Teacher Evaluation Using the Danielson Framework II. Building Evaluation Skills: Gathering Evidence from a Classroom Observation B. Gathering Evidence of Domain Three (Instruction) A Review of the Components of Domain 3 – Part 1 CHARLOTTE DANIELSON: Now let's turn our attention to Domain 3: Instruction. This is the other big domain that happens in the classroom. And some people would argue that it's the most important one because it is the epicenter, if you like, of teaching. Now, I would take the position that Domain 3 can't happen without Domain 2 being done well. It's just kind of a prerequisite. But it's true, Domain 3 does represent the heart of teaching, and the heart of Domain 3 is 3C: Engaging Students in Learning. As we've already said, learning is done by the learner through an active intellectual process. And that while as teachers we sometimes think that our students learn on account of what we do, we actually know that's not quite right from learning theory. We really know now that our kids don't learn because of what we do, they learn because of what they do. And in Domain 3 is where we get to see what they are doing. Now, it is designed in Domain 1, through the activities and assignments. And so we can look at an assignment that a teacher has done, or the directions for an activity, and exam those. And we will do that for a lesson. But in Domain 3, we're watching to see what actually happens in the classroom, and to focus on the intellectual engagement of students. Are they being asked to think. That's sort of the cornerstone of intellectual engagement, are they being asked to think. Now, this plays out in a lot of different ways. So Domain 3 has five components, just as Domain 2 did. The first one is: Communicating with the students. Now, this takes several forms; there's several elements to it. Part of it is just being clear, clear direction. Do the kids know what they're supposed to do? The heart of it, though, is the explanations of content that a teacher offers. Not only are they clear and are they accurate, but do they engage kids through the use of analogies, through the use of information that the kids have already. For example, if I wanted to explain the concept of passive solar energy to a class, I would find something in their experience, such as water in a hose on a hot summer day that gets very hot. Even though nobody's heating it, nobody's heating it, the sun is heating it though. Or a car, even in the winter, that's got its windows rolled up, if it's a sunny day it gets very hot inside. That's an example of passive solar energy at work. 1 www.educationalimpact.com

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Most children would be familiar with that. And so I would refer to that, and so engage them intellectually, in experiences that they're familiar with, to make sense of the new content. So explaining new content to students is in some ways the heart of 3A, but it's not all of it. There is, of course, just being clear about directions, and there's the use of imaginative language, where experienced and skilled teachers use their instruction as a way to enhance students vocabulary and understanding, and use of rich language in their explanations and their conversation. That's 3A. 3B has to do with Questioning and Discussion Techniques. Now, this is the only specific instructional skill, that in The Framework for Teaching, has an entire component devoted to it, and that reflects its central location in teaching. That every teacher uses questioning and discussion, and it's important that we use it well. That we use it to extend understanding, that we pose high level questions, where we invite students to think, to draw conclusions, to make connections. Now, there's a place for what I would call recitation, that is quick, fire, just singleanswer questions. If, for example, you're teaching let's say English Literature, and you give an assignment the previous day, and you want to make sure everybody's done the reading, you ask some questions about it to check. It's like a verbal quiz. And the kids know, if you do this every day, or every day you give an assignment like that, they know to expect that. And so they don't want to be embarrassed in class so they are more likely to do the homework. But that's not questioning and discussion in the sense it's used in 3B. In 3B, it is using discussion and questioning as an opportunity to deepen understanding. And an importance use of that for teachers is to not only just have questions and answers that go from the teacher to different students and back, but encouraging students to talk to each other. And so, for example, if I pose a question to a class, and somebody answers it, and then I might say, "That's an interesting idea, Tom. Mary, what do you think about that?" That is, I would invite them to critique each other, and then I would gradually be able to remove myself from the center so I'm not mediating the whole thing. That becomes an important skill for them to learn, so then when I have put them in groups to discuss something, they have some idea of how to do that.

