Best Practice: New Standards For Teaching And Learning In America's Schools, Second Edition

The Story

In its original edition, 'Best Practice' was the first book to summarize the emerging standards of state-of-the-art teaching, offering practical descriptions of instructional excellence across the curriculum. Now, in this extensively revised and expanded second edition, we find updated descriptions of progressive teaching in six subject areas: reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts. New and revised features include: thorough coverage of all major national standards projects, including a dozen key documents released since 1993 a critical review and chronology of recent school reforms, with a balanced look at the fractious standards movement itself updated chapters on reading and writing that incorporate the new NCTE and IRA standards a retrospective on the NCTM standards, based on a decade of attempted implementation a look at the destructive impact politics has had on history and social studies curriculums a new chapter on Best Practice in the arts, with an emphasis on K-12 curriculum integration many new classroom stories. While the second edition draws upon official standards documents from a disparate array of leading professional groups, it nonetheless reveals a surprising and encouraging level of agreement: The consensus is that students learn best in schools that are student centered, experiential, democratic, and collaborative - yet rigorously challenging. Following 'Best Practice,' we may yet attain this goal.