Charlotte Danielson on Teaching and the Common Core

Teaching expert Charlotte Danielson says the Common Core State Standards provide opportunities 

for teachers to "think deeply about what students are learning."

—Teachscape

INTERVIEW

Charlotte Danielson on Teaching and the Common Core

By Anthony Rebora

LINK

Charlotte Danielson, a former teacher and school administrator with degrees from Cornell and Oxford Universities, is one of the most recognized authorities on teaching practice in the United States. A popular speaker and trainer, she is best known as the creator of the "Framework for Teaching," a 115-page set of components for effective pedagogy that is used in many states and districts to inform teacher evaluation and professional development.

Danielson recently released a new edition of her Framework for 2013, with updates designed to reflect the Common Core State Standards.

In a recent interview, we talked to her about the common standards and how they might change teachers' work.

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What are the central implications of the common standards in terms of instructional practice, or the way teachers teach?

That's a good question, because we tend to think about the common core in terms of what students learn—for example, whether they demonstrate understanding of a concept or strong argumentation skills, being able to establish a point and defend it logically. Those are, of course, curriculum and ultimately assessment issues. But they also have implications for instruction—that is, how do you teach students the skills of argumentation? How do you teach in a way that advances conceptual understanding rather than superficial knowledge? These types of learning outcomes require different kinds of instructional practices—ones that many teachers are not adequately prepared to use.

I think the common core rests on a view of teaching as complex decision making, as opposed to something more routine or drill-based. That's a view I've always taken as well. It requires instructional strategies on teachers' parts that enable students to explore concepts and discuss them with each other, to question and respectfully challenge classmates’ assertions. So I see the common core as a fertile and rich opportunity for really important professional learning by teachers, because—I don't know now how to say this nicely—well, not all teachers have been prepared to teach in this way. I see that as one of the enormous challenges facing the common core rollout.

When you walk into a classroom, will good teaching look different under the common core?

Well, that depends on how teachers are teaching now. But when I walk into a classroom, of course I care about what the teacher is doing, but in some ways I care even more about what the students are doing. What's the nature of the task? Are students being invited, or even required, to think? Naturally, that has implications for what the teacher is doing and what the teacher has already done. That is, has the teacher designed learning experiences for kids that engage them in thinking or formulating and testing hypothesizes or challenging one another respectfully or developing an understanding of a concept? You really only know what a teacher is doing when you look at what the students are doing. I also listen carefully to how teachers question students—if they ask kids to explain their thinking, for instance. That's very different from just saying that’s the right or wrong answer. It's a very different mindset about wanting to understand the students' thinking and their degree and level of understanding.

How much of your framework has changed as a result of the common standards?

Not much. What I did was make explicit some things that were always there. The Framework for Teaching has always been grounded in the same fundamental assumptions as the common standards—for example, the importance of student conceptual understanding and of student intellectual engagement. I just called those things out. But it's important to note that the common standards so far only apply to two subject areas, literacy and mathematics, whereas my framework is generic—I intend it to apply to all settings. So in terms of the actual rubrics and the critical attributes of the different levels of performance, I could only incorporate those aspects of the common standards that in fact apply everywhere—for example, those things we’ve been talking about like argumentation and conceptual understanding. For things that are more subject-specific, such as the close reading of texts and the balance of fiction and nonfiction, I included those only in the examples for particular critical attributions.

The common-core documentation says that the standards are designed to give teachers flexibility. Does that make it more difficult for schools to evaluate teachers—insofar as there is no one right or prescribed way to do things?

It’s true that the common standards are silent on the subject of how students should learn the content of the standards—there’s no doubt about that. But I don’t think that necessarily makes it "more difficult" for administrators to evaluate teachers' practice. That is, if I'm going into a classroom and looking for how well a teacher is implementing the common core, I'm going to look for those common themes that run through the common core, and if it's literacy or math, look for specific things. Again, I tend to look at what the students are doing. So, for example, do you see evidence of the teacher developing the skills that would encourage good argumentation—not only by asking good questions themselves but by encouraging the students to ask good questions and respectfully challenge one another's point of view? That kind of holistic inquiry has always been a part of my Framework.

