Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Most people hear "best practice" and picture a downloadable checklist; the phrase is better used for the situated judgment skilled practitioners cannot quite put into words.
Say the phrase "best practice" out loud in a staff meeting and watch what happens. People reach for a binder. The phrase has come to mean a procedure somebody else wrote, validated somewhere else, and handed down for you to follow. I will argue that the phrase is worth keeping for a different meaning, the situated judgment that lives in accomplished practitioners' hands, by showing what it takes to move that judgment from tacit knowing into knowledge you can defend in print, and why the move is appraisal rather than admiration.
Here is the pivot. Theory work is what Dr. de Kock calls blue sky theorizing: building upward, reasoning about what should be true of a problem in principle. Necessary work, and the wrong posture for what comes next. Now you dig. De Kock's phrase for the second posture is an archaeological appreciation tour, the patient excavation of exemplary excellence. You brush the dust off what skilled professionals already do well and you take it seriously as knowledge. The movement is from imagining what should work to appreciating, carefully and critically, what already does.
What exactly are you digging up? Skilled knowing is a living matrix of clues, most of them tacit, that a practitioner attends from to attend to the work in front of them. You do not notice the clues; you notice the patient, the congregation, the classroom, the case. Donald Schön's reflective practitioner works in the swampy lowlands where real problems live and technical rules run out, which is precisely where competence becomes hardest to describe. Barry Schwartz calls the same thing practical wisdom, the marriage of moral will and moral skill, and his example is the jazz musician improvising inside the form. The form is real. So is the improvisation. Neither one is a checklist.
Most of that knowledge lives in a body and in habits, and nobody else can check it, which is the problem. "Trust me, I have been doing this for twenty years" is almost certainly true and is not yet an argument. For embodied wisdom to count as best practice in scholarship, it cannot stay buried in private. It has to be made communicable, and persuasively so, so that peers can test it and consider whether it transfers. Part of what you are claiming when you write it up is that your work has iterative and replicable potential outside your own setting. The discipline, then, is turning tacit excellence into knowledge you can defend in print.
A caution travels with all of this. Not every widespread practice is best, and not every best practice is wise. Some things everyone does cause harm. Just because a thing is easy does not make it good; just because a thing is hard does not make it right. So archaeological appreciation is never merely admiring. It appraises. You dig the practice up and then you ask hard questions of it: does the evidence hold, in what context, and for whom?
Those questions are where theory earns its keep. Each theoretical lens is a different way of seeing the practice you are excavating, and naming something "best" is a critical act. It is never innocent. The word encodes a moral judgment about which practice counts and why, and whose. Theory keeps that act intentional rather than naive. A useful side effect: the lenses make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and that loop is what lets you see your own practice, the one you can no longer see because you have been inside it for two decades.
So here is the concrete practice. Pick one moment of excellence you have witnessed, yours or a colleague's, and describe it until the tacit clues become sayable. Then interrogate it. For whom did it work? At whose cost? Under what conditions would it fail? Your deliverable is not a procedure for others to download. It is an account of judgment, tested, appraised, and portable enough that another practitioner in another setting could argue with it. Best practice, writ large, is not the binder. It is the argument you make for what the binder cannot hold.
The Postmodern Terminal >_