New Document Will Benefit Teachers and Students By Aligning Widely Used Danielson Framework With NSQ Standards

A new document has been released that aligns two major standards frameworks for K-12 education. Evaluating Online Teachers Within Traditional Systems: A Crosswalk of the NSQ Teaching Standards and the Danielson Framework will serve to coordinate the popular Danielson Framework for Teaching (FFT) standards and the National Standards for Quality Online Teaching (NSQOT). The document is the result of a joint effort by the Danielson Group and the organizations behind the National Standards for Online Learning (NSQOL). The purpose of this initiative is to better support students, teachers and instructional leaders in all learning modalities — whether in-person, face-to-face, or a hybrid of these.

Last revised in 2019, oversight of the NSQOT is a collaborative effort between Quality Matters, Virtual Learning Leadership Alliance, and the Digital Learning Collaborative. Designed to improve the quality of digital learning, the standards have been adopted by schools and systems across the United States and become the national benchmark for quality online instruction in K-12 education.

The Danielson Framework is one of the most popular and widely implemented instructional resources in the world. Its focus on traditional, in-person teaching has impacted classroom instruction for nearly thirty years, and the Danielson Group has worked with 1,500 organizations in 49 states and U.S. territories and 15 other countries in promoting the standards.

By using the “crosswalk,” schools, systems and educators will enjoy increased clarity regarding compliance with standards, and students will benefit from improved pedagogical quality and consistency. Teachers and instructional designers can now use these common frameworks in tandem with each other, moving between modalities in ways that serve learners in ways not previously accounted for by a single set of standards. As the footprint of online learning continues to grow, this flexibility has become increasingly important in K-12 education. “The peer-reviewed alignment of these two widely accepted but differently focused sets of standards provides the educational community with a powerful tool to improve teaching in all learning environments,” said Brian Johnson, Director of Learning Design and Development for The Danielson Group.

The new document will be presented at the Digital Learning Annual Conference, a yearly gathering of K-12 online learning practitioners and providers taking place February 13-15, 2023 in Austin, TX, at a panel presentation titled Look Both Ways: Crosswalking the Danielson Framework with the NSQ Teaching Standards.

“We are excited to share our work with the educational community at DLAC,” said Christine Voelker, K-12 Program Director for Quality Matters and co-creator of the crosswalk. “The panel will review the process used to create it, present ways in which it is currently being used, and provide ideas for utilizing the document in practice so that educators can begin implementing the crosswalk in their work immediately in service of their learners.”

Educators interested in the document can download it for free on the NSQOL website’s resources page.

About Quality Matters

Grounded in research. Driven by best practices. A community that puts learners first. Quality Matters (QM) is the global organization leading quality assurance in online and innovative digital teaching and learning environments. It provides a scalable quality assurance system for online and blended learning used within and across organizations. When you see QM Certification Marks on courses or programs, it means they have met QM Course Design Standards or QM Program Review Criteria in a rigorous review process.