The practice of licensure, the licensure of practice

Abstract

Licensure tests play a critical role in any profession. Well-designed tests both delineate the core competencies that are required to enter a profession and provide evidence that candidates can safely practice in the profession. They also identify the professional knowledge and skill that differentiates any educated individual from the well-prepared professional. Geoffrey Phelps and Gary Sykes use a series of assessment tasks to illustrate how teacher licensure testing can be designed to focus more directly on assessing aspiring educators’ performance of the professional competencies that make up the day-to-day and moment-to-moment work of teaching.

Using Performance Tasks to Provide Feedback and Assess Progress in Teacher Preparation

“…The focus of this study was on gathering input from teacher educators on the potential for using short performance tasks as part of their teacher preparation methods coursework. However, the potential uses for these performance tasks go substantially beyond providing opportunities to learn core practices as part of teacher preparation and also include uses such as diagnosing professional learning needs; delivering end‐of‐course evaluations; providing initial licensure; and studying, evaluating, and promoting teaching quality (Phelps, Bridgeman et al, 2020; Phelps & Sykes, 2020). Considering a more comprehensive set of uses could provide additional context for understanding the value of these tasks as tools to support professional learning.…”

“…However, while CKT assessments identify knowledge used in tasks such as evaluating student work or selecting material to meet particular learning goals, the new performance tasks focus on teaching skills such as explaining content procedures or modeling concepts (Phelps, Bridgeman, et al, 2020). Extending the CKT frameworks provides a useful basis for integrating practice‐based knowledge and skill (Phelps & Bridgeman, 2022; Phelps & Sykes, 2020).…”

“…This type of validity evidence provides strong support for focusing on particular core practices as part of practice-based professional preparation and as outcome measures to diagnose teacher learning and evaluate teacher education and professional development programs. It is also important to recognize that many, and perhaps most, current approaches to teacher preparation are missing several components specified in this logic model, in large part due to a lack of suitable assessments of teachers' performance (Phelps & Bridgeman, 2022;Phelps & Sykes, 2020). In many instances, teachers receive few opportunities to try out core practices as part of professional learning.…”

Testing, best practices, and the teacher intellectual

“…But in a bait-and-switch ploy, Rodney Paige, then secretary of education, defined highly qualified as merely passing some sort of test of academic competence and demonstrated verbal ability. (See Borden-King et al, 2020; Phelps & Sykes, 2020, for discussion of the problems with standardized testing for teachers as currently practiced.) At the same time, the federal government actively supported alternative forms of teacher certification of varying quality and promoted school choice in the misguided belief that market forces and competition among providers would force reform and raise quality.…”

Preliminary Evidence on Measurement Characteristics for the Foundational Assessment of Competencies for Teaching Performance Tasks

“…This new design for licensure has a number of advantages over extant assessments that have historically characterized licensure testing. Because traditional licensure tests have focused on the content that students are learning, they provide little to no evidence of the professional knowledge and skill used in teaching a subject (Phelps & Sykes, 2020). FACT is designed to address these limitations with an assessment that provides more comprehensive evidence of the foundational content knowledge and teaching skills required for safe and effective beginning teaching.…”