A Review of the Components of Domain 3 – Part 2 2 www.educationalimpact.com

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CHARLOTTE DANIELSON: 3C is Engaging Students in Learning. It's the heart of Domain 3. And since Domain 3 is the heart of the Framework, it's really the heart of the entire Framework. It is why we do this. It is where the learning happens. Now, the rest of Domain 3 really supports 3C. Now, in Domain 2, which we talked about earlier, the different components are somewhat separate, distinct from one another. In Domain 3, they're very intertwined, and they all support 3C. That is having clear explanations, and imaginative use of language, and so on, is important because it engages kids in the content. The use of questioning discussion engages kids in the content. What 3C refers to then, what the kids are actually doing. What is the activity? What is the assignment? What are the materials being used? Are they being asked to think, and to draw conclusions. That's the heart of Domain 3. And those are the questions we need to ask ourselves when we're looking for student engagement. It's not just busy, it's not just on task, it's not just compliance, it is engagement. There is an energy level often in the classroom, a sort of buzz, that is an indication of deep student engagement. Now, there's a little bit more to Domain 3. There is 3D, which is: Using Assessment in Instruction. This represents something very important in teaching. That we used to think of – when I was first in education, we had a unit of instruction, let's say, and then at the end a test. And the test signaled the end of the instructional process. And you either did well or poorly, and then maybe something happened, but that's how you knew you were at the end of whatever the unit was. We know a little better now, and we know that the assessment shouldn’t signal the end of instruction about a topic, it should be integral to the instruction. And so teachers being alert to student understanding as they're moving through a unit, and even through a lesson, it's critical to student learning. That's is, that's how we know to make little adjustments, and to be monitoring, and seeing where the kids are with us and where they're not. Many teachers have developed quite ingenious strategies for getting kids to indicate where they are. You know, I really get this. I have questions. I'm lost. Or exit passes, when kids leave a classroom they give the teacher something that then the teacher can look at between then and the next class, and determine whether they need to re-teach anything. 3 www.educationalimpact.com

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So using assessment not to grade students, not to pass judgment, but as a part of the instructional process for the teacher information, mostly, about how are we doing? Do we need to do something again? Do we need to come back to it? And at the high levels here, it's the students doing it themselves. That is, monitoring their own understanding, being able to give feedback to their classmates. And so it becomes, then, integrated in the instruction against the clear standards of what is expected here. What's a good essay, for example, and how close am I to that in my writing? Then it becomes not just the teacher passing judgment and giving a stamp, but it becomes a search for excellent work by everybody in the class. And then the last component in Domain 3, 3E, is: Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness. This is a high-level skill. Not very many beginning teachers can do this well because it's enough to plan a good lesson. And often, when a beginning teacher encounters a rough spot in a lesson, they don’t have a Plan B. They just have to sort of soldier on and hope for the best. But an experienced teacher, and an expert, will immediately recognize that something is not working. They'll shift gears. They might even make a major course correction (it depends on what it is). Or in a slightly different way, they might seize on a teachable moment. A student might arrive in class with a caterpillar or something, and you didn't think to do anything with caterpillars that day, but you realized that this caterpillar is a good example of something we're working on and so let's incorporate it. And the kids are very interested in it, and so on. So the seizing on teachable moments is a high-level skill. It takes a lot of confidence to do that, as does making adjustments. And another part of Flexibility and Responsiveness is being responsive to individual student needs, interest needs, and especially when students are having difficulty, to persist, and to have the belief that one should persist, and then the skills to persist to find new ways to come at some concept that a student is not understanding. So Flexibility and Responsiveness is a high-level skill. It depends on some experience, and a lot of expertise, but it's one well worth cultivating. So this is Domain 3. It's about the instruction. It's about engaging kids in the content, promoting their learning of this content, which we have designed in Domain 1. We'll get to that later. But right now, it's the doing. And if you need a refresher of what some of those components are, you can of course read the book, I would recommend that, but you can also watch the program that we've done together, called Twenty-two Components of Great Teaching, where I talk about each of the components, a little bit 4 www.educationalimpact.com

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more than what I just now said, which was just labeling them. So if you need a little refresher, you might want to do one of those two things. And if, as part of your refresher of some of these components, you actually want to be reminded about what they look like in the classroom, you can also look at the Looking at Real Classrooms program that we've done together, that links actual clips, video clips, short ones, with the components of The Framework for Teaching. It give you like a "for instance" of what they actually look like.

