Spring cleaning is a vivid and fond memory I have from childhood. Though, our spring cleaning happened in summer. We had summer cleaning. Mother was an elementary teacher, and used her summer break to attack a long to-do list. One of those items was to clean and organize our house. In June and July, she took each room and closet down to bare bones to clean, organize and filter through a year of living. My younger brother and I would assist, or, be encouraged to “play outside”; each option being valuable to our mother in their own way. Cleaning and organizing the house was good practice and provided our family with a clean, comfortable, and organized environment. It felt good to be home and we were proud of our house.
I say cleaning was a good practice because it gave my brother and me a way of learning how to care for the items you own, and demonstrated the value of creating a productive and comfortable environment. It was one of many good practices our parents gifted to us. My brother and I have carried many of those good practices with us into our own family experience. We each like a clean house, as many people can relate to. We like organized closets, workspaces, and desks, and each of us loves a good list. As different and independent as we are from each other, we also have many mutual family traits we absorbed from a shared childhood.
I own three robot floor vacuums. I love them. One lives upstairs, and two work on the main floor. I could go so far as to admit I want another for downstairs. Unfortunately, the carpet is too thick. It’s not that I am lazy and don’t want to clean. Oh, heaven’s no. I actually go around sweeping while the little cleaning crew is hard at work searching the floor for dust and unwanted particles. The truth is the little robot crew does a better job than I would. They vacuum and clean following a formula and pattern. They can clean dust from hardwood floors with meticulous veracity, and they do it without getting a bad attitude or purposefully leaving the errant crumbs around my husband’s favorite lounge chair because they are mad he was eating in the family room again. The honest reality is, they bring an increased level of cleanliness to my floors. They can’t do it all, but they do add a new level of expertise to the cleaning portfolio.
So… what’s the point of all the discussion on cleaning? Hang on, here comes the connection. Best Practice is a term many of us are familiar with; particularly in the professions of medicine, law, architecture, and education (Zemelman, Daniels & Hyde, 2012). As professionals, we depend on trusted and reliable practices to guide our operational decisions, while concurrently incorporating vetted knowledge gained from new research and technological developments.
Best Practice is an ever-evolving constant. We need the constant presence of established good practices, while synchronously adopting improved processes and gaining knowledge from research in the field. In education, the concept of establishing Best Practices is often easily understood and greatly desired, yet, difficult for some to specifically identify. What is Best Practice when teaching math to 4th grade; teaching the concept of social justice to middle school; or, teaching literature to high school? The conversation among educators on each of those topics can sprawl out and reveal many perspectives, beliefs, and viewpoints.
This sprawl of perspective can, possibly, be the thinnest of stumbling blocks for establishing and adopting precise Best Practices in any community of educators. It is not that any educator specifically hesitates at adopting into their pedagogy any practice that is “better,” instead, it is the necessity of establishing the exact practice that is explicitly better, and the exact circumstance this practice improves.
I recently concluded a course on Reading and Writing in Content Areas with a cohort in a local school district. All participants in the course are practicing teachers working on their Masters in Education. In the course, the focus is on establishing the ‘Best Practice’ of utilizing reading and writing in content areas to support student achievement. These teachers are dedicated to students, and all agree supporting reading and writing is a Best Practice. However, they also believe their content areas are important too. Understanding what Best Practice looks like for each of them in their respective content areas takes diligent evaluation. My challenge to them was to think of language as one of our primary teaching tools. The words we choose to teach with through what we say, ask students to read, and what we ask them to write about are important. The essence is not that we are all Language Arts Teachers- but that we all understand how to help students read and write with comprehension within our content area. Each discipline has its own way of constructing and conveying meaning through spoken and written language. The vocabulary, structure of the written word, and style of language mechanics differ between each discipline. To help students construct meaning, feel confident to seek information, and become lifelong learners depends on how autonomous they can become in negotiating the information they encounter. Teaching our students the skills and techniques to encounter the printed word, and write with purpose within disciplines is important to unlocking that lifelong learning process. The challenge to each of them was to identify and develop a specific Best Practice for reading and writing across content areas to adopt into their classroom teaching.
Here is where my little robot vacuums come into play. My childhood memories of Mother’s summer cleaning the house included a complete strip and wax of the hardwood floors. It was time-consuming and required a lot of effort. Once complete, the floors were beautiful. To keep the floors in pristine condition, she swept and vacuumed often throughout the year. Using my simplistic example of hardwood floors and vacuuming, we can identify cleaning floors as a Best Practice. Through one generation of technological advances, accomplishing this Best Practice has evolved. Mother had a wax buffer and a canister vacuum she pulled around, while I have little robots to scurry about the floor. Each of us working toward the Best Practice of cleaning floors. If I were to refuse to accept any advances in cleaning technology, I would be walking behind that buffer and pulling along the canister vacuum. (…and here is where I quietly say, no thank you…)
The master students investigating Best Practices in reading and writing across the content areas were equally challenged to identify what has evolved in lesson design in order to reach their Best Practice. It is an essential truth that education evolves with, and within, each generation. To resist the effort to investigate, understand and adopt the evolving processes of Best Practice into our pedagogy sets our students at a distinct disadvantage. Teachers are not preparing students to live in a recycling of our lives, we are preparing them to live in their future lives. Educators who reject the opportunity to understand the full dimension of identifying and developing Best Practices, and evolving their pedagogical skill set, run the risk of presenting stagnant experiences that do not prepare students for the future they will encounter.