Diana Senechal Has Fun with the Danielson Rubric

32 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

1. Zee says:

   June 29, 2013 at 10:32 am

   Well, I certainly enjoyed reading Diana’s satire.

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. first grade teacher says:

   June 29, 2013 at 11:19 am

   I am a huge fan of satire and have had my share of belly-laughs by reading other Diane Senechal satirical pieces. But in the midst of laughter this one line chilled me – “Low-inferencing is about reporting what you see, no more, no less, and refraining from any and all interpretation.”

   While my district does not use the Danielson Rubric, I have several Low Inference type evaluations posted to the wall of my classroom office – useless pieces of paper with mundane scrawls of gibberish about what my administrator observed during a walk-through, which I suspect was mandated because of our status as a school in 2nd year program improvement.
   I followed the link Diane Senechal provided and read more about the Danielson Framework. My heart goes out to all teachers being evaluated using this rubric. It is wrong, wrong, wrong, and I for one will continue reading these blogs, responding, nagging my colleagues to get active, and speaking up anywhere I can.

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. Robert D. Shepherd says:

   June 29, 2013 at 11:21 am

   OK, here’s a thought experiment for you. I want you to imagine applying the Danielson rubric to

   the Buddha’s first lesson at the Deer Park in Isipatana (the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta) or to
   Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount

   You would have to conclude that both were unsatisfactory teachers.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Robert Rendo says:

     June 29, 2013 at 11:38 am

     The reformers could only measure Jesus by the number of loaves baked and fish caught in a single year and see if that number increased the following year. Jesus’s VAM would be waived if he pulled any miracles, which would result in an arrest on charges of cheating . . . . .

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Robert D. Shepherd says:

       June 29, 2013 at 11:51 am

       Hilarious, Robert!

       LikeLike

     • Robert Rendo says:

       June 29, 2013 at 11:55 am

       Thank you.

       LikeLike

   • Robert D. Shepherd says:

     June 29, 2013 at 11:50 am

     No preparation of the learning environment. No prepared materials/resources. Minimal interaction with the pupils. Not following the prescribed curriculum. No assessment of pre-existing learning standards.

     Clearly, what these guys should have been placed on probation until they started meeting minimal standards for the profession. How could they presume to call themselves teachers?!!!

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Robert Rendo says:

       June 29, 2013 at 11:54 am

       They’re not. That’s the problem.

       LikeLike

   • Robert D. Shepherd says:

     June 29, 2013 at 11:54 am

     The Danielson rubric is a superb list of goals for teachers to keep in mind. A thoughtful teacher can get quite a lot from it. But the use to which this rubric is being put is clearly crazy.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Robert Rendo says:

       June 29, 2013 at 11:59 am

       I agree with you completely.

       Speaking of baking loaves, Charlotte is making far too much dough to speak out against the misuse of her rubrics.

       It will only be a matter of time where she will either come up with some rationalization on maybe why her rubrics could be used for their current purposes by reformers OR, just the opposite, in which she will lambaste the use of her rubrics, but she’ll do it sitting high atop her mountain tops of cash.

       Right now, it’s “Hush, hush sweet Charlotte” . . . .

       LikeLike

     • Robert D. Shepherd says:

       June 29, 2013 at 12:05 pm

       There are many of these people, Robert, who have completely compromised their principles in order to suckled at the reform teat. I am thinking of one very widely known and influential education theorist and entrepreneur who spent years railing against the evils of summative assessment and talking up embedded, formative assessment as an alternative. When this guy saw where the money was coming from, he turned on a dime and started cashing in, big time, on the standards-and-testing regime. I won’t name names because the very mention of this fellow’s name makes me physically sick.

       LikeLike

     • Robert Rendo says:

       June 29, 2013 at 12:18 pm

       I’ll take famous hypocrites for $500, please.

       Who is David Coleman?

       LikeLike

     • Robert D. Shepherd says:

       June 29, 2013 at 12:40 pm

       ROFLMAO!

       LikeLike

     • Duane Swacker says:

       June 29, 2013 at 4:13 pm

       I’ll take famous hypocrites also for $200: Who is Marzano?

       LikeLike

   • Robert D. Shepherd says:

     June 29, 2013 at 12:00 pm

     I’ve always said, “I am a teacher. Mine is the profession of the Buddha, of Yeshua of Nazareth, of Socrates.” A humbling thought, that.

     It would be amusing to imagine an evaluation conference in which the Danielson rubric is applied to Socrates in, say, the Phaedo or the Phaedrus.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Duane Swacker says:

       June 29, 2013 at 4:13 pm

       What, them dead greek men have no place in modern society!!!

