learning needs, and language demands is indisputably important. Yet the ques-
tionable assumption that student teachers are in positions to make planning,
instruction, and assessment decisions autonomously is baked into the edTPA,
which generally remains silent on the impacts of external conditions and the
practice of gatekeeping in deeply political school contexts.
Overall, candidates’degrees of unease with how their teaching was represented
in the edTPA seemed to correspond with their perceptions that the aim of the
assessment was to approximate the construct of teaching as fully as possible. By
contrast, those who did notfind the tensions of representation especially prob-
lematic tended to characterize the test as a device for sampling and demonstrating
particular proficiencies in a bounded way. Berliner ( 2005 ) suggests that“we often
confuse task-centered and construct-centered approaches to assessment,”and that
“when we evaluate quality in teaching, we are categorically not interested in a
single performance,”but in the confluence of pedagogical reasoning and practice
over time, in context. In other words, candidates whose positions on assessing
teaching quality were most aