Charlotte Danielson's Best Book Is About Teacher Growth Through Professional Conversation
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why Charlotte Danielson's work on professional conversations is more valuable than the evaluation framework she's famous for.
Key Takeaways
- The evaluation framework isn't her best work - Danielson's rubric became widely used for teacher evaluation, but that wasn't its intended purpose
- Professional conversation drives growth - Her book on using conversation to develop teachers is more impactful than checkbox evaluations
- Evaluation and growth are different goals - Using the same tool for both accountability and development undermines both purposes
Transcript
Now, Charlotte Danielson is widely known as the creator of the most popular teacher evaluation framework.
Now, I say most popular because it is required by law in many states.
It's not always popular with teachers because it's not always used in the best way.
But I have to say, having worked with Ms.
Danielson in Seattle as a principal, she came out and worked with us, having seen her speak many times, I have to say...
her ideas are solid and her heart is in the right place.
And if you want to know what Charlotte Danielson is really all about, I want to encourage you to check out this book that we talked about on Principal Center Radio.
The book is entitled Talk About Teaching, Leading Professional Conversations.
It's not about teacher evaluation at all.
It's about how professional conversations help teachers grow.
And it really informed my thinking as I worked on different materials.
And you'll see some of that thinking in my book on classroom walkthroughs.
Now we're talking 21 days to high-performance instructional leadership.
And conversation really is at the heart of that approach.
And what you'll find is not a part of that approach is forms.
This is really a process of interacting as professionals on a human level, not about filling out forms, not about rating, not about compliance, but really about growth through professional conversation.
Dr.
Danielson's work, Charlotte Danielson's work, also informed the design of our repertoire app, which I put together starting about 10 years ago.
And I really wanted that not to be a form-based app, but to be an app that would make your job easier as you document practice, as you look for evidence of practice that's aligned with those evaluation criteria, whether you use Danielson's system or someone else's, and as you ultimately have conversations with teachers that change their practice.
So if you would like to do a free trial of Repertoire, no credit card is required.
You can go to principalcenter.com slash repertoire and sign up.