Teaching, Learning, and School Organization: Principles of Practice and the Regularities of Schooling

Abstract

This artick sets out a way of thinking about the connection between our ideas of best practice, school organization, and policy. It develops six principles of best practice in teaching and learning: (a) the object of teaching is to nurture understanding, (b) understanding occurs in the context of specific bodies of knowkledge, (c) understanding requires the active construction of knowledge by learners, (d) understanding requires the development of basic and higher order knowledge simultaneously, (e) learners differ substantially in what they bring to understanding specific bodies of knowledge, and (f) learning is a social, as well as an individual process. These ideas of best practice connect to organization and policy through the solution of four recurring problems, or regularities, of schooling: (a) how students are grouped for purposes of instruction, (b) how teachers' work is defined vis-l-vis groups of students, (c) how content is allocated to time, and (d) how students' progress is assessed. Translating principles of best practice into organization and policy requires changing traditional solutions to these problems.