Join me at the NJEA Convention

Nuances of Working with the Danielson Model  for Teacher Evaluation

Thursday: 1 – 2:30 p.m.  Room 303
Friday: 1 – 2:30 p.m.  Room 303

The Danielson Framework for Teaching describes a set of knowledge and skills that can be used to help teachers achieve high standards of professional teaching practice. However, a cursory knowledge of the model is insufficient for success. This session will focus on the observable components, highlighting often confusing differences among them. In doing so, teachers will develop strategies for pushing their practice and striving for highly effective instruction.

Teacher Evaluation — Behind the Scenes Work (Professional Responsibilities)

Thursday: 3 – 4:30 p.m.  Room 303
Friday: 9:30 – 11 p.m.  Room 303

No matter which teacher practice evaluation instrument your district uses, they all have standards dealing with Professional Responsibilities  (Stronge Standard 6, McREL Standard 1, Marshall Standard F, Marzano Domains 3 and 4, Danielson Domain 4). These are typically “unobservable” as they describe teacher’s work outside of their interactions with students. This session will explore processes teachers can consider in gathering and analyzing data around their professional practice.

NJEA Convention site.

 

Speculating on the Secrets of Teaching

Interesting conversation between Amanda Ripley and Elizabeth Green. A few highlights:

… I have close friends and family members who are teachers, but my appreciation for the work was skin deep. I thought about the physical challenge — like, you have to get up so early, and you have to blow kids’ noses. But it’s actually really cognitively challenging …

… Once you believe kids are quite capable and actually more capable than adults when it comes to learning, then that opens up a whole cascading realm of possibilities…

… In the US, partly because of federalism, we have no central government that can really create coherence. The Feds just keep pushing the one button they have—which is accountability. This idea that if we can just put more pressure on schools, they will produce…

… When you have not done the serious work of selecting and training teachers thoughtfully, you end up having to do all the work on the back end—which is unfair to teachers…

… Why not a reality teaching show? The idea of getting people to watch a teacher teach in a really masterful way and then talk about what she did…

Read the entire conversation here.

Want answers about teacher evaluation? Ask!

 This column appears in the October 2014 issue of the NJEA Review.

Ah, October. The smell of pumpkins, fall foliage, a chill in the air … and a critical deadline that affects all teachers in New Jersey. According to AchieveNJ regulations, a district must annually notify all teaching staff members of the adopted evaluation policies and procedures no later than Oct. 1. If your superintendent hasn’t provided this information to your staff, it’s time to start asking questions.

Your District Evaluation Advisory Committee (DEAC) should have made a series of recommendations to the district superintendent regarding the design of a district’s teacher evaluation system. These decisions go well beyond the selection of a model (Danielson, Marshall, Marzano, McREL, Stronge, etc.). The district should compile all of the policies and procedures related to how it will implement the evaluation process for all staff members so that everyone knows what to expect from their observations and can begin to prepare now for summative evaluations.

For example, do you know the planned timeline of your observations for the year? The regulations require a minimum of one observation per semester (and three for the year if you are a non-tenured teacher). But there are other important timing considerations. Will your announced observation come first (so that you can take advantage of a pre-conference) and your unannounced come later in the year? Will there be a planned gap between observations (giving you an opportunity to reflect on your practice and consider opportunities for growth)? Timelines are important.

Do you know how your district is approaching the behind-the-scenes work of teaching (such as Instructional Planning and Professional Responsibilities)? These cannot be observed (for the most part) during classroom instruction — so how will they be assessed and when? What constitutes exemplary practice in, for example, record-keeping? Teachers need to be aware of these expectations and build a portfolio throughout the school year so you’re not scrambling in May to locate evidence in time for a summative evaluation meeting.

Most critically … what is your district’s approach to creating a summative score based on your yearly observations? Many schools are using software packages that default to a straight averaging method — one that is not conducive to highlighting teachers’ strengths or need for remediation. Will the district use a conjunctive formula (typically associated with the Marzano system)? Or a holistic approach (more often used with the Stronge model)? Perhaps there is a growth-oriented approach (only using the ratings from the strongest observation) or a modality focus. This is one of the more critical DEAC considerations and system design decisions that must be made and communicated to every teacher by October 1. Teachers must know how they will be assessed during their summative evaluation meeting; those conversation should never be a surprise.