OK, so, imagine you are a school leader. How much room would you give teachers to experiment as they are implementing the common core?

I personally would allow them to experiment quite a bit, because, again, the common standards only describe what students will learn. There are many ways to achieve those goals. In addition, this is all very new. As I said a minute ago, this is a rich opportunity for good professional learning—and for teachers to work together and maybe watch videos of one other teaching, then pause the video and talk about how or why particular decisions were made. I think implementation of this will be more productive if it’s done through groups of teachers working together or with a principal or instructional coach or team leader—as opposed to having a principal say, “This is the way it has to be.” It seems to me that, given the opportunity for deep professional learning work, teachers will have the expertise in this at least as much as principals or other school leaders. I mean, they’re the ones who are going to be able to say, “This is what common core looks like in algebra,” or “This is what it looks like in 3rd grade reading class.”

Furthermore, we've discovered in our work that principals don't always recognize real student engagement. If the students are compliant and doing what the teacher says, if they're on task and busy, principals will often call it "engaged." But the students might not be doing any thinking at all. They might just be filling in some blanks on a worksheet. So I think this shift is going to challenge a lot of people to think deeply and differently. That’s my hope. And from a school leadership perspective, this means you don't want to be ramming things down peoples' throats—I think that's at odds with the spirit of what you're trying to do with the common core.

There's a lot of talk about teachers being able to share and to make greater use of supplemental curriculum materials like primary sources. Do you have any recommendation for teachers on evaluating the quality or relevance of such resources?

Yes, the use of primary sources in lessons—diaries, ships' logs, letters—can be wonderful and extremely enriching. And when teachers use these kinds of things, they can engage students in the kinds of learning that absolutely reflect the common core—that require analysis and conjecture and move away from rote learning. And I think that as more materials become available online, and as teachers begin to delve into the standards and understand what kinds of skills they are trying to develop in students, this can be a very rich experience for teachers themselves. They will be able to get involved in conversations with other educators and gain expertise as to the kinds of resources they need or want. I also assume that districts and curriculum directors will also help teachers evaluate lesson materials, in terms of their applicability to particular standards. At least in the early going, teachers may just need to trust their school or district leaders’ judgment on the value of particular materials.

What’s your advice for developing formative or benchmark assessments based on the common standards, given that the official common-core-aligned assessments are still under development?

I think it's the same issue as with teaching in general. You need to have a deep understanding of what the standards are about. Let's say you teach 4th grade mathematics. From reading the standards, you can see that there's a premium on mathematical reasoning, let's say. So you would want to be both teaching and formatively assessing kids on that. For example, do the students understand the processes they are using? Can they apply them in varied situations?

But we have to define what we mean by formative assessment—some people use that term to mean interim summative assessments, these benchmarking exams that companies sell. That’s not my definition of formative assessment. I consider formative assessment to be a part of teaching, something that is assimilated into lesson plans and instructional decision making. It’s ongoing monitoring done by the teacher, not just of the group as a whole but of individuals as well. In my view, it's not mini-summative assessments—it's not something you administer, if you will, in January. It’s an integral part of instruction. Formative assessment is not something you buy off the shelf. It's a skill you learn how to do.

But how do you know if you’re doing it well?

The same way you know if you're doing teaching well. To me this is another place where there’s an opportunity for teachers to work together and determine what it looks like on the ground when students are reaching the kinds of higher-level learning objectives the common core describes. It has to be part of teaching—an integral part of conversations teachers need to be having about whether they are implementing the standards with fidelity. What kind of responses are we getting from our students? What kind of evidence do we have that theyunderstand what they are learning? I think figuring out how to measure these expectations is very much on-the-ground work.

