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December 2010/January 2011 | Volume 68 | Number 4 The Effective Educator Pages 35-39
Charlotte Danielson
A good system of teacher evaluation must answer four questions: How good is good enough? Good enough at what? How do we know? and Who should decide?
"This is so much better!" commented Carla, a 4th grade teacher, following an evaluation conference with her supervisor:
Before, I had no idea what my principal was looking for—I had to be a mind reader! So I just played it safe, taught a familiar lesson, one I knew would go well—but did the process improve my teaching? Not at all! In my old school, the principal just came in with a checklist, but we never really talked. But this time, we had a great conversation about how to help my students want to write. It really made me think. As a result, I've got a new approach: I'm going to engage some students around the things they're passionate about and have them try to convince their classmates about the value of such interests.
Carla's statement provides an insight into how we might improve teacher evaluation to better foster conditions for both teacher and student learning. Let's consider the deficiencies of traditional systems. These include
We can remedy these problematic characteristics by attending to some basic principles of assessment and teacher learning. First, it helps to be clear about why we even have teacher evaluation. Laws, of course, require it. But why are there laws? The first and most fundamental reason is because public schools are public institutions; they take public money, and the public has a right to expect high-quality teaching. But there are two more basic purposes.
Credibility in an evaluation system is essential. A principal or a superintendent must be able to say to the school board and the public, "Everyone who teaches here is good— and here's how I know." A teacher evaluation system that satisfies this requirement will include the following:
Element
Unsatisfactory
Basic
Proficient
Distinguished
Quality of Questions
Teacher's questions are virtually all of poor quality, with low cognitive challenge and a single correct response. They are also asked in rapid succession.
Teacher's questions are a combination of low and high quality, posed in rapid succession. Only some invite a thoughtful response.
Most of teacher's questions are of high quality. Adequate time is provided for students to respond.
Teacher's questions are of uniformly high quality, with adequate time for students to respond. Students formulate many questions.
Discussion Techniques
Interaction between teacher and students is predominantly recitation style, with the teacher mediating all questions and answers.
Teacher makes some attempt to engage students in genuine discussion rather than recitation, with uneven results.
Teacher creates a genuine discussion among students, stepping aside when appropriate.
Students assume considerable responsibility for the success of the discussion, initiating topics and making unsolicited contributions.
Student Participation
A few students dominate the discussion.
Teacher attempts to engage all students in the discussion, but with only limited success.
Teacher successfully engages all students in the discussion.
Students themselves ensure that all voices are heard in the discussion.
But there's another purpose of teacher evaluation: to promote professional learning. Teacher evaluation typically serves this more developmental purpose through professional conversations between teachers and colleagues who observe in their classrooms and between teachers and supervisors following formal or informal observations.
A commitment to professional learning is important, not because teaching is of poor quality and must be "fixed," but rather because teaching is so hard that we can always improve it. No matter how good a lesson is, we can always make it better. Just as in other professions, every teacher has the responsibility to be involved in a career-long quest to improve practice.
The challenge is merging these two purposes of teacher evaluation. Educators need to create procedures that yield valid and reliable results—that is, that satisfy the legitimate demands for quality assurance while promoting professional learning. In truth, the demands are somewhat different. A system to ensure quality must be valid, reliable, and defensible—these are "hardsounding" qualities—whereas a system designed to promote professional learning is likely to be collegial and collaborative—these are much "softer-sounding" qualities.
Until recently, educators' attempts at merging quality assurance with professional learning have taken the form of enhancing evaluators' skills using techniques like clinical supervision and cognitive coaching. These are valuable skills and worth learning, but they are insufficient. The profession is better served when the requirements for these two purposes are embedded in the design of the systems themselves.
We can get a clue as to the nature of this problem if we consider the typical observation, supervision, and evaluation process in use in most schools. The scenario proceeds as follows: The administrator goes to the classroom and watches a lesson, takes notes, goes away and writes up the notes, and then returns and tells the teacher about the lesson (what was good, what the teacher could improve). Most observations are a variation on this theme.
It's important to note that in this scenario, the administrator is doing all the work; the teacher is completely passive. (The teacher has, of course, taught the lesson, but the teacher contributes nothing to the observation itself.) So it's not surprising that teachers don't find the process valuable or supportive of their learning. The process violates everything we know about learning— that learning is done by the learner through a process of active intellectual engagement.
If we want teacher evaluation systems that teachers find meaningful and from which they can learn, we must use processes that not only are rigorous, valid, and reliable, but also engage teachers in those activities that promote learning—namely self-assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversation.
We can modify the traditional observation scenario to accomplish these aims. A revised process—like the one Carla was so enthusiastic about at the beginning of this article—might look like this:
A recently published study of a two-year pilot program in Chicago Public Schools has documented the benefits of this approach. Conducted by researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, the Excellence in Teaching Project aims to accurately measure a teacher's classroom performance. The project is the proposed replacement for a teacher evaluation checklist that administrators have used in Chicago Public Schools for the past 30 years. Principals in the pilot used the Framework for Teaching to guide their classroom observations as well as the required pre-observation and post-observation conferences.
The pilot provides an insight into the perceptions of participating teachers and administrators, who signaled the following areas as being crucial to effective teacher evaluation:
A credible system of teacher evaluation requires higher levels of proficiency of evaluators than the old checklist, "drive-by" observation model. Evaluators need to be able to assess accurately, provide meaningful feedback, and engage teachers in productive conversations about practice.
In our experience with the Framework for Teaching, members of the Danielson Group have trained hundreds of observers all across the United States and in other countries as well. Our findings have been somewhat humbling; even after training, most observers require multiple opportunities to practice using the framework effectively and to calibrate their judgments with others.
Most administrator preparation programs don't teach such skills; administrators must acquire them on the job. But when they do learn them, administrators can be the instructional leaders that schools so urgently need.
A training program for evaluators—one that uses the Framework for Teaching—consists of several steps:
A second challenge for administrators is finding time to conduct meaningful observations and engage in professional conversations about practice. However, even in the traditional system, principals need to devote time to the evaluation process—despite the fact that it often produces few benefits. In the words of an educator with whom we've worked, "It doesn't take any longer to do this process well than to do it poorly, so why not do it well?" What better use of a school leader's time than to engage teachers in conversations about practice?
Evaluator-teacher conversations, when conducted around a common understanding of good teaching—and around evidence of that teaching— offer a rich opportunity for professional dialogue and growth. We can't create more hours in the day, but careful setting of priorities and judicious scheduling of both observations and conferences can make the best use of the time available. Moreover, unless a district's negotiated agreement forbids it, brief and informal drop-in observations yield plenty of information for reflective conversation and require far less time than formal observations do.
Abundant evidence from both informal observation and formal investigation indicates that a thoughtful approach to teacher evaluation—one that engages teachers in reflection and self-assessment—yields benefits far beyond the important goal of quality assurance. Such an approach provides the vehicle for teacher growth and development by providing opportunities for professional conversation around agreed-on standards of practice.
1 The Framework for Teaching divides the complex activity of teaching into 22 components clustered in four domains of teaching responsibility. Each component defines one aspect of a domain; two to five elements describe a specific feature of a component. To view the framework, visit www.danielsongroup.org/theframeteach.htm.
Charlotte Danielson is an educational consultant based in Princeton, New Jersey. She has taught at all levels and has worked as an administrator, curriculum director, and staff developer. She is the author of Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (ASCD, 1996, 2007) and Teacher Leadership That Strengthens Professional Practice (ASCD, 2006); charlotte_danielson@hotmail.com.
December 2010/January 2011The Effective Educator
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