Best Practice or Bust!

One of the passions that fuels my professional fire is the quest for achieving best practice. True, I’ve read many of the “What Works” research syntheses, puttered onto the “Doing What Works” websites, pored over research meta-analyses that reveal the “top-10” lists of effective teacher/administrator/superintendent behaviors, but as the years have anchored my experiences I’ve found myself looking at things through a slightly different lens.

It’s not so much about using “best practices;” rather, it’s about achieving that nebulous, marvelous, utopian state of best practice. It’s about wholehearted effectiveness, extraordinary success, brilliant focus, and otherworldly efficiency. In other words, it’s not about The List; it’s about utilizing the strategies on The List at the right time, in the right manner, by the right people, for the right reasons.

What path should we follow to get to that state, then? I’m glad you asked. The key is housed in two concepts, both of which are the hallmarks of the National Board for Certificated Teachers: intentionality and self-reflection.

This issue of The Launching Pad addresses both, and weaves them together in a way that makes sense. First, click on our book review of Mike Schmoker’s newest classic, “Focus.” He’ll excite you to start a grassroots campaign to eliminate summer vacation this year, just so you can keep on working and implementing the simple ideas he proposes. Next, read the profile of Darwin Prater, a superb young principal in Texas who has made a tremendous difference by following the tenets of the Professional Learning Communities concept – and made them work for his community, his school, his staff, and his students.

Our feature articles propose two items that you might find in any good literature espousing “Best Practices.” Dr. Rick Mason shares another set of benefits for principals getting out of their offices and “Into the Wild,” and Megann Ollett, a first-year instructional coach outside of Houston, talks about a coaching strategy that meets her teachers’ needs: Intentional questioning. Both are great ideas, and how a principal and coach implement them will vary from school to school and setting to setting. It’s up to us to implement those powerful strategies in a way that lands us square in the heart of best practice.

Finally, our longtime friend and poignantly humorous columnist, Derek Cordell, takes a turn in the alley – the bowling alley, that is – and shares a method for decision-making. And this, of course, fits perfectly into our theme, for in order to turn “best practices” into best practice, we’ve got to make the right choices at the right moments. This is a skill that requires attention and nurturing.

No matter what our role is in school leadership, we can build for ourselves the capacity to lead powerful and positive change. I’m fortunate right now to sit on a committee in my school district that is investigating, defining, and describing what we’ve come to call “high-leverage teaching moves.” This will result in a list of sorts, but will also clarify our expectations for effective classroom instructional practice. Then, as we coach our teachers in the art of accurate and relentless self-reflection, they will be able to make decisions about the use of any given strategy at any given moment, in any given class with any given child, and begin to realize ridiculous success. That’s best practice.

Commence liftoff.