Teachers and their supervisors all need to be on the same page. So if the October 1 deadline has come and gone, be sure to ask: What are the district policies and procedures regarding evaluation? A healthy system is one that keeps everyone informed.

The NY Times Imagines Successful Schools

Joe Nocera writes:

…most of the countries with the best educational results used the same set of techniques to get there … American reform methods were used nowhere else in the world …We are entirely on the wrong track …

The main thing that works is treating teaching as a profession, and teachers as professionals. That means that teachers are as well paid as other professionals, that they have a career ladder, that they go to elite schools where they learn their craft, and that they are among the top quartile of college graduates instead of the bottom quartile …

…the cost per pupil in the places with the best educational systems is less than the American system, even though their teachers are far better paid. “They are not spending more money; they are spending money differently …

Read the entire piece here.

Seven Key Takeaways From FIT Teaching

Recognize that wrong answers came from somewhere. Dig deeper to find out where they came from. Teachers feel there’s never enough time to remediate for students when they struggle. But, if we can learn to understand the difference between a mistake (when pointed out, a learner knows what to do next) and an error (when pointed out, the learner has no idea what to do next, thus requiring reteaching), then we can spend precious instructional time where it’s most needed. Did a student simply forget to capitalize the first word of the sentence? Or does that student truly not understand punctuation rules? Teachers can maximize their student interaction time when they spend some time analyzing student responses.

Ask students what they are learning, not what they are doing. This seemingly small change in questioning allows a shift in focus that can help teachers better gauge students’ understanding of content. Rather than asking students what they are doing—that is, asking them to explain a task—teachers should ask students what they are learning—that is, asking students to explain the purpose of a task and how they are learning from it. At Health Sciences High and Middle College, where Fisher and Frey teach, staff—and even visitors—regularly ask about learning rather than doing. Try this change in your classroom to see how it shifts the conversation and helps you to better determine your students’ levels of understanding.

Separate compliance from competence. This has huge ramifications for grading practices. Why do we grade every worksheet, homework, or quiz that students turn in? If we grade everything, we are asking students to be compliant (that is, keep up with the work and you’ll get more points). If we focus on students’ mastery of concepts, however, we’ll send an important message: I’m here to help you learn and will only give you a grade when you appropriately demonstrate your competence in this subject.

Automate responses to recurring events.  Principals are faced with daily demands that take away from the time they can spend in classrooms focusing on the teachers and students. More and more, principals are asking the question, “How can I spend more time focusing on instruction in my building?” The answer is to analyze the systems within your school and create automated responses to recurring events. Buses arriving late? Have a response team ready with a standardized checklist of action items. Cafeteria won’t be open for lunch on time? Plan out the response in terms of personnel and schedule revision. Planning for automaticity in a system means that principals can have more time in the classrooms focusing on the most important aspect of their job: instructional leadership.

Establish the purpose of a lesson. Determine what students should learn and why they should learn it. One of the most important ways we motivate learners is by establishing a good reason for the learning to take place. Without a clear goal, students rightly perceive their work in school as artificial, and this may lead to compliance or even defiance. If we instruct without a purpose—or fail to convey that purpose to our students—then we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t meet the learning target.

Get kids to produce language, not just hear it. Encourage collaborative work using academic vocabulary. Teachers need to scaffold and assess language needs so students can better access content. The Common Core, in fact, asks for students to use rich academic vocabulary. One of the keys ways to support students in learning language and using academic vocabulary is to ask students to produce and practice using language more. Collaborative work time should be used to have students speak and use academic vocabulary. Fisher and Frey recommend that teachers aim to set aside 50 percent of a lesson for collaborative work. While this will not always happen, teachers should always keep in mind that collaborative work, where students are encouraged to communicate and interact, will help students build language skills and increase academic vocabulary usage.

Remember that the gradual release of responsibility does not have to be linear. Many are familiar with the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) framework, which articulates how responsibility should be turned over from the teacher to the student. Focus lessons (“I do”) and guided lessons (“we do”) place the responsibility on the instructor, while collaborative work (“you do it together”) and independent work (“you do it alone”) put most of the responsibility on the student. There is a common misconception, however, that this framework is linear—that is, that the different types of instruction have to go in order. In fact, good teachers use formative assessment to pick which element of GRR is needed for individual students and differentiate accordingly. Here is an example from Fisher and Frey’s YouTube channel that shows that the GRR framework does not have to be implemented linearly.

