"What's the Best Move?"

What approach do you take to answer the question "what's the best move?"

I'm no chess master, or expert even. I do believe, though, that my knowledge of chess and my years of chess experience have earned me the title of "Not-Beginner." Over the course of those years, I have taught to several beginners the fundamentals of chess strategy (as taught to me by actual masters of chess). The most common question asked by these beginners during a game is, "what's the best move?"

Faced with the task of explaining "Not-Beginner" logic to a chess beginner, I take a questionable approach. I always tell these players not to look for an absolute best move. Instead, I teach them to craft a best move fit for their skill level. I teach them to first check for basic tactics (includes mating patterns), then to check for moves that help what they feel is the right strategy for the position if no good basic (I repeat basic because I don't believe a beginner should be taught every tactical concept) tactic is found. And finally, if no "best move" has been found yet, I teach them to improve their position with ideas I see fit for a beginner (this includes, of course, ideas like restricting the opponent and gaining space on a certain side of the board).

I've started on this topic because I'm hoping to compare my approach to approaches by players of higher rating and even lower rating. Criticism (constructive criticism!) is appreciated as well!

Edit: Apparently, my question is unclear. I'm asking what you, as a teacher, would tell a student if he asks "what's the best move here?" Or rather, "how can I find the best move?" (Let's assume this student has a chess.com rating of less than 1000).

 I think 1. e4 is the best first move.

I could be wrong, though. Or I could be right!

By the way, I am not "Not-Beginner", I'm just a "Beginner". 

Thanks for the reply, beginner :) . Although, I was not asking for the best "first" move, but a reply to the question of how to find a best move in any specific position. Maybe I need to make that more clear in the post?

I chose the wording "what's the best move" to appeal to those who have taught chess to beginners before, as I'm sure they will have heard this question many times in a game with a curious student.

Oh... well, yes, you should make that clear in the post.

I don't know how to find a best move in any position. What I do is I basically go to Chessmaster 2000 Grandmaster Edition, and play out my game, and then it can give me an analysis.

How to do it without a chess program... well, I don't know.

It would be cool to find the answer to the question, though! 

I try to use Silman's approach, but I usually get lazy and skip a few steps here and there.

FancyKnight, you wouldn't worry that you were providing your "beginner" student with too much information for him (or her) to keep in mind? If I recall, Silman has 7 steps in his approach. This would mean, to a beginner, looking every move for 7 different things.

For a <1000 player, asking "how would I reply if I were my opponent" should be enough.

I see, thanks. I recently began to wonder if I was cheating these players out of a good quality chessucation (I literally just thought of that on the spot) by not giving them the proper Silman 7-step approach. But maybe my original idea of finding the "relative [to their skill level] best move" wasn't so bad after all.