Teachers Should Be Evaluated on Professional Judgment, Not Just Outcomes

anytime I mention Charlotte Danielson or teacher evaluation on social media, I get a variety of responses from teachers, some of which seem to believe that teachers should not be evaluated at all, that there should just not really be any system of teacher evaluation.

And I get that response because I get that lots of people have been treated in ways that they perceive as unfair, it's never fun to be evaluated, and evaluations, frankly, are not always done well.

And that is not a secret or a mystery to Charlotte Danielson.

And I've worked with her.

I've had her as a professional developer in my school district and have learned from her and seen her speak many times.

And I think she has one of the best systems out there.

But she is very aware that her system is not always used in the most constructive ways.

And really, she even designed it originally for reflection and professional growth, not for teacher evaluation.

But then it ended up being kind of the best framework, the best rubric for teacher evaluation, and now it is the most popular framework out there.

But I think it's worth asking, what really should teachers be evaluated on?

Because a lot of people feel like the Danielson framework is unfair, especially if they're working with less privileged students.

And I personally used the Danielson framework in my professional certification portfolio fairly early in my career.

And one of the things that I found was a little bit unfair was the description of level four, right?

Like if you want it to be at the very top of the rubric, not just satisfactory, but exemplary or whatever your organization calls it beyond satisfactory, there are some things that feel like they're a little bit outside of your control as a teacher, right?

You can control what you do But level four requires students to take ownership, requires students to do things.

And I think a lot of people feel like those are not always possible no matter what they do.

I think they're a good vision to strive for.

I think that level four practice is a good vision to aim for.

But I think if you feel like sometimes you're not really going to have a realistic shot at being able to reach level four just because of where your students are coming in from, how far you can get them is not going to get to level four practice.

So I think we need to think about this question of what should teachers be evaluated on?

And there have been different takes on that over the years.

There have been the four domains and more recently, danielson clusters and there are lots of other systems marzano has a system kim marshall has a system strong has a system and your organization may have its own system of criteria for teacher evaluation and i think on one level we can look at the domains we can look at the criteria and say that's what we're evaluating people on but i think at the heart of what we're doing in teacher evaluation what we're examining it's not so much the song and dance.

Like, yes, there may be things like, do you explain things clearly?

Do you manage the classroom well?

There are some outcomes, but ultimately what I think we need to be getting at in teacher evaluation is professional judgment.

Is this teacher making decisions that were the right decisions for the moment?

Because the moment is not always ideal.

It's not always the perfect lesson where everything is going well and you can just teach it without interruption and students learn it, they understand it, they have the background knowledge they're expected to have and everything just goes smoothly.

Teaching often requires making the best of the circumstances.

Maybe you had a really great lesson yesterday and half the class missed it, so they didn't get what they were supposed to in order to be ready for today's lesson.

That's the type of situation that teachers are in every day and that they have to make the best of.

So I think we need to look for ways to evaluate teachers based on professional judgment and what they did given the circumstances, not just the outcome, not just the test score, not just the did students take leadership of everything, but did the teacher make the best possible decision under the circumstances?

Let me know what you think.