How will the common core affect teachers who have students with a wide range of skill levels or high needs?

Well that hasn't changed. That is the perennial instructional challenge—kids come into your classroom with a huge range of backgrounds and skills. I fear that the common core papers over that problem.

In what way?

Well, in mathematics, for example, you're expected to focus on a few key concepts for 3rd graders. But suppose you've got some students who never mastered the 1st grade skills. The standards documentation, as far as I can see, is silent on how a teacher handles that situation.

So what’s your advice for a teacher in that position?

As an outsider, it's hard to be specific, but I think one has to understand the developmental learning sequence of particular concepts and teach them in a way that's compatible with the central themes of the common core. That is, the specific topics to me are less important than the big ideas. So if I'm teaching for conceptual understanding, which is a big idea in the common core, I'm going to go for conceptual understanding while maybe modulating the specific skills I'm teaching. Say I'm a 4th grade teacher and prime numbers is a 4th grade skill, but I've got some 4th graders who don't understand place value. In that case, my own personal inclination would be to ensure that my students develop conceptual understanding of place value at that point—because that’s what they need. So the big idea of conceptual understanding is still consistent. But the actual topic? I don't see how you can responsibly say anything other than that you have to be flexible and teach students what they have the background to learn at that point. Otherwise, you're setting them up for failure.

Are there things about the common core that you don’t like?

No, not really, not conceptually. But I do worry somewhat about the assessments—I'm concerned that we may be headed for a train wreck there. The test items I've seen that have been released so far are extremely challenging. If I had to take a test that was entirely comprised of items like that, I'm not sure that I would pass it—and I've got a bunch of degrees. So I do worry that in some schools we’ll have 80 percent or some large number of students failing. That's what I mean by train wreck. But who knows? We just don’t know enough about the assessments right now. But when I have shown some of those released items to groups of educators—to teachers and administrators—the room just goes very quiet. So I can imagine a hostile response on the part of some educators and communities. But I'd like to be wrong about that.

I do think the vision of the common core, in terms of the conceptual framework, is terrific. For some educators, it represents a real change in mindset. It's about getting away from this scripted or pre-digested textbook-based instruction and really asking questions and encouraging deep understanding. I love all that tremendously. I mean, when you ask a kid who doesn't like school, "Why not?," you never hear him say, "because it's too hard." Kids say, "It's boring." And you know what? They have a point. A lot of it is. There are a lot of boring lessons out there—and I see the common core as a way of breaking out of that, because it does put a real premium on students' deeper learning and understanding and engagement, real engagement.

Do you have specific advice for teachers who are making the transition to the common standards right now?

I guess my advice to teachers would be to take a deep breath and look at ways this might be compatible with what they're already doing and what they want to do in their classrooms. Good teaching has always been what the common core is asking: inviting students to think and to understand complex concepts. The standards are going to invite teachers to think deeply about what the students are learning, and about whether they are really teaching for understanding, and how they can do that better—because that's where the real power in learning is. This is a big initiative, and it is going to require a major reorientation in how many people think about instruction and student learning. There's no doubt about that. I don't think we should pretend otherwise. On the other hand, it’s always been the vision of some people, including me, that that’s how we ought to be teaching—for deep engagement. And by engagement I mean intellectual engagement, resulting in the understanding of complex concepts.

—Anthony Rebora

WEB ONLY

From Betsy Combier:

By the way, if you are a teacher and you have been observed using Danielson's standards and rubrics, please read the UFT-Office of Labor Relations Stipulation prohibiting this.

News Corp. Education Tablet: For The Love Of Learning?

Joel and Rupert want to get into the education-online business. We think: nothing wrong with that!
Maybe the NYC Department of Education will stop throwing tech teachers out for no reason.

