Chapter 40
Representing Teaching Within
High-Stakes Teacher Performance
Assessments
Kevin W. Meuwissen and Jeffrey M. Choppin
40.1 Introduction
Teacher education in the United States is contextualized by efforts among various
actors—for instance, state policy makers, teacher educators, and researchers—to
wrest control over the terms, conditions, and consequences of accountability in the
field. A key mechanism in this campaign is teacher performance assessments
(TPAs), which have evolved with the accountability movement to serve the roles of
gatekeeping teachers’entry into the profession and evaluating the outcomes of
teacher education. Tensions over TPAs as policy leversfirst emerged in California
in the early 2000s, when—in response to a law mandating that teaching candidates
pass a state-approved performance assessment for licensure—universities within the
PACT consortium developed an alternative to the existing test that aimed to
emphasize subject-specific student learning, position the TPA as a formative
assessment tool, and preserveflexibility in teacher education programming.
Currently, deliberation on TPAs’dual roles as accountability levers in the policy
context and formative tools in teacher education intensifies with their nationaliza-
tion via the edTPA, an assessment which evolved from the PACT and increasingly
is embraced as a state-level licensure mechanism (Meuwissen and Choppin 2015 ).
It consists of three core competencies—planning, instruction, and assessment—that
teachers must demonstrate via lesson plans, instructional videos, assessed samples
of student work, and narratives that contextualize and interpret those artifacts. In
2013, the states of New York and Washington became thefirst to require that all
teaching candidates complete and pass the edTPA as a mandate for initial state
K.W. Meuwissen (&)J.M. Choppin
University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
J.M. Choppin
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_40
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