Good educators know that students are most successful in the classroom when they receive detailed feedback that celebrates their strengths and provides them with concrete next steps for improvement. Then we teachers get to step back and watch them revise, revisit, redesign, and find their own victories. We know this is what a successful student looks like, but when that same philosophy is turned on us, as teachers, our hackles go up, we get defensive, and we insist that this is just one more way our autonomy in the classroom is being ripped away from us.

My experience in teacher evaluation centers around The Danielson Framework for Teaching, as that is what we have been using in New York City public schools since 2013. While there are many similarities between Danielson’s Framework and the Marzano Focused Teacher Evaluation Model, for example, I want to make a case that the Danielson Framework, among others, are just good teaching. So while you may not need to know the ins and outs of Component 2.3a, you surely want to create an environment of rapport and respect in your classroom. And so I challenge you to read on.

The Danielson Framework tries to tackle the virtually impossible task of defining all of the things a teacher does in their classroom over the course of a period, a day, a unit, a school year. It breaks down all of those hours of prep work, heart-to-heart student conferences, and thoughtful class discussions, into four domains:

And who can argue? When I think about everything that encompasses my day-to-day teaching life, I can neatly squish it into one of these categories. 

• A colleague has a question about drama vocabulary for their speech-writing unit? Bam! Professional Responsibilities. 

• A student feels comfortable enough to come to me with a personal weight they’ve been carrying. Done. Classroom Environment. 

• My 6th graders are rejecting every project I throw their way. Let’s create a whole new one that they won’t hate. Okay. Planning & Preparation. 

• I teach five back-to-back classes and have to ration my water consumption on Tuesdays. Duh. Instruction. 

And because teaching is a highly complex and multi-layered profession, we all know that this is a significant over-simplification. That is why that within each domain there are 22 components that attempt to further outline what makes us who we are in the classroom. 

(If you’re wondering why some of these are bolded? It’s because these are the only components on which, as of the 2019-2020 school year, New York City teachers are assessed. This in no way invalidates the other components, but for the purposes of our exploration here, I’m going to focus on the highlighted components.)

As I continue my mission to clarify the Danielson Framework for Teaching for you, I propose thinking of it like interpreting Shakespeare. There are countless resources available to help you decode and understand what the Bard was saying all those years ago. And the closer you read into his writing, the more questions you have and the more layers you discover. But a real working-knowledge of Shakespeare requires you to step back, read it for the big picture, see what he intends, and even if you don’t understand every single word, you can still walk away with the greater meaning.

If we can set aside all of the questions about how we ended up here--What does this actually look like in my classroom? Who is Charlotte Danielson, really? What does she know about classroom teaching, anyway? How can anyone grasp the scope of what I do in 15-minute snippets?--then we can see that what the Danielson Framework for Teaching purports to do is provide teachers with the specific feedback they need to continue to improve their practice. That is what The Danielson Group claims is at the heart of this framework, and what the New York government entities who put this in place in 2013 hoped would happen. 

Naysayers have claimed since the outset that this system, like all systems of teacher evaluation, exists to eliminate “bad teachers,” but who’s to say what makes a “bad teacher?” Well, The Danielson Group and your administrator, naturally. And why should they be trusted? They don’t know the arts! They’ve never taught the arts before! They don’t know what this looks like in your classroom! What’s to stop them from using this framework to get you out because you’re pushy, because you don’t kowtow to parents’ every whim, because you don’t go quietly into that good night? What’s to stop them from saying you’re a “bad teacher” when you know you’re not? 22 components. 22 components stop them. 22 components that attempt to define what successful teaching looks like. Those components are what keep you in your classroom doing what you love to do. Before this your administrators had two choices. You were either “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory,” and if your principal found you to be a thorn in their side, then their mystery criteria determining your competence might deem you “Unsatisfactory,” and leave you with little recourse. 

The greatest challenge with this, and any top-down system, really, is ensuring proper understanding of what it looks like--across all content areas. We all want an easy answer, a prescribed solution for “how to do it.” And with every new initiative, we just want the bottom line, and we want it fast. For as hard as teachers work, we just want someone to tell us the shortest distance between points A and B. How do we get the results our administrators want with as little effort as possible? Yet within our own content areas, we spend countless hours seeking out resources that speak to our students, giving personal notes on every reflection, planning field trips that, let’s face it, we’ll be villainized for by deigning to take our students away from their “real classes” for a day. Arts teachers are not lazy. But we have to believe in our cause. We have to have a deeper understanding of why it matters to us in order to invest our limited emotional and intellectual resources in it.