Best Practice, Today's Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools,   ISBN:9780325007441

Customer Rating: 

As a high school SS instructor, I`m with one star O`Keeffe completely on this one. Please read his narration as it is a bit lengthy, but highly comprehensive. The book is simply a rehash of of politically based broad "concepts" but offers nothing whatsoever concrete or specific for success. In other words, it`s a huge compillation of 20 year retreaded terms like: rich compendium, collaboration, diversity, global, for the good of the children,..... etc, etc. A comic strip like Dilbert would have a complete field day with the 300 pages of highly worn out buzz words and existentialist failures that are of course conveniently politically correct, and what pin-head "progressive" professors love to hear.. READ: make for great sales to agenda driven college profs pawning these off on unfortunate undergrads. True American reading and writing skills are waning drastically. It is becuase of books like this for the past 15 years are driving it in the direction. If you are truly interested in best practices/success in your classroom, do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what these 300 pages of worn out pathetic verbiage tell you to do, and your children will indeed succeed.

Customer Rating: 

So far I have only read 2 chapters (as required for a class), but found them very informative. The authors summed up the situation accurately in my mind concerning the political vs. educational viewpoint of assessment. This book is also well written and easy to read. I look forwrd to reading more.

Customer Rating: 

This book is essential to recognizing that if we want to prepare our kids for the world they will actually live in we must teach in a way that prepares them for that world. The requirement in teaching and learning today is to produce thinking students who can read and write and compute while discriminating between fact and fiction; students who can seek new vistas of solutions and ask questions that offer new possibilities! Our world demands not rote facts and content but how to use knowledge to evaluate new insights, directions and solutions. It all begins in the classrooms with teachers who inspire students. Sadly, there are still many classrooms that are teacher directed with passive learners. The book offers specific strategies that when increased can re-engage, motivate and inspire our students today. I believe eager, motivated and inspired students is essential for our world's future!

Customer Rating: 

Book was delivered on time. I would purchase from seller again. Thank you very much.

Customer Rating: 

As a high-school English teacher, I am personally fed up with the growing mob of self-appointed gurus and "experts" who are attempting to usurp the intellectual authority of teachers, instill professional groupthink, and intimidate teachers and parents alike with their "research-based" snake oil. BEST PRACTICE is a polemic masquerading as accepted professional doctrine. The authors denounce E.D. Hirsch and his Cultural Literacy program as mere commercialism, as if they themselves aren't engaged in the same act of self-promotion and greed with this book. They deplore standardized testing as "heartless" and "authoritarian," yet conveniently ignore what spawned it in the first place. The fact is that both Hirsch and the testing craze wouldn't exist if there were not a significant public demand for them, and that demand exists largely because of the disgraceful, time-proven results of progressive education.

Example: This 2005 edition of BEST PRACTICE continues to laud the 1989 reforms in math education (read: Connected Math) set forth by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, yet within the last two months the NCTM issued headline-making changes in its recommendations to math teachers, effectively retracting its pro-CMP policy in favor of a more traditional approach. Again, this happened because schools and parents recognized the harm wrought by ten years of CMP and its "student-centered" philosophy. Alas, they didn't see it in time to prevent a decade's worth of damage. Why? Because they were sold a bill of goods by the American education establishment, which abandoned substantive learning ages ago in favor of shallow pop-psychology, fad-chasing, and sophism.

I can attest to the failure of Whole Language, another gimmick foisted on America's children in the name of cutting-edge reform. Today's high-school juniors and seniors were first taught to read and write in the mid-1990s, during Whole Language's heyday, and it shows: their writing suffers from rampant spelling and syntax errors, and many students have trouble comprehending what were once standard high-school-level texts like The Scarlet Letter. Worse, they are easily frustrated and resentful for having any reading material outside their narrow self-interest assigned to them, no doubt because the student-centered movement has made them complacent and, ironically, disinterested in reading about cultures, time periods, and experiences unlike their own.

The authors present the standards proposed by numerous education think-tanks and associations as if they were above reproach. The NCTM example alone proves they're not; and as Diane Ravitch notes in her book The Language Police, the 1996 NCTE-IRA standards for teaching English were so bad the Clinton Administration temporarily withdrew funding for the project before it was published. The NCTE in particular is as much a political association as a professional one; it does not welcome or tolerate dissenting views, and it therefore does not speak for all, or even a majority of, the nation's English teachers.

There is nothing wrong with classical teaching. I'll take rote-memorization, seat work, and lecturing over the "experiential," "active," "hands-on learning" drivel so ardently promoted by today's education apostates. It gets results, and it doesn't have to be boring, either, not if it's taught by someone who cares about students and knows their subject-matter thoroughly. Zemelman et al know this, which is why they are so contemptuous of anything remotely traditional occurring in the nation's classrooms; where would their careers be if traditional teaching methods were widely validated over the new nonsense? It's also the reason why they obfuscate their assertions with pseudo-scientific studies--all of which are as vulnerable to selective interpretation and flakiness as is medical research--not to mention pseudo-scientific language. To my mind, manipulative jargon like "constructivist learning" and "triangulated assessment" does more to reveal the dishonest agenda and desperate aspirations of today's educrats than it does to legitimize their authority.

Teachers--i.e. working classroom teachers, not theorists and pedagogues--should do what works best for them and their students. The more we submit to crass opportunists and smug politicos, the more we give up our intellectual integrity in favor of "research-based" gimmickry, the more our entire profession suffers.