With Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools, authors Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde highlight the consensus among the many recent national standards documents: all the experts are calling for schools that are more challenging, authentic, and collaborative. Drawing on these three core principles, their book offers ideas, strategies, and examples of exemplary programs to achieve better teaching and learning. But Zemelman, Daniels, and their colleague Marilyn Bizar didn't stop there. They helped start a new inner-city high school that puts Best Practice into action. This video offers an insider's look at this new, complex, and emerging school.
Zemelman, Daniels, and Bizar take us directly into the classrooms at Best Practice High School, where real kids and teachers are cocreating a rich curriculum and a supportive community. You'll observe teachers frankly discussing the challenge of standards and change, and the rewards Best Practice offers. You'll see kids involved in some key innovative structures—integrated curriculum, peer mediation, flexible scheduling, weekly internships, inclusion special education. There are also helpful discussions of the practical, everyday procedures that make Best Practice work, and of the ways students make choices and take on responsibilities on a daily basis.
Teachers, principals, and administrators will be inspired and engaged by this practical look at what can be achieved by a group of dedicated educators, students, and community members. They'll also discover how—despite the typical constraints of district mandates, required curriculum, and standardized tests—we can all achieve higher standards and a new vision for schools across the nation.