Joel Klein

by DAVID FOLKENFLIK

March 08, 2013 2:03 AM

LINK

 

The educational division of the media conglomerate News Corp., called Amplify, unveiled a new digital tablet this week at the SXSW tech conference in Austin, Texas, intended to serve millions of schoolchildren and their teachers across the country.

Amplify promises the tablet will simplify administrative chores for teachers, enable shy children to participate more readily in discussions, and allow students to complete coursework at their own pace while drawing upon carefully selected online research resources.

News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch views the digital tablet as part of a push to modernize the educational system. But he has another goal in mind as well. The media mogul is counting on future revenues from his educational branch to help shore up the finances of his newspaper and publishing division as it is split off later this year from the conglomerate's vast holdings in television and entertainment.

And as a result, News Corp.'s initiative is stirring both interest and controversy.

In the past few years, Murdoch has described education as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. At a May 2011 event in Paris, Murdoch noted that the fields of medicine, finance and media have all accelerated their adoption of technology. But schools have failed to share such advances, he said.

"Today's classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age: a teacher standing in front of a roomful of kids with only a textbook, a blackboard and a piece of chalk," Murdoch said.

The person Murdoch hired to lead his charge, Joel Klein, is familiar in education circles. Klein is a Democrat and served as assistant attorney general under President Clinton. He was chancellor of the New York City school system for more than eight years for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He's easy to pick out at Amplify's offices in midtown Manhattan. He's the only person dressed in a suit and tie in a workspace that more closely resembles a startup — replete with people confidently volleying at a pingpong table and piloting miniature helicopters overhead as their CEO walks by.

"Critics and others have said, 'You know ... technology has been around a long time, but it hasn't changed the learning experience,' " Klein told NPR. "It's not about hardware, it's not about devices, it's really about learning.

"And if this does what I believe it will do — which is enhance the teaching and learning processes — then it's going to be a home run."

A sneak peak revealed an Android tablet with a firm silicone jacket (designers say they have to expect pupils to be as careless with the tablets as they are with traditional textbooks). It is customized with apps for teachers to help them run quizzes and determine pupils' progress with ease while containing all of their coursework in a single, 10-inch device. It comes loaded with Amplify's curricular materials that satisfy so-called "Common Core" requirements mandated in all but five U.S. states. If Amplify wins the rights to carry most texts electronically — admittedly a tough nut to crack, given how warily publishers view e-books — the tablet can truly serve as a digital backpack.

Other companies, including such giants as Apple, are trying to sell school districts on the value of their tablets, too. Stephen Smyth, president of Amplify's Access division that creates the digital platforms on which its curricular material is delivered, argues that his company's tablet is distinctive because it is designed to allow students to interact with teachers instantaneously.

"These devices are connected," Smyth said recently. "If you go to Best Buy or a retailer and buy a tablet off the shelf, it can't do this. Really, what we're trying to solve here is actually how to have teachers use tablets in the classroom environment."

But some critics question what problem the tablets from Amplify — and its competitors — are solving. Some teachers union officials argue that Amplify's efforts are part of a disturbing effort to lure politicians with technology that promises to enable teachers to handle more students per class — and thus reduce how many teachers school districts will need to employ.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of the nonprofit Class Size Matters in New York City, said Klein and Murdoch "believe that public school kids should have larger classes, and instead of getting personalized instruction via their teachers, should do it via a computer."

The tablet may well function perfectly well on its own terms, Haimson said, but she contends that Amplify's goal is less about helping schoolchildren than about turning a profit.

"It's all part of the same vision they have for transforming education by privatizing it," Haimson said. "And we have seen not just in New York City but nationwide an avid pillaging going on of public resources for private ends."

Klein's record in New York, a selling point in Murdoch's decision to hire him, is political baggage among some of his foes in the battles over education policy. Diane Ravitch, a former assistant education secretary under President George H.W. Bush who now criticizes some of her earlier allies, wrote last year that Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had manufactured a schools crisis in a report for the Council on Foreign Relations. Klein and Rice wrote a report that carried this stark warning: "Educational failure puts the United States' future economic prosperity, global position and physical safety at risk."