As all of these different take-aways show, participants at the FIT Teaching Academy were able to dig into the FIT Teaching model and consider how it resonates with them. The Academy was a full three days of amazing conversations about current practices and how FIT Teaching can provide an integrated and streamlined approach to make teaching more responsive to student needs. Participants left energized, motivated, and encouraged.

Cross-posted at ASCD In-Service.

Let’s hear it for slow and steady …

NJ policymakers are finally noticing that the runaway train of teacher evaluations needs some brakes applied. After several intensive sessions last week, an agreement was reached on key issues related to standardized testing and its use in evaluating teachers. A commission has been established to take a look at the entire standardized testing environment. At the same time, student growth objectives have been reduced (to 20%) of a teacher’s evaluation rating.

More on the story here.

Will other states take notice?

The teaching gap

Quote

Linda Darling-Hammond writes:

“…American teachers today work harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers elsewhere in the industrialized world.They also receive less useful feedback, less helpful professional development, and have less time to collaborate to improve their work …

…one in four American children lives below the poverty line and a growing number are homeless, without regular access to food or health care, and stressed by violence and drug abuse around them …

…U.S. teachers … spend many more hours than teachers in any other country directly instructing children each week … And they work more hours in total each week than their global counterparts … with much less time in their schedules for planning, collaboration, and professional development.

the Core Opportunity Resources for Equity and Excellence Act would make headway on the school resource issues that are essential for progress:

Value teaching and teacher learning …

Redesign schools to create time for collaboration …

Create meaningful teacher evaluations that foster improvement.”

Read the whole article here.

 

 

 

End of the year reflection: what’s next for teacher evaluations?

Many teachers are participating in a higher-than-usual number of end-of-year in-service days, thanks to the need to make up a higher-than-usual number of snow days. Overheard at a recent workshop in which teachers were considering their first year with a new evaluation system:

“Whew, I’m sure glad that’s over! I guess we survived the year.”

“Yeah, it was pretty rough … I wonder if it will ramp up even more next year?”

“I don’t know, but I guess we should get ready. Maybe we should focus a little more on instruction …”

You think?

This is the stage many teachers and districts find themselves confronting — we’ve survived the first implementation year, we’re now getting pretty familiar with the evaluation model. Where do we go from here?

Focusing on instruction is exactly the right move, both from a practical and philosophical standpoint. For practical reasons, putting some energy into intentional design and improved instruction benefits teachers in terms of their evaluation ratings. More important is the impact it will have on students’ learning experiences.

A superb instructional model that pushes instruction to highly effective levels is the FIT Teaching™ model of gradual release of responsibility from Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey. Through an intentional process of focused instruction, guided instruction, collaborative learning and independent learning, teachers hand ownership of  learning  over to their students. In most evaluation models, this personalized and student-centered style of instruction results in effective and highly effective ratings.

So when reflecting on the school year, take a deep breath and think about getting FIT.*

betterlearning

 

*full disclosure: I am a member of the FIT Teaching expert cadre for ASCD.

You might want to reconsider that idea …

From Henry the Sixth, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2, 71-78

All: God save your majesty!

Cade: I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.

A troubled, urban school district (that shall remain nameless) has been “taken over” by their state board of education (that shall remain unidentified). One of the “takeover” folks spent an entire morning in a workshop devoted to teacher effectiveness and all she could offer during the debrief was her belief that we needed to get rid of “all the bad teachers.”

I couldn’t help but think of the memorable Shakespeare quote which cited killing all the lawyers as the first critical move toward social revolution. So I turned to the education policy-maker, “Let’s suppose you get your wish, and tomorrow, all of the bad teachers are gone. What will you do now?”

She looked at me like and there was a long, long pause. She eventually offered, “Well, I guess we should be prepared to hire some new teachers.”

“And where will those teachers come from? Last I checked, there weren’t too many folks banging down the doors to work in this district.”

She mumbled something about getting together a marketing plan so I asked one more question, “Have you considered focusing on supporting the teachers who already work here?” She walked away.

*sigh*