county, and state education offices are fond of sharing "best practices" through professional development. The idea is to spread the word about strategies that work in some schools so other teachers can use these strategies and get the same great results. There are times when it works this way. Unfortunately, things can get complicated when the same people who pick and distribute best practices are also responsible for checking whether they are being done correctly, and when none of those people are current teachers. Here's an example of how the sharing of best practices sometimes works once supervising offices get involved.

Phase one: A school seems to be successful in educating students in a given subject or demographic sub-group. Let's call this School A.

Phase two: A team of people who want to know what made School A successful descends upon the school. They sit in the classrooms. They ask questions. Then the team comes back with a report that says something like, "Teachers at School A are successful because they ask students to make their own test using fill-in-the-blank test questions. This is a research-based report."

Phase three: The information from the report is filtered through a series of people sitting in a quiet, student-less office. Materials are created. Packets are made.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 26, 2011 3:04 AM
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