Ann Schulte: Teacher Performance Assessment Isn't the Answer
Guest post by Ann Schulte.
The edTPA is spreading across the country like wild fire, and I'm feeling burned out. My experience with standardized performance assessment over the past 10 years has given me multiple opportunities both to learn from it as well as critique it, and to that end, I've engaged in a variety of discussions about it initially with other California educators, and more recently with teacher educators across the U.S.
Amid the many reforms related to teacher assessment, the edTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment) is gaining rapid and widespread attention. In this post, I'll use edTPA, TPA, and PACT (Performance Assessment for California Teachers) interchangeably, though technically these are somewhat different versions of the same sort of thing. The edTPA, derived from PACT, involves several components, but I'll focus mostly on the standardized portion of the assessment that involves teacher candidates responding to planning and teaching prompts (written responses can range from 40-80 pages) and a videotape of approximately 20 minutes of a
The edTPA is spreading across the country like wild fire, and I'm feeling burned out. My experience with standardized performance assessment over the past 10 years has given me multiple opportunities both to learn from it as well as critique it, and to that end, I've engaged in a variety of discussions about it initially with other California educators, and more recently with teacher educators across the U.S.
Amid the many reforms related to teacher assessment, the edTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment) is gaining rapid and widespread attention. In this post, I'll use edTPA, TPA, and PACT (Performance Assessment for California Teachers) interchangeably, though technically these are somewhat different versions of the same sort of thing. The edTPA, derived from PACT, involves several components, but I'll focus mostly on the standardized portion of the assessment that involves teacher candidates responding to planning and teaching prompts (written responses can range from 40-80 pages) and a videotape of approximately 20 minutes of a