The Change We Cannot See - Instructional Quality and Classroom Observation in the Era of Common Core - Educational Policy 2022, Vol. 36(6) 1261–1287

Oct 15, 2026

Adoption of “College and Career Ready” standards, including Common Core State Standards, seeks to raise academic expectations nationwide, requiring measurable shifts in teaching, observation, assessment, and support. This essay describes efforts in District of Columbia Public Schools to develop such measures and tests whether existing approaches capture standards-aligned instructional quality. Results show current single-measure tools limit what can be seen, omitting key instructional elements. The paper proposes multi-measure systems for a fuller, more standards-aligned view of instruction.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages27

Reading Time1 h 8 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Educational policy goals and the challenge of implementation

Standards imply teaching changes but not quality facets

Misalignment around the construct of instructional quality

What instructional quality includes

The paper’s theoretical contribution and proposed solutions

The Change We Cannot See: Instructional Quality and Classroom Observation in the Era of Common Core Educational Policy 2022, Vol. 36(6) 1261–1287 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/0895904820951114](DOI: 10.1177/0895904820951114) [journals.sagepub.com/home/epx](journals.sagepub.com/home/epx) Julie Cohen 1, Ethan Hutt2, Rebekah Berlin3, and Emily Wiseman 1 Abstract The adoption of“College and Career Ready” standards—including Common Core State Standards—aims to raise academic expectations for students nationwide. Meeting these outcomes requires shifts in teaching, which, in turn, requires developing measures for the observation, assessment, and support of new kinds of instruction. This essay focuses on our efforts to develop such measures in a research project conducted in the District of Columbia Public Schools, which raised fundamental questions about whether existing measures can meet this challenge. By emphasizing observable elements of individual lessons, current measures produce a restricted view of instructional quality, omitting crucial elements of instruction called forth by new standards. Having identified this disconnect, we offer suggestions for developing multi-measure systems to capture a fuller picture of standards aligned teaching. 1 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA 2University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA 3Deans for Impact, Austin, TX, USA Corresponding Author: Julie Cohen, University of Virginia, Bavaro Hall-Emmet Street South, Charlottesville, VA 22903-1738, USA. Email: [jjc7f@virginia.edu](jjc7f@virginia.edu) Keywords classroom instruction, educational reform, evaluation and assessment, teacher quality For decades, American politicians and policy makers have focused educational policy on setting more ambitious goals for students. Whether driven by dissatisfaction with “old” approaches or fear of falling behind international competitors, each decade has brought a new statement about what we want from our schools. Most recently, this impulse has given rise to the widespread adoption of “College and Career Ready” standards—including, but not limited to, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) . Though policy makers have found it easy to ask for more from our schools and our students, figuring out how to secure these more ambitious goals—to leave “no child behind,” or have “every student succeed” or be “college and career ready”—has been an endemic challenge for American educators and an enduring focus for educational researchers. A major source of this challenge is that policies invariably articulate discrete learning goals for students but not specific curricular or pedagogical choices for teachers. As in the case of the newly adopted “College and Career Ready” standards, the standardsimply a certain kind of teaching and a certain set of pedagogical choices but stop short of explicitly spelling out for teachers the particular facets of instructional quality that would facilitate students’ meeting those standards (Cohen & Hill, 2008; Hiebert & Stigler, 2017) . For example, the first CCSS standard for mathematical practice asserts that students should be able to“make sense of problems and persevere in solving them,” but does not articulate what kind of instruction would support students in sense making or persevering when solving mathematical problems. The facets of instructional quality and the tools that would support the high-quality teaching that would facilitate these outcomes are left to the imagination. Whatever the motivation for doing so, the decision to avoid direct discussion of instructional quality in the context of new standards creates the possibility for wildly divergent outcomes: productive variation in pursuit of these standards at one extreme and, at the other extr

FAQs

Why does adopting Common Core-style “College and Career Ready” standards require new observation and assessment measures?

Because achieving the expected outcomes depends on shifts in teaching, which in turn requires tools to observe and assess the instructional changes. The paper emphasizes the need to develop measures for observation, evaluation, and support of new kinds of instruction.

What limitation does the article identify in existing measures of instructional quality?

Current measures emphasize observable elements of individual lessons, producing a restricted view that omits crucial instructional elements called for by the new standards.

What solution does the article suggest for capturing standards-aligned teaching more fully?

The authors recommend developing multi-measure systems that can provide a fuller picture of standards-aligned instruction rather than relying on a single, limited measurement approach.

Oct 15, 2026

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