"Best Practices"

I have seen many connections between education, medicine and agriculture in the last few years. Basically, these all share a foundation in biology, but each is regulated by political decision-makers. Much of my thinking has focused on how educational decision makers in many instances make decisions for political reasons, and how those are often contrasry to to the biology that is the foundation of education.

An illustrative example: we know that fit individuals have healthy brains and that the opportunity to be up and active helps cognitive function. based on that biology, we would hope to have students, especially struggling students as active as possible. Rather than encouraging those students to be active, however, we institute academic standards for student-athletes. As a result, an academically weak student may be further disadvantaged because he or she cannot"make the grade," and the student falls further behind because athletics is taken away.

There has also been something steadily bothering me about "best practices," in recent years. Now I get it, I want educators to do what they should (according to the biology of human learning), and much that we have done in recent decades is not. Still, however, an expert who defines best practices, and the administrator (or other leader) who buys into that experts' definition is limiting what is expected and what is done.

I have a PhD. I have been thinking about kids and computers and what and how they learn for a couple of decades. When a principal comes to me with a "best practice," I scrutinize it. I look at it from all sides and challenge both the practice and the advocate to prove it is worthy, and I am likely to take the practice and tweek it to the experiences I know my students have and to try it out before concluding it is "best" or not.

Today, I heard a story on Fresh Air (the NPR program) in which Harvard University Medical School professors were drawing similar conclusions about the best practice recommendations in medicine.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/21/140438982/becoming-mindful-of-medical-decision-making