Best Practice, Third Edition: Today's Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools
by Steven Zemelman
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List Price: $29.00
Our Price: $23.48
Your Save: $ 5.52 ( 19% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Heinemann
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.102
EAN: 9780325007441
ISBN: 0325007446
Label: Heinemann
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2005-04-27
Publisher: Heinemann
Studio: Heinemann
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource
Comment: 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:
Summary: The typewriter or the computer? Your choice
Comment: 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:
Summary: Great
Comment: Book was delivered on time. I would purchase from seller again. Thank you very much.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Equals Worst Results
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Practice,Third Edition: Today's Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools
Comment: Great stuff for Reading teachers, and the Elementary classroom in general!
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Editorial Reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource
Comment: 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:
Summary: The typewriter or the computer? Your choice
Comment: 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:
Summary: Great
Comment: Book was delivered on time. I would purchase from seller again. Thank you very much.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Equals Worst Results
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Practice,Third Edition: Today's Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools
Comment: Great stuff for Reading teachers, and the Elementary classroom in general!
Best practice is the pillar that supports powerful teaching, and the first two editions of the highly acclaimed Best Practice have promoted instructional excellence for more than ten years. Now the third edition, with forty-five percent new material, does still more to make the big ideas of education accessible, identifying the teaching methods that help students learn, explaining how to implement them in the classroom, and showing what exemplary instruction really looks like. Recognizing that the themes of American education have changed dramatically, Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde reconvened, and their new edition provides fresh, inspiring examples of state-of-the-art teaching methods in action. It also carefully examines state, national, and discipline-specific standards and demonstrates how engaging and interactive classroom instruction is truly the most effective way to meet those standards. You'll find that time-tested tools like the famed "More Than-Less Than" charts are updated, while the wealth of recent research and new classroom vignettes will lead your teaching in invigorating new directions. Building on the official standards documents of leading professional organizations in reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and the arts, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde describe the classrooms and techniques of some of America's most effective teachers with the passionate, humorous, and conversational tone that has made Best Practice a favorite of veteran and novice teachers, staff developers, and teacher trainers across the country. Read Best Practice, Third Edition - on your own or with a whole-school faculty study group - and find out why even though some things in education may change in the short term, methods that are student centered, experiential, democratic, collaborative, and rigorously challenging will always be the key to high-quality teaching and authentic learning.
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