Leadership Matters - February 2013

SB 7: Growing pains —–—————————————————————————

Evaluators must evidence engaged learning for the teacher to be rated as proficient or distinguished in the FFT. Danielson defines engaged learning as the student being intellectually involved in the work. An evaluator must evidence this intellectual involvement. This begs the question of how an evaluator would evidence student engagement when a teacher is lecturing or when the classroom activity is totally teacher centered. In a lecture classroom the observer could evidence the number of students looking at the teacher, the number of students taking notes, the number of students verbally interacting with the teacher either by asking or answering questions, etc… However, it is difficult for the observer to evidence that “virtually all students are highly engaged” in a lecture or teacher centered classroom. The key for “engaged” classrooms is for the students to be intellectually doing the work. The more the classroom resembles active intellectual student work the higher the teacher would be rated in relation to “engaged learning.” If a teacher evaluator only sees lecture or teacher centered activities after observing a teacher multiple times in both informal and formal observations the teacher would be rated “Needs Improvement” at best. This is one of the reasons evaluators need to make multiple observations, to see the teacher in a variety of activities in multiple observations In this new evidence gathering process, I encourage (really require) administrators to go around the room and ask students questions about what work they are doing. Danielson describes engaged learning as the student intellectually doing the work. In order for a teacher evaluator to evidence engaged learning, the administrator must talk to students and record the conversation for evidence purposes. Teacher evaluators finding the time that will be required to do the teacher performance-based evaluation with veracity Teacher evaluators will need to observe teachers much more than the minimum required by the rules (one informal and one formal for tenured teachers and one informal and two formal for non-tenured teachers) in order to afford teachers fundamental due process. No teacher evaluator is going to be part of a process to honorably discharge a 25-year veteran teacher with just a few observations. At a minimum, I believe it will take eight to ten informal/formal observations over a two-year cycle to gather enough evidence for all ten components in Domain 2 and 3 of the FFT. This begs the question “What will administrators not do in order to dedicate the time needed to do this work?”

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evidence is: 1) What the teacher says and does; 2) What the students say and do; 3) Can it be counted?; 4) Can it be timed?; and 5) Can the teaching be summarized accurately using only evidence based words? Evaluators learn to collect evidence from the observations, categorize the evidence by domain/ component, enter into reflective conversations with the teacher, and finally, summatively rate the teacher. Following the above stated process, how can anyone say that no teacher will be rated Distinguished/Excellent? The administrator would have to gather the evidence and rate the teacher based on that evidence. The summative rating could not be predetermined to be ‘Proficient.” It has been my experience that there are many excellent teachers. These excellent teachers will learn what the FFT requires for a summative “Distinguished” rating and they will earn this rating. I wonder what Danielson means by “teachers visit distinguished but do not live there.” However, I would guess if you asked Danielson if there are excellent teachers in Illinois she would say yes. Will there be less summative rated excellent teachers in Illinois now that the FFT is being implemented? Probably yes, but we cannot make that determination until we gather the evidence, categorize the evidence by domain/component, reflect with the teacher and then rate the teacher. We need to conduct multiple informal and formal observations to gather enough evidence to make this final determination. It is my guess that teachers will continue to improve when it comes to illustrating the critical elements of the frameworks in these multiple observations. In my personal opinion, we have many excellent teachers in Illinois no matter what the measure. Following the required teacher evaluation training for all teacher evaluators, the actual competencies needed to do this work to actually improve teaching and learning and determine the professional teaching practice rating for the teacher While virtually all Illinois teacher evaluators have successfully completed the Teachscape training I have drawn the conclusion that this training was a good inter-rater Danielson training. It did not include specific training on the relative importance of the various components within the Danielson Frameworks for Teaching (FFT). The FFT emphasizes the importance of Engaged Learning as the most important Component and Domain 3, Instruction, as the most important Domain.

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