Content area
Abstract
The Pennsylvania Department of Education (2003) adopted Charlotte Danielson's framework for teaching recommendations and created a new evaluation form for public school teachers. The form considers Danielson's four domain areas of effective teaching: planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.
The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' attitudes towards Danielson's domain areas. The study compared elementary, middle, and high school teachers, in a Pennsylvania public school system. It also sought to identify differences in attitudes among school level, grade assignment, subject area taught, gender, years of experience, or familiarity with Danielson's frameworks of teaching. The significance of this study was to determine which domain areas teachers agreed or disagreed with as indicators of effective teaching. The findings can be beneficial for this school district to implement this new evaluation instrument successfully.
The survey instrument that was used was written and developed by Dr. Bernard Brogan, the dissertation chairperson, and Tina Sweeley, doctoral candidate. The survey used a Likert scale that included the choices: strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, and do not understand. The survey questions were developed and adapted from Danielson's four domain areas of effective teaching. It included 66 questions and asked eight background questions concerning years of teaching experience, years in current position, teaching assignment, grade level taught, gender, subject(s) taught, level of education, and familiarity with Danielson's model.
In all, 230 teachers participate in this study. The participants were given the survey and the directions were read aloud in order to maintain consistency and control for bias or researcher influence. The data were analyzed using SPSS for Windows statistical software. Descriptive statistics and one-way Analysis of Variances (ANOVA) were conducted in order to analyze the data and investigate the levels of significance. The outcome variable, teachers' attitudes, was examined with regard to the overall reported opinions of each domain area, as well as school level, grade assignment, subject area taught, gender, years of experience, and familiarity with Danielson's framework for teaching. The results indicated overall agreement in the domains and some influences on respondents' opinions with regard to the other factors.
