40.2.2 The Difficulty of Representing High-Quality Practice
in Assessments of Teaching
A central assumption underlying the edTPA’s use as a professional gatekeeping
mechanism is that an authentic assessment of practice can identify, ensure, and even
elevate high-quality teaching. But quality in teaching is not easily defined and
determined. Fenstermacher and Richardson ( 2005 ) explain that successful teaching
does not necessarily equate to good teaching, as it is possible to successfully teach
people to do things that are harmful, immoral, or pointless. For teaching to be of
high quality, it must be both successful, in the sense that teachers help students
develop consequential knowledge and skills, and good, in the sense that teachers
and learners demonstrate ethics of care, civility, and responsibility throughout the
process. They argue that these markers of quality are contingent upon several
conditions beyond teachers’practice itself—specifically, students’commitments to
the learning process, supportive social environments for professional growth, and
the availability of resources that promote powerful teaching and learning.
Berliner ( 2005 ) similarly suggests that high-quality teaching is made of moral
dimensions, like empathy, respect, and fairness toward others; psychological
dimensions, like motivating students and interpreting their interactions; and logical
dimensions, like defining and demonstrating subject-matter concepts and modeling
learning tasks. Because these dimensions are inextricable from each other and from
the environments in which they are enacted, Berliner indicates that measuring
teaching practice judiciously is less a matter of documenting task completion—even
if the tasks are highly authentic—and more a matter of assessing the construct of
“underlying competencies that enable performance” (p. 212). Zeichner ( 2012 )
raises three points of caution related to Berliner’s argument. Thefirst point is that
what constitutes a full representation of practice for experienced teachers differs
from what constitutes a reasonable representation for novices with no independent
classroom experience; in other words, the construct is provisional. The second point
is that schools vary considerably in the extent to which they regulate or script
instructional practice; and thus, teachers’capacities to choose particular pedagog-
ical approaches may be variously encouraged or undermined. The third point is that
a relatively narrow focus on techniques associated with planning, instruction, and
assessment might overshadow cultural and political-institutional competence,
which arguably impact the ways in which teachers respond to and act upon the
conditions of their practice.
Studies abound in support of SCALE’s indication that TPAs are credible
assessments of teacher quality. Darling-Hammond et al. ( 2013 ) note that preservice
teachers’performance on the PACT significantly predicts future effectiveness as
determined by student achievement scores in mathematics and English language
arts. From a different angle, Goldhaber and Anthony ( 2007 ) report that the National
Board for Professional Teaching Standards’(NBPTS) certification assessment—
another close relative of the edTPA—is useful for identifying effective teachers,
though they found no evidence that participating in the NBPTS certification process
600 K.W. Meuwissen and J.M. Choppin