For all students to achieve at their highest capacity, it is important that instruction in all classes employs those strategies that have been demonstrated to be the most effective. Effective teaching and learning models for diverse student populations are described in the following principles for Best Practice Schooling. These practices support the learning style and the differentiated needs of students in all programs.

• CHILD-CENTERED.  The best starting point for schooling is the kid’s real interests . All across the curriculum, classes should be listening to, and investigating students’ own questions.
•   Active, hands-on concrete experiences are the most powerful and natural forms of learning. Students should be immersed in the most direct possible experience of the content  of every subject.
• REFLECTIVE.  Balancing the immersion in direct experience must be opportunities for learners to look back to , to reflect, to debrief, to abstract from their experiences what they have felt, thought and learned.
• AUTHENTIC.  Real, rich, complex ideas and materials are the heart of the curriculum. Lessons or textbooks which water down, control, or oversimplify content ultimately disempower students.
• HOLISTIC.  Children learn best when they encounter whole, real ideas, events and materials in purposeful contexts and not by studying sub-parts isolated from actual use.
• SOCIAL.  Learning is always socially constructed and often interactional. Teachers need to create  classroom interactions that scaffold learning.
• COLLABORATIVE.  Cooperative learning activities tap the social power of learning better than competitive and individualistic approaches.
• DEMOCRATIC.  The classroom is a model  community; Students learn when they live as citizens of the School, and further going down on this in the Internet, as net citizens or netizens.
• COGNITIVE.  The most powerful learning for children comes from developing true understanding  of concepts and higher order thinking associated with various fields of inquiry and monitoring of their own thinking.
• DEVELOPMENTAL.  Children go through a series of definite but not rigid stages, and schooling should fit its activities to the developmental level of students.
• PSYCHOLINGUISTIC. The process of young children’s natural oral language acquisition provides our best model of complex human learning and, once learned, language itself becomes the primary tool for more learning – whatever the subject matter.
• CHALLENGING.  Students learn best when faced with genuine challenges, choices and responsibilities in their own learning.

By: Ronaldo V. Tiangco | MT I | MNHS Poblacion