certification. In 2014, we began to investigate preservice teachers’experiences with
the edTPA during itsfirst year of consequential use as a high-stakes test in these
two states.
Several studies suggest that TPAs’enactments of planning, instruction, and
assessment constitute ecologically and consequentially valid representations of
practice (Sato 2014 ; Wei and Pecheone 2010 ). While we concur with this sug-
gestion, we also found that the edTPA’s situation in New York and Washington as a
high-stakes accountability mechanism, evaluated by a private subcontractor outside
of the teacher education context, forced candidates to make difficult choices about
what to represent in their teaching and how to represent it, sometimes on ques-
tionable grounds. Our goals for this chapter are threefold. First, we describe the
edTPA and the difficulties associated with positioning the assessment as a sum-
mative measure of high-quality teaching. Second, we draw from our research to
illuminate specific challenges associated with candidates’efforts to represent of
their teaching through the edTPA. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work
for using TPAs as accountability and instructional improvement levers in and
beyond policy contexts like those in New York and Washington.
40.2 The edTPA as a Tool for Measuring Quality
Teaching
40.2.1 The edTPA and Its Proliferation Across the United
States
The edTPA, designed by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity
(SCALE), includes a series of artifacts and written commentaries aligned with the
core teaching practices of planning, instruction, and assessing student learning. We
describe its specific components in Table40.1.
Table 40.1 Components of the edTPA
Task Artifacts Narratives- Planning for
instruction and
assessment
Three tofive consecutive lesson plans with
relevant instructional materials and lessonsContext for learning
commentary; planning
commentary- Instructing and
engaging students in
learning
Two continuous, unedited instructional
video recordings of ten minutes or less per
recordingInstruction commentary- Assessing student
learning
Three assessed work samples from focus
students, at least one of whom has unique
learning needsAssessment commentary598 K.W. Meuwissen and J.M. Choppin