She wrote that Klein and Rice offered prescriptions that were unproven — especially the reliance on technology proffered by private corporations.

Just days after leaving city government in 2010, Klein joined News Corp. in order to invigorate Murdoch's efforts in education. The company swiftly paid $360 million for an educational tech venture called Wireless Generation, which had been a contractor for the city schools on two high-profile projects. That firm was used as the basis for what they rechristened "Amplify."

But before they could get very far, Murdoch's tabloids in London became embroiled in the bribery and criminal phone hacking scandal. New York state revoked a $27 million contract for an education database with Amplify, citing concerns about the integrity of its parent company.

And Klein was pulled away to help Murdoch clean up the legal mess. He led an effort to collaborate with law enforcement authorities in both the U.K. and the U.S., thus limiting the company's likely liability in both countries and enabling it to avoid any criminal prosecutions or major civil sanctions for bribery in the U.S., at least so far. 

"The good news was, while we had a problem in the U.K., that problem wasn't a global problem," Klein said.

Yet Klein, now back at Amplify, conceded there is some suspicion of his boss's politics and motives, too.

In this country, Murdoch has pushed for greater reliance on charter schools, criticized teachers unions and given money to aid select politicians sharing his agenda. For example, records show News America, an arm of News Corp., gave $250,000 toward a group that helped to fund like-minded candidates running for the Los Angeles Board of Education. And Murdoch's primary American news organizations — Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post — have high-profile conservative pundits who have often been skeptical to the point of hostile toward teachers groups.

But Klein said Amplify should not be confused with its corporate siblings that often serve as a platform for political stands.

"Rupert realized this from the beginning: This is a division that's going to be focused on education," Klein said. "We don't have a political mission — none whatsoever. What we're doing is developing materials in math and science and the English language arts — designed by leading experts.

"Our commitment," Klein said, "is education only. We have no subsidiary agenda."

 

The Lawless NYC Department of Education

Bloggers have noticed that there seems to be a disconnect between what has happened to the lawfully bargained rights of teachers and the "law". This is a necessary and important discussion which has been ignored for 10 years as political cliques try to hide the immense harm that has befallen teachers, parents, and children under Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education. Read my comments after the blog post below.

One of the newest additions to the outcry about this mess in NYC is below, from a great blog named "Accountable Talk":

Some Legal Questions

Accountable Talk

LINK

You've probably heard that a judge barred Governor Cuomo from stealing $250 million from NYC schools to satisfy his ego. The judge correctly ruled that children should not be punished because the city and UFT failed to reach a deal. This, to me, brings up a question.

Why isn't the UFT using the courts to prevent Cuomo from imposing an evaluation system on NYC teachers? Obviously, I'm a teacher and not a lawyer, but it seems to me there's a strong case here. Our contract, which was collectively bargained, is still in force and there is no provision in it for a new evaluation of any kind. Since when does the state have the power to unilaterally alter a contract because it doesn't like the terms? The few law courses I took emphasized the fact that contract law is pretty solid in this country. Has that changed? How can the state, which has a stake in the outcome of this dispute, simply choose to override a valid contract signed and agreed to by both parties?

Furthermore, any evaluation system imposed on us would be in direct opposition to the Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law, which states that a collectively bargained contract must stay in force until a new contract is signed. How can the governor just vacate that law? If he does, would that invalidate the rest of the Taylor Law as well, and allow teachers to strike without penalty?

If Cuomo can force this contract alteration on us, what would stop him from passing a law mandating a 50% cut in salary for all city workers if he wishes to? It's the same thing. Collective bargaining itself is threatened if the state decides that it can simply alter contracts it doesn't like.

I'd appreciate the opinion of any lawyer out there on these questions. I think the courts would enforce existing contracts and tell the Gov. to stick his power grab. So, how about it?