How Best Practices are Best Met in Middle and High School

Debbie Willingham
Feb 09, 2009

Sometimes even those teachers who want to do the best possible job helping their students find success have a hard time realizing exactly what that should look like. Students are often told the expectations for success without being told how to reach those expectations. Sometimes teachers see a new initiative as "one more thing" to have to do without understanding how it may seamlessly fit in with the good practices they already have in place. Best practices are the basis of the Learning-Focused Strategies Model, so they should not be considered something additional, but rather what we hope always happens in the classroom. Here are some of the best practices we know we should be using and how Learning-Focused helps teachers meet them.
 
On top of the list is, of course, standards-driven design of all lessons. Learning-Focused helps teachers design standards-driven lessons with the development of K-U-D (Know-Understand-Do) Organizers, Student Learning Maps, learning units, and lessons planned with standards as the basis for all teaching and learning.
 
Beginning by addressing the standards-driven objective of a lesson to focus students is another best practice. Learning-Focused extends this by turning it into an essential question that students are expected to answer by the end of the lesson and by posting and addressing the question with students.
 
An obvious, but sometimes underused, best practice is the expectation by teachers of a high degree of rigor in every class for every student. The consistent use of high level questions throughout lessons as distributed guided practice and summary can help all students keep up and understand at a high level. Expecting all students to use extending thinking skills such as constructing support, analyzing perspectives, deductive reasoning, and error analysis, ensures that students are expected to think at and reach a higher level of understanding-thinking "outside the box and beyond the book".
 
Keeping all students constantly engaged and ensuring that they understand how to think about specific content is another best practice that teachers sometimes fail to address. The consistent use of graphic organizers in all lessons to help students organize content and skills and to analyze information, as well as the concerted effort by teachers to make all lectures interactive, can increase engagement and understanding by all levels of learners.
 
Displaying student work and having "walls that teach" is another best practice. When teachers have students create products or performances in their culminating and extending thinking assignments, they can often be displayed with their correlation to the essential question and standards that have been addressed.  To make them even more powerful, the process can be shown by also displaying the graphic organizers students used to design their products.
 
Finally, assessing student understanding in ways beyond a test is an important best practice, because "show what you know" can often be more revealing than just a pencil and paper test. Learning-Focused assessments are product or performance-based and may include both extending thinking and culminating assignments. The use of quality rubrics given to students when assignments are made lays out the expectations, and they can be used by students, teachers, and parents for formative and summative assessment.
 
Best practices are things we know good teachers should do; they just do not always happen on a consistent basis. Incorporating the Learning-Focused Strategies Model for planning and implementing lessons puts all the pieces together so that teachers know they are doing the best possible job they can to move their students forward.