       LikeLike

     • Diana Senechal says:

       June 29, 2013 at 8:11 pm

       Not Danielson, but close:

       http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-socrates-would-fare-on-new-teacher-evaluation-plan/2011/06/13/AGGdhfTH_blog.html#pagebreak

       LikeLike

     • Robert D. Shepherd says:

       June 30, 2013 at 10:30 am

       OMG, wonderful, Diana! : )

       LikeLike

4. Robert Rendo says:

   June 29, 2013 at 11:34 am

   Hysterical and horrific at the same time.

   First, luxury housing in NY City like never before. Now, luxury pampering of principals when they participate in “change”.

   Yet, Danielson and satire always have great potential. I did a piece on her a while ago:

   

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Robert D. Shepherd says:

     June 29, 2013 at 1:25 pm

     Robert, I tired to go to that link but got a “suspicious site” warning from my antivirus software. Any notion what is going on there? I would love to read your piece. Warm regards to you!

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Robert Rendo says:

       June 29, 2013 at 1:47 pm

       Robert, I don’t know?!?!

       A foolproof way of doing this is to go to the site at

       http://thetruthoneducationreform.blogspot.com/?view=snapshot

       and click on the next to last image called “Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte”. But once the image appears, you should click on it again to enlarge, and it will do so as a j-peg on another screen. If you don’t, the original is likely to be too small to read.

       I respect your scholarship, your being well read, and your writing . . . .You are a among the shepherds who can guide many sheep to better pastures with good information.

       LikeLike

   • Celia Wilde says:

     June 29, 2013 at 6:01 pm

     Great cartoon. Chicago just did its first round of evaluations using the framework. What a great waste of time snd manpower.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Robert Rendo says:

       June 29, 2013 at 6:15 pm

       Thank you, Celia.

       I agree. Principals don’t need to evaulate every teacher in the building, but should spend their time empowering the weakest teachers.

       LikeLike

5. Suzanne Pyrch says:

   June 29, 2013 at 12:27 pm

   Shades of The Prisoner. Wonderful.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Robert Rendo says:

     June 29, 2013 at 12:59 pm

     Thank you, Susan. Time to retitle . . .

     LikeLike

     Reply
6. Madame La Farge says:

   June 29, 2013 at 12:28 pm

   I know Senechal was trying for humor, but as a senior teacher who has toiled in the straight jacket Bloomberg/Walcott New York City classroom, I could not read the entire piece. It was too disturbing to continue. I, for one, have “turn and talk”, conferring, binders, and inappropriate assessments coming out of my ears.

   The life has been zapped out of the classroom by this new assembly line, robotic, scripted mini lesson format.

   Or try giving the NYC math baseline assessment to four and five year old non English speaking students in October. I administered the assessement 5 students at a time, with no help, in the room with this small group and the rest of the class, 25 students in all.

   The children being assessed watched me as I modeled and explained that they were to fill in the little circle below the correct answer. I went on to read the questions, blah, blah, blah…..let’s remember that these children have no language with which to comprehend the information I was reading to them.

   We have entered a new realm of insanity…..Senechal is right on target. It is just too close to home to read.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Robert D. Shepherd says:

     June 29, 2013 at 1:22 pm

     Well said, Madame! It’s time the deformers, who lack any real experience in the classroom, got a lot more of this sort of reality check!

     LikeLike

     Reply
   • Duane Swacker says:

     June 29, 2013 at 4:17 pm

     Well, Madame,

     You stated “We have entered a new realm of insanity…”

     I hope that you have already inoculated yourself against these times by having done what comedian Lewis Black did: “I took acid when I was younger just to prepare myself for times like these”.

     LikeLike

     Reply
7. Ellen Lubic says:

   June 29, 2013 at 3:18 pm

   Praise be to Oden that there are still great teachers such as those who posted all the sanity above. Robert and Robert…always find solace in your posts. Thanks.

   LikeLike

   Reply
8. Robert Rendo says:

   June 29, 2013 at 5:44 pm

   Thank you, Ellen.

   LikeLike

   Reply
9. pidge says:

   June 29, 2013 at 6:35 pm

   Gramnivorous quadruped…Dickens is still right on. Not that high school students read Dickens anymore.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Duane Swacker says:

     June 30, 2013 at 9:53 am

     “Gramnivorous quadruped. . . “, is that anything like gramnivorous sawflies?

     LikeLike

     Reply