Best Practices Research

Best Practices in Education

Homework
How much homework is too much homework? The National PTA recommends 10-20 minutes for 1st grade and 10 minutes for each additional grade. That means by the time you are in 12th grade you should be doing 120 minutes or 2 hours of homework a night. I believe homework is key to becoming proficient in a subject. The more you practice and the more you see concepts or ideas the better chance you have of remembering it or being able to reflect on what you are seeing daily. This subject is important to me because as a future Math teacher homework is one of my biggest assessments of how I teach to what my students understand. It is an easy way to assess what was not stated clearly the day before in class. I feel the National PTA is pretty close on the times. If you figure that a student has 6 classes then they are spending about 20min per class on homework. I would expect to see about 30 minutes per class to be right on. While this standards seems reasonable the real question becomes how to get one’s students to turn in the homework but that question is for a later day and time.
http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm

Peer Tutoring
Peer tutoring can benefit both students involved. Peer tutoring has been proven to help not only the student being taught the information but the student teaching the information. Peer tutoring shows its best gains when the students are from different levels of proficiency. This will play a huge role in my classroom because whether I am teaching Math or Special Education peer tutoring is a great tool for building social skills, motivation, academic achievement, and improved relationships with peers. I believe all four of these benefits are vital for students to learn in school and are easily translatable as essential skills in the workplace. This type of group work works really well in math class because students who may be struggling get to hear and see math from a different perspective than his/her teacher. Also the students teaching gain a better understanding because they have to explain in words what each step is and the reason for that step.
http://www.nea.org/tools/35542.htm

Best Practices in Instruction

Clear Objectives and Timely Feedback
I believe setting objectives and feedback is vital to student’s education at any level. Being able to set clear reachable objectives can make or break a lesson. I like to take it a step further and ensure that the objectives are in student friendly language and have students explore relevance (i.e., real world application). For example when working on algebra you give specific goals and objectives for them to complete the problems and then ask the question “how do you use algebra in your life?” You will get 30 different perspectives of how this style of math is related to everyday situations. The second part of this best practice is feedback. Giving students feedback in a timely manner is more important than just giving feedback. The sooner you can give your students comments on how they did and how they can fix it the sooner you will see progress. All students want to know their results on assignments. As a teacher giving timely feedback will help me quickly understand where there are misunderstandings that I need to address.
http://www.middleweb.com/MWLresources/marzchat1.html

Non-linguistic representations (i.e., Visuals/Manipulatives)

Non-linguistic representations can help student’s access information through their visual and auditory sensors. Giving your students 2 ways to understand things will activate their brains and allow the students’ brains to process the information quickly and efficiently through stimulation. The reason why I believe this technique in instruction to be important is because I work with students who need a visual support for all verbal directions. Not only have I noticed those students academics improve when implementing the visual cues but other students have shown more growth also. Pictures are a universal language where words can be jumbled up and misunderstood. Not only that but pictures re-enforce the verbal directions or cues. In math getting my students out of their seats and have them move from one side of the room to the other to represent each side of an equation will help them not only see mathematically what needs to happen by why the process is used.
http://www.middleweb.com/MWLresources/marzchat1.html