Russell Quiones

Dr. Thomasina White

Why does Danielson identify the "Framework for Teaching" as a road map for novice
teachers? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer.
In Danielsons Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, she
opens with an outline of the four domains that teachers must navigate in order to reach a
baseline of success within the profession. Rather than referring to her framework as a
hard and fast handbook for being an educator, she classifies the domains as
responsibilities [which] seek to define what teachers should know and be able to do in
the exercise of their profession. She concedes that teaching is an transformative practice,
evolving from day-to-day survival in your novice years, to a careful refining of practice
as a veteran. In this context, she provides her framework as a roadmap for novice
teachers: well-established definitions of expertise and procedures to certify novice and
advanced practitioners. Though these domains do not provide an exact picture of what a
successful teacher looks like, they provide a basis for what a novice teacher must know
and do in order to stay afloat, all before learning to refine their practice on an individual
level.
As she begins to outline in Chapter 1, teachers take on the role of multiple
professions, experiencing physical, cognitive, and emotional exhaustion on an hourly
basis. Recognizing the impossibility of crafting a framework that fits the diverse teaching
styles of all educators reading this roadmap, she qualifies her work as a beginning for
which novice teachers begin an important reflective process. The process kicks off with
these baseline tenets of success so that each individual has a starting point consistent
within the profession, so that they may evolve with time and experience. She speaks

again to the importance of this roadmap looking both inward and outward, establishing
that such procedures are the public's guarantee that the members of a profession hold
themselves and their colleagues to high standards of practice. Danielsons roadmap
identifies and defines the domains of knowledge that a teacher must develop, beginning
with knowledge of content, knowledge of students, and spiraling into more detailed
components that vary between schools, teachers, and students. The text serves as a
foundation for novice teachers, as we all attempt to find our footing on the beginning of
our journeys as educators.