Principles of Best Practice Learning
Best Practice is the serious, thoughtful, informed, responsible, state-of-the-art teaching. If a professional is following best practice standards, he or she is aware of current research and consistently offers students the full benefits of the latest knowledge, technology and procedures.
Teacher’s classroom management practices have a significant, positive effect on decreasing problem behaviour in the classroom. Rules and routines are powerful preventative components to classroom management because they establish the behavioural context of the classroom by identifying what is expected, what will be reinforced, and what will be retaught if the inappropriate behaviour occurs.
The ability of teachers to organize classrooms and manage the behaviour of their students is critical to achieving both positive educational outcomes for students and teacher retention.
Teacher’s classroom management practices have a significant, positive effect on decreasing problem behaviour in the classroom. Rules and routines are powerful preventative components to classroom management because they establish the behavioural context of the classroom by identifying what is expected, what will be reinforced, and what will be retaught if the inappropriate behaviour occurs.
The ability of teachers to organize classrooms and manage the behaviour of their students is critical to achieving both positive educational outcomes for students and teacher retention.
The following principles are deeply interrelated, each influencing the others.
1. The first five elements address various aspects of student-centred teaching and learning.
STUDENT-CENTRED: The best starting point for schooling is students’s real interests; all across the curriculum, investigating students’ own questions should always take precedence over studying arbitrarily and distantly selected “content”.
Experiential: Active, hands-on, concrete experience is the most powerful and natural form of learning. Students should be immersed in the most direct possible experience of the content of every subject.
Holistic: Students learn best when they encounter whole ideas, events, and materials in purposeful contexts, not by studying sub-parts isolated from actual use.
Authentic: Real, rich, complex ideas and materials are at the heart of the curriculum. Lessons or textbooks that water down, control, or oversimplify content ultimately disempower students.
Challenging: Students learn best when faced with genuine challenges, choices, and responsibility for their own learning.
2. The next five principles draw attention to cognitive and developmental aspects of teaching and learning.
COGNITIVE: The most powerful learning comes when children develop true understanding of concepts through higher-order thinking associated with various fields of inquiry and through self-monitoring of their thinking.
Developmental: Students grow through a series of definable but not rigid stages and schooling should fit its activities to the developmental level of students.
Constructivist: Students do not just receive content; in a very real sense, they recreate and reinvent every cognitive system they encounter, including language, literacy and mathematics.
Expressive: To fully engage ideas, construct meaning, and remember information, students must regularly employ the whole range of communicative media - speech, writing, drawing, poetry, dance, drama, music, movement and visual arts.
Reflective: Balancing the immersion in experience must be opportunities for learners to reflect, debrief and abstract from their experiences what they have felt, thought and learned.
3. The final three principles remind you to attend to the social and interpersonal aspects of teaching and learning in schools.
SOCIAL: Learning is always socially constructed and often interactive; teachers need to create classroom interactions that “scaffold” learning.
Collaborative: Co-operative learning activities tap into the social power of learning better than competitive and individualistic approaches.
Democratic: The classroom is a model community; students learn what they live as citizens of the school.