Product Details

• Author: Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar
• Year: 2004
• Grade Range: K-12

• Media: 360 pp/paper
• ISBN: 978-157110-405-2
• Item No.: WEB-0405

Everyone talks about "best practice" teaching—but what does it actually look like in the classroom? How do working teachers translate complex curriculum standards into simple, workable classroom structures that embody exemplary instruction—and still let kids find joy in learning?

In Teaching the Best Practice Way, Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar present seven basic teaching structures that make classrooms more active, experiential, collaborative, democratic, and cognitive, while simultaneously meeting "best practice" standards across subject areas and throughout the grades. Each section begins with an essay outlining one key method, providing its historical background and research results, and then describing the structure's vital features. Next, several teachers representing different grade levels and school communities explain how they adopted the basic model, adapted it to their students' needs, and made it their own.

Fully updating and expanding Methods that Matter (Stenhouse, 1998), Teaching the Best Practice Way adds the stories of twenty more celebrated teachers, including James Beane, Donna Ogle, Franki Sibberson, and others from around the country. A brand-new chapter focuses on reading as thinking, detailing the ways teachers can nurture strategic readers—readers who not only deeply understand the printed materials they encounter in school, but who also bring these cognitive strategies to their "reading" of film, art, music, and their experience of the world. The book also shares new research studies that validate the principles and activities of best practice teaching, along with lists of recommended materials that support each of the seven methods.

Unique in the field, Teaching the Best Practice Way speaks to all teachers, K–12, with stories, examples, and practical classroom materials for the teachers of all children. This is the book for teachers, schools, and districts that believe the big ideas about teaching really do cross all grade levels and subject areas. Education professors will also find this an ideal resource for use in methods courses.

Table of Contents

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Contents
Contributed Pieces
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. How to Teach
2. Reading-as-Thinking
3. Representing-to-Learn
4. Small-Group Activities
5. Classroom Workshop
6. Authentic Experiences
7. Reflective Assessment
8. Integrative Units
Epilogue
References
Index

Marilyn Bizar
Marilyn Bizar teaches at the Center for City Schools of National-Louis University in Chicago. A former public school teacher, Marilyn and Harvey Daniels now collaborate with a network of twenty-five schools seeking to implement progressive teaching...
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Harvey Daniels
Harvey Daniels received all of his degrees -- B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. -- from Northwestern University, which finally urged him to leave campus and get a real job.
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