Classroom Observation in Domain 3 CHARLOTTE DANIELSON: When you are observing classrooms, and looking for Domain 3, and in particular, looking for student engagement, I would like to just remind you what it is you're looking for in the activities and the assignments. Now, part of it, you can ask and answer these questions on the assignment themselves, but you really care in Domain 3 about how it's working in the classroom. And so we can identify, then, what are the characteristics of an engaging task or assignment? There's several characteristics. The first one is that it's posing an interesting question or problem. I'm not just learning a procedure I wrote, but we put out to kids a question to which the answers not immediately obvious, and from which they will learn what we want them to learn. So, for example, "How many beans are in this jar, do you think?" Well, if my aim for this class is for them to learn some skills of estimation, I don't want to just say, "Well, today we're gonna learn about estimation. And, here, what do you think? What are ways we could estimate?" That would be a boring way to do this. Instead, if I ask them a question that might kind of intrigue people, "How many beans do you think were in this jar? And I wonder how close we can get. We could try different ways, and then actually count them, and see what way is the best way. But let's just try for now, just what do you think?" That sort of question. Which most students will find pretty interesting. Engaging activities tend to invite some student choice and initiative. So, for example, "How many beans do you think are in this jar?" And so different groups of kids might come up with different ways of doing it. But there are lots of choices we can offer kids. At an advanced level in English Literature, for example, we might have been studying Hemingway, for example, and tried to understand what is his style of writing. And the assignment might be, Write an essay, a short piece, in the style of Hemingway. Now, I don't care what it's about. You choose. 5 www.educationalimpact.com

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But use what we've learned about his style to replicate it. It's engaging, it's much more engaging than just write a report. Engaging activities tend to go deeper. They encourage depth rather than breath. It's not just a onceover lightly of the depth of a quarter of an inch, but it's an activity that invites students to go deep. Collaborative work tends to be engaging. Now, not everything lends itself to that, obviously. But where possible, we should let kids work together. And most people use group work a lot, and I think it's a good idea, most of the time. As I say, not always possible, not always even desirable, sometimes you really want to see what individuals can do. But as an incentive, and a motivation for working hard, often group work is a good approach. And then most important, in a way, engaging activities invite, and really demand, higher order of thinking on the part of students. That is, they require that they form hypothesis, that they analyze data, that they compare and contrast, that they are thinking, and drawing conclusion, and seeing relationships, seeing patterns that we've not pointed out to them, but we're inviting them to find them. And, again, it offers choice. And then you can have a conversation with the whole class, and see who heard what, who thought of what, how do they compare to each other. That mental activity is what's engaging. That is, when you talk to students who don't like school about why they don't like school, I have never once heard a student say "because it's too hard." What do they say? "It's boring." That's always the answer, "It's boring." You know, I can't speak for anybody else, but I don't think I've ever known an intellectually lazy four-year-old. Now, I've known a lot of intellectual lazy 14-year-olds. Now, a lot of things happen, granted, between 4 and 14, but in my view, one of the things we know is that between 4 and 14 one of the things they do is go to school. And I would hate to think that in school, we somehow turn off the curiosity, but I think we better examine that. Because when we don't invite kids to use their intellect, that's what they want to do, and they will tend to find it boring if they're not encouraged and permitted to do that. So that's why engaging students and learning is so essential. Why designing engaging learning experiences is so central to good teaching.

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