Achieving Balance in Graduate Progreams: Negotiating Best Practices

Dealing with this recurrent, nearly archetypal, issue of finding balance between the practical and the theoretical in graduate programs is the task of English language arts educators and the requisite activity of graduate students in our field. The relevance of best practices in instruction is clear, but that is not the end goal of graduate school. Instead, graduate schools must help practitioners rediscover their curiosity and their professional imagination. English educators must create the time and space for inservice teachers who are our graduate students to discern the value and relevance of tying best practices to theory and theory to effective practice.