My last column on teacher standards focused on the how. How should we deliver professional development? How long? Which teachers? Who leads? They were recommendations for structural changes about the medium of delivery.
But there’s a more fundamental and important question: What is a quality teacher? We can tinker with the delivery of PD, but if the content itself advances poor conceptions of education or ineffective instructional practices, what’s the point? Who cares about the means if the end in question is bunk?
What a school, district, or state defines as a quality teacher can be found in teacher evaluation rubrics. They are the policy that defines quality instruction and signals to all personnel in the system what teachers ought to be doing.
Rubrics for teacher evaluation became a hot topic during the early aughts. Race to the Top carrots and No Child Left Behind federal waivers incentivized states to adopt intensive teacher evaluation systems. Unfortunately, too often, these rubrics and evaluation incentivize all the wrong things.
Of all the frameworks that gained popularity, perhaps none are more famous (or infamous) than the Danielson Framework. New York uses it. My own state of Wisconsin uses it. There are no data that I can find proving that it’s the most popular one, but I’d bet the naming rights to my third child that it is. On this framework, what kind of instruction earns top marks?
Skim through it, and a clear vision of the ideal teacher stands out. In a “distinguished” teacher’s classroom, students “critique and write” their own curricular materials. They design “their own rubrics.” Teachers invite students to teach each other the content. Rooms are organized to facilitate “centers and groups.” Student direction, not teacher-lead instruction, is the gold standard towards which we are supposed to strive.
Collectively, “distinguished” teachers are those who shun explicit instruction to instead facilitate activities, run centers, and otherwise build their classroom on a constructivist understanding of human knowledge and learning. As a corollary, “unsatisfactory” teachers are thus those who rely on anachronistic lectures, rote practice, or (God save us) desks in rows. The horror, the horror!
I’ll pause here because I can already sense readers typing me an email in protest. Surely, Daniel, you don’t mean to imply that direct instruction is better than student-directed learning. While a column in a newsletter is no place to cover all research on effective instruction, I’d recommend reading up on the shortcomings of constructivist models such as project-based learning and inquiry learning and the research supporting direct instruction, spaced and interleaved practice, worked examples, and other traditional, structured instructional techniques.
That these rubrics reward high marks for happy-clappy pedagogy and assigns low marks for more traditional (and more effective) pedagogy is significant. As I’ve argued before regarding students, everything that a school does communicates a message. What behavior is rewarded or punished, which books are read, who are the heroes of history, what posters hang on the wall—each inculcates a worldview in students even beyond what is explicitly taught.
The same is true for teachers. These rubrics incept the idea that the best teachers have turned their classrooms over to the students, avoid anything that whiffs of traditional instruction, and incentivizes them to seek out opportunities for development grounded in progressivist, constructivist pedagogy.
Principals, too, as they consider professional development regimes for the year, are more likely to choose for a yearlong focus something like running learning stations, which has little evidentiary base, instead of knowledge building, which has much evidence bolstering its implementation. When teachers set their own improvement goals, they may focus on workshop models instead of direct instruction.
And on the flip side, these rubrics tie the hands of teachers who want to pursue more traditional models of instruction. Such teachers risk poor marks, professional consequences, or the reputation of being one of the buildings “bad teachers” if they put desks in rows (research finds this is the optimal arrangement for most instruction). When an assistant principal at a classical school, I had to grade my teachers using a rubric that ran in direct contradiction to our own stated belief in teacher-led instruction.
For those who have already drank the traditional instruction Kool-Aid, a central difficulty is convincing others. Learning styles have been debunked more times than years I’ve been alive, and yet their myth persists. Teacher rubrics are a policy lever that would both incentivize more teachers to adopt such instructional techniques and also begin to shift the view of the profession towards more effective instruction. If they’re reading every year that “distinguished teachers” make effective use of interleaved practice, they’ll begin to hold that view themselves.
If we want to make better teachers, it begins with how we define that.
