Preservice teachers’ adaptations to tensions associated with the edTPA during its early implementation in New York and Washington states

The edTPA is a teaching performance assessment (TPA) that the states of New York and Washington implemented as a licensure requirement in 2013. While TPAs are not new modes of assessment, New York and Washington are the first states to use the edTPA specifically as a compulsory, high-stakes policy lever in an effort to strengthen the quality and accountability of teachers and teacher educators. This study examines 24 New York and Washington teaching candidates’ experiences with the edTPA during its first year of consequential use for state certification. The data, drawn from qualitative interviews that were part of a larger mixed-methods study, reveal that preservice teachers had to mediate several tensions associated with the edTPA’s dual role as a formative assessment tool and a licensure mechanism. In this paper, we identify those tensions, describe candidates’ efforts to mediate them, and discuss the extent to which that mediation process may or may not contribute to the improvement of teachers’ practices. Given the edTPA’s positioning in a policy context – specifically, the potential for the assessment’s locus of control, high stakes, and opaque rating process to distort the procedures it is intended to measure – the paper concludes with recommendations for teacher education programs aimed at capitalizing on the edTPA’s benefits and mitigating its unproductive tensions.

教育教学能力评估（edTPA）是一种教学表现评估（TPA），纽约州和华盛顿州在2013年将其作为教师资格认证的一项要求加以实施。虽然教学表现评估并非新的评估模式，但纽约州和华盛顿州是最先将教育教学能力评估专门作为一种强制性的、高利害关系的政策杠杆来使用的州，目的是提高教师和教师教育者的质量并加强其责任。本研究调查了24名纽约州和华盛顿州的教学候选人在教育教学能力评估用于州认证的第一年中的经历。这些数据来自作为一项更大规模的混合方法研究一部分的定性访谈，揭示了职前教师必须调和与教育教学能力评估作为形成性评估工具和教师资格认证机制的双重角色相关的几种矛盾。在本文中，我们确定了这些矛盾，描述了候选人调和这些矛盾的努力，并讨论了这种调和过程在多大程度上可能有助于或无助于教师教学实践的改进。鉴于教育教学能力评估在政策环境中的定位——特别是该评估的控制源、高利害关系以及不透明的评级过程可能扭曲其旨在衡量的程序——本文最后针对教师教育项目提出了建议，旨在利用教育教学能力评估的益处并缓解其无益的矛盾。