« : Previous post
Next post: »

Best practice v.s. PGP

| Posted on: April 10th, 2008 | Categories: Conference, Learning, Teaching, Worth Reading | 4 Comments »
Other related posts and pages: |All you can cheat, part II (a response) | Of teaching & cooking | Is TPACK fundamentally flawed? A quick response | On picturing words, tech-mix an old school idea | Unpacking TPACK, the book |

I was recently in a discussion with members of the AACTE committee on Innovation and Technology about the term “best practice.” This search for best practice (or practices) is something one hears about all the time in educational (and ed tech) circles. We want to list them, document them, offer them to teachers and so on… I don’t deny the value of documenting practices that seem to work, since they can be useful models for other practitioners. However, it is the label of “best” that I rebel against. For a long time now I have been bothered by it and got a chance to put my concerns down in writing.

It seems to me that this phrase has almost become a cliche – and is wrong in some key ways. First, if we value context (which I think we all do) then the idea of best practice seems problematic. What is best for one context may not be for another. Second, how do we know that a given practice is indeed the BEST! That’s a pretty high standard to meet. Third, given the continually fluctuating and contested arena that education is, what is the best is hard to define and contingent on local, temporally based standards.

This is not to say that there are no relative judgments we can make – clearly some solutions are better than others, but I am hesitant to make (or accept) this absolute ruling (which the word “best” seems to imply).

I remember at last year’s SITE conference conference somebody asked a “what are some best practices to develop TPACK?” Since Matt had presented, and as per our rules, I had to answer questions – I said something along the same lines of what I am writing here – which is that, I am not sure I agree with the idea of identifying and documenting examples of best practice. Given the complexity of technology integration in teaching what we can hope for, at best, is PGP, i.e. Pretty Good Practice. (For those of you who remember, this is a play on words taken from email encryption where PGP means Pretty Good Privacy).


| Posted on: April 10th, 2008
Other related posts and pages: |All you can cheat, part II (a response) | Of teaching & cooking | Is TPACK fundamentally flawed? A quick response | On picturing words, tech-mix an old school idea | Unpacking TPACK, the book |


You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 

4 Responses to “Best practice v.s. PGP”

  1. dmcallister Says:
    April 21st, 2009 at 11:42 am

    Punya,

    Thanks for your comment on my blog. I appreciate the delineation you make here between “best” and “pretty good,” highlighting the connotation of each. It makes me think about the words I use as a writer and as a support for teachers. There are any number of well-worn phrases in the professional development world, and, as I am just learning many of them, I tend to accept and reuse them.

    What I like your post, and the body of information you and Matt have produced around TPACK, is that you seem concerned to evaluate each of these ‘buzz’ words in light of the real experience of teachers. I respect and appreciate that approach. Thanks for encouraging my own reflection.

  2. EduTech Today Newsletter » Blog Archive » Message from the MAET Director Says:
    September 30th, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    [...] So this understanding of heuristics is at the heart of good cooking (and good teaching – to bring the analogy full circle). Good cooks, and teachers, understand that there is no one perfect solution, but rather lots of good ones. There are no best practices, just lots of pretty good practices (I had written earlier about this idea of Best practice vs. Pretty Good Practice). [...]

  3. tuscany villa Says:
    January 31st, 2010 at 12:47 pm

    Found this post on twitter, thanks for the info

  4. New Literacies & TPACK | Punya Mishra's Web Says:
    August 2nd, 2010 at 1:25 pm

    [...] It seems to me that this is a great way of thinking and learning about TPACK. By grounding it in specific examples the somewhat abstract ideas of the intersecting knowledge bases of TPACK can be specifically connected to actual projects and implementations. Moreover the open-ended task of asking participants to improve or adapt these projects prevents them from seeing these projects in some ways as being perfect or as an examples of best practice. (My concern with the whole idea of  “best practice”, as opposed to Pretty Good Practice, can be found here). [...]

Leave a Reply

« : Previous post
Next post: »