Hey--I'm trying to design my first game using the Pygame library for Python, and I was wondering what the best practices are for level design in general. I would love to hear what you guys think are good object oriented design patterns for managing levels. Also, I'm fairly new to Python--thanks!
If this is your first Pygame application, don't spend time worrying about "object oriented design patterns for managing levels". What you need to do now is to figure out how to make Pygame do what you want it to do.

Can you display everything you want to?
Is your display flicker-free?
Can you read the user input controls properly?
etc.

Object oriented patterns for managing levels comes later, much later.
Level Design in Pygame