How to Use Instructional Frameworks to Improve Teaching
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why specific instructional frameworks are the most direct way to help teachers improve practice.
Key Takeaways
- Specificity Drives Growth - Teachers improve faster when leaders name a specific practice, identify current performance, and define the next step clearly.
- Evaluation Rubrics Are Too Broad - General teacher evaluation rubrics cover too much to provide actionable guidance in a single area of practice.
- Frameworks Create Doable Next Steps - A well-designed instructional framework helps teachers see what to do next instead of being told to make a vague leap in practice.
- Design Matters - Effective frameworks include key components and levels of fluency so growth can be mapped from current practice to proficient and beyond.
- Tools Can Speed the Work - Justin explains that new tools now make it much easier to build high-quality instructional frameworks quickly.
Full Transcript
What is the most direct way to improve teaching practice? I believe it's to be specific, to pick a specific practice and say, here's where you are, here's the next step, here's where we ultimately want to go. And the best tool for doing that is a rubric, or what I call an instructional framework.
An instructional framework is a familiar format. A rubric is a familiar format. But often we don't use them to talk about specific teaching practices or specific areas of practice.
The main time we use rubrics like that is in teacher evaluation. But the problem with teacher evaluation rubrics is they're very broad, right? They cover every subject, every grade, K through 12, every area of a teacher's practice. And because they're so broad, they can't be that specific, right?
Like, a rubric would have to be hundreds of pages long to cover every single thing a teacher could possibly need to do in their practice, because teaching is so complicated. So, if you want to help someone improve in a specific area of practice, you have to be specific in your framework.
And a couple years ago, I wrote a book on how to build that kind of framework called Mapping Professional Practice. Wrote that with my friend Heather. Who's a principal in Canada. And the challenge of following what's in that book is that it is a lot of work to write those frameworks.
Now, recently, we have developed some tools to make it really, really easy to write those frameworks to the high standard that the book describes. And what you'll find when you do that, when you write a framework like that, is that it actually gives the teacher a next step.
It helps the teacher identify, okay, yes, here is where my practice is in this particular area. Here's my next step. And the next step is actually doable. I think so often when we want people to improve, we want them to go from doing something that they know how to do to doing something that they don't know how to do
and they don't even understand what we're talking about. And for ourselves, we're often unclear you know, what kind of guidance to provide. So, instructional frameworks are the solution to that problem.
They provide that clarity. They provide that specificity. And I'm doing a new webinar coming up soon called Get Specific, where I'll show you what these rubrics look like, what these instructional frameworks look like, what their design features are. They have key components and levels of fluency.
I'm gonna talk about how to design those. And I'll show you the tool that I've developed to help you build those quickly so that you can have a teacher tomorrow who is struggling in a particular area of practice, you can figure out where they are, you can figure out what proficient or beyond teaching looks
like in that area of practice, and then you can create a roadmap for their growth.
So, if you're starting over here, maybe we need to be here, and then ultimately here and beyond, you can build a framework like that very quickly. So, join me on the Get Specific webinar, and I'll show you how. You can register at principalcenter.com slash specific.
