(As long as teachers can still use their intuition)
“Learning to trust your instincts, using your intuitive sense of what's best for you, is paramount for any lasting success. I've trusted the still, small voice of intuition my entire life. And the only time I've made mistakes is when I didn't listen.” – Oprah Winfrey
The
other day I just happened to catch an NPR Radiolab piece on “Choice” and being “Overcome by
Emotion.” Essentially, the hosts were discussing if we were all completely
rational beings, like Spock
from Star Trek, would we have an easier time making choices throughout our day.
In theory, you think of course, but in reality it’s our emotions and intuition
that keep us out of a circle of rationality. When you finally remember your
favorite cereal from childhood, you are saved from the endless oblivion of
choices in the supermarket aisle.
After
sharing a series of interesting stories related to emotion and choice, Jad
Abumrad came to the conclusion that, “one way to look at a gut feeling is that
its kind of a short-hand average of all of this past wisdom.” (Quote is at 12:30)
Teacher Knowledge
I
had a light bulb moment. As teachers, so much of our day is piecing gut
feelings together. What separates a good teacher from a bad teacher is strong implicit
knowledge of what good teaching looks like and how to implement it. Marilyn
Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle refer to this as “teacher knowledge” in
their work on teacher action research. Listening to the NPR piece on the
reality of intuition, I was excited that there was neurological evidence to
support the notion that what teachers know is particular to teachers and is
important in educating children.
But
then I thought, “oh, no!” This does not jive with all these “teacher
effectiveness” buzzwords I have been hearing lately.
Or
does it?
Teacher Effectiveness Confusion
My
first experience with the Danielson framework was while working with a student
teacher last spring. She came to me concerned about using “low-inference
evidence” to support her work with our students who were emergent communicators
with multiple disabilities. I immediately thought, “you want evidence of what
my students say, only? Hmm, most of them are non-verbal… how’s this going to
work?” The student teacher gave an example of grading student papers without
knowing who they were, so that you would not be biased. I thought, “great, my
students cannot write and definitely do not independently do worksheets.”
This
was what I was thinking of as I combed through the New York City’s Department
of Education (DOE)’s website for
implementing the new teacher evaluation system based on the Danielson’s Framework
for Teaching, also known as Advance. (Because everything needs to have its
own name in NYC, can’t just be APPR like the rest of New York State.) I was
looking for a better understanding and I cross-referenced the DOE’s info with the
Danielson Group website and other
web resources.
A Danielson Framework Surprise
I
have to admit that I have come to the conclusion that Charlotte Danielson may
not be as evil
as we have been led to believe. It seems that its our state education
departments and local school districts in their rush for accountability that
may be corrupting the important work of documenting what good teachers know and
do.
Shockingly,
I have to say that this particular PowerPoint
from the NYC DOE was actually quite helpful. I appreciated that their
definition of low-inference included what students say AND do. I also got the
impression that this was about improving administrators’ practices, as well as
teachers. I went looking for evidence that teachers had to be robots teaching
to a strict norm, but I only found it on district websites about “norming,” not
in Danielson’s actually work, like here.
Teacher Knowledge and Danielson Working
Together?
I
started thinking: is Danielson’s work finally what we as teachers have been
looking for in order to prove our implicit teacher knowledge? I have always
felt good teachers should have nothing to fear about being observed; could this
be a tool that could confirm that we are effective teachers?
What Low-Inference Really Means
It
turns out low-inference does not just mean grading papers without knowing who
the students are, but can be something like using a checklist during your
lesson to document that students are meeting specific IEP objectives. Low-inference
has come to have two meanings in education: low-inference observations of what
our students are doing by teachers and administrators and low-inference
observations of what teachers are doing by administrators.
Because
I am a special education teacher, I initially thought that everything I do is
high-inference, such as observing children’s movements and facial expressions
and drawing conclusions, and I became defensive. Actually, everything I do in
my teaching is a series of low-inference (ie. evidence-based) actions that over
time have formed my intuition. This is exactly why experience counts in
teaching. As teachers, we need to think about it as taking evidence-based
action, which will provide low-inference evidence for administrators. We need
to specifically identify the parts of our practice that causes us to form
opinions and determine next steps.
To
eliminate confusion though, I wished they would have just used a simple phrase
like “objective evidence” instead of “low-inference evidence.” The definition
of “inference” inherently means, “a conclusion or
opinion that is formed because of known facts or evidence.” (Merrian-Webster
Dictionary) Conclusion is in the word, and it is confusing as to whether
there is supposed to be low conclusions or low evidence. A low “conclusion from
evidence” evidence?
Support for Teacher Intuition
Initially,
I associated the Danielson framework and teacher evaluations as an attempt to
eliminate teacher intuition. Low-inference was another buzzword for rejecting
teacher knowledge. But low-inference is about being specific, which I think we
as educators really cannot fight. We can no longer simply say that our teacher knowledge
is immeasurable, but we need to be sure that the tools that are being developed
accurately reflect the murkiness of teaching young minds. We need to let our
implicit teacher knowledge shine, by investing the time to understand the
Danielson Framework of Teaching and use it to support our profession.
So
I leave you with the two questions I have arrived at today:
1.)
Are the Danielson Frameworks of Teaching an
accurate way to demonstrate implicit teacher knowledge?
2.)
How can we be sure that the Danielson
Frameworks are used accurately given the complexities of teaching students with
special needs?
I
hope you can help me by sharing how you answer these questions and I will continue
to blog as I shape my own answers.
It
is time for all teachers to channel our innermost Captain James T. Kirks,
because as rational as Spock was, he and the rest of the ship would have been lost without the gutsy
Captain James T. Kirk in command.
Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on. – Captain James T.
Kirk
