Chapter 7: Problematizing Notions of Decontextualized “Best Practice”

The label “best practice” has lately garnered a certain cachet in educationspeak. A Google search for “best+practices+education” reveals pages of relevant hits. At the 2010 conference of the Texas Council for the Social Studies, there was a presentation strand labeled “best practice.” The National Education Agency has a section on its website titled “Research Spotlight on Best Practices in Education.” And a tour of a university library catalog might reveal books as “best practice” for high school classrooms (Stone, 2002), for teaching students in urban schools (Duhon-Sells, 2004), for ELL (English Language Learning) instruction (Li & Edwards, 2010), or for teaching writing (Graham, MacArthur, & Fitzgerald, 2007). “Best practice” would seem to be the pinnacle of practice to generate learning inside the classroom. Borrowed from the language of business, it refers “to a set of techniques for most efficiently and effectively producing a desired outcome” (Lampert, 2010, p. 25), suggesting assurance for the educators, legislators, or parents wondering about what to do to improve learning in schools. The notion of a best practice can seem especially compelling in this time of teacher deskilling (Kincheloe, 2004) and of reductionist solutions for generating ever higher standardized test scores. It suggests that if we will simply implement this practice or this method, then education will improve.