How to Thrive in the Changing Landscape of Teacher Education

Abstract

This chapter explores a number of issues for consideration when adopting and implementing edTPA as a summative performance-based assessment of preservice teacher candidate tasks. This chapter aims to offer guidance and support for programs in the beginning stages of implementation of edTPA. Each of the considerations includes a vignette from personal experiences at a regional comprehensive university in the southeast. Issues discussed include timeline for implementation, buy-in, decision-making processes, professional development and training, mapping, and next steps. The vignettes detail particular issues or concerns and include faculty, staff, and/or teacher candidates. Data used to develop the vignettes was collected via interviews, surveys, and reflections.

Developing and using a scalable assessment to measure preservice elementary teachers' content knowledge for teaching about matter

“…Ideally, there would be no performance differences by gender identity or race/ethnicity. However, there has been previous evidence of differential performance by gender with males outperforming females, and by race/ethnicity, with White preservice teachers outperforming non‐White preservice teachers on teacher licensure assessments (e.g., Gitomer, 2007; Gitomer et al, 2011; Nettles et al, 2011; Steinberg et al, 2016). Our hope is that these historical differences by gender and races/ethnicities differences would not be evident in our CKT matter assessment for PSETs, although they may persist.…”

From Interest to Entry: The Teacher Pipeline From College Application to Initial Employment

“…Despite clear evidence of their importance, the K-12 public education system struggles to attract ''high-achieving'' (typically measured through SAT/ACT scores or grade point average [GPA]) 1 and ethnoracially diverse teachers (Partelow et al, 2017). For instance, college students pursuing teacher certification tend to have lower standardized test scores than those pursuing other careers, though there is some evidence of recent improvement (e.g., Gitomer, 2007;Lankford et al, 2014;Master et al, 2018). Perhaps more concerning is the stubborn persistence of racial/ ethnic representation gaps between the teacher workforce and the K-12 student population (Brown & Boser, 2017;Ingersoll et al, 2021).…”