I sat through a PD given by Charlotte Danielson, many school districts have adopted her sixty plus item rating checklist, in the Q & A I asked, “Supreme Court Judge Stewart wrote, ‘I can’t define pornography but I know it when I see it,’ is that also true watching teachers?”
The engine driving learning forward is always the head of department. They know what the lessons and the curriculum looked like, and they know what the class assessments reveal. So each proxy can easily be weighed in context. The problem with heads of departments is that they don’t realise this, and think the hands on the steering wheel are what matters. Leadership is directionless without the engine. God, that was a bit strained.
Really enjoyed reading this and sadly the proxies continue. The whole process of trying to measure learning reminds me of production efficiency methods. Needless to say the language of production has creeped into education eg. Lean tools, VSM, EduScrum, Agile, Heijunkska, Kaisen, Visual Kaban Boards etc
In England, we’ve been centralising pedagogy for years. Failing schools are absorbed by apparently successful ones and import their practices wholesale. When they improve, nobody bothers teasing apart which mechanisms actually worked.
You end up with whatever’s measurable at scale – techniques that are evidence-based until they’re mandated everywhere, regardless of whether they fit the lesson in front of you. That’s how you get the empty rituals and proxy worship you describe: a high-stakes system where deviating from a set of practices inscribed as ‘good teaching’ becomes a threat.
The alternative is to make the system teacher-centred and build new proxies each time an observer enters a room. But proxy humility collides with the accountability apparatus that schools and academy trusts are built on. Observers need to collect data they can aggregate and send upwards. Those at the top need that data to defend the changes they’re making to a hall full of teachers at the next INSET day. The cycle doesn’t work otherwise.
And if something goes wrong at the next inspection, it’s much easier to fall back on reams of observations based on those proxies – even if they don’t tell you all that much – than saying you allowed observers to use their own judgement when they walked into a room.
I sat through a PD given by Charlotte Danielson, many school districts have adopted her sixty plus item rating checklist, in the Q & A I asked, “Supreme Court Judge Stewart wrote, ‘I can’t define pornography but I know it when I see it,’ is that also true watching teachers?”
Charlotte demurred
The engine driving learning forward is always the head of department. They know what the lessons and the curriculum looked like, and they know what the class assessments reveal. So each proxy can easily be weighed in context. The problem with heads of departments is that they don’t realise this, and think the hands on the steering wheel are what matters. Leadership is directionless without the engine. God, that was a bit strained.
Really enjoyed reading this and sadly the proxies continue. The whole process of trying to measure learning reminds me of production efficiency methods. Needless to say the language of production has creeped into education eg. Lean tools, VSM, EduScrum, Agile, Heijunkska, Kaisen, Visual Kaban Boards etc
In England, we’ve been centralising pedagogy for years. Failing schools are absorbed by apparently successful ones and import their practices wholesale. When they improve, nobody bothers teasing apart which mechanisms actually worked.
You end up with whatever’s measurable at scale – techniques that are evidence-based until they’re mandated everywhere, regardless of whether they fit the lesson in front of you. That’s how you get the empty rituals and proxy worship you describe: a high-stakes system where deviating from a set of practices inscribed as ‘good teaching’ becomes a threat.
The alternative is to make the system teacher-centred and build new proxies each time an observer enters a room. But proxy humility collides with the accountability apparatus that schools and academy trusts are built on. Observers need to collect data they can aggregate and send upwards. Those at the top need that data to defend the changes they’re making to a hall full of teachers at the next INSET day. The cycle doesn’t work otherwise.
And if something goes wrong at the next inspection, it’s much easier to fall back on reams of observations based on those proxies – even if they don’t tell you all that much – than saying you allowed observers to use their own judgement when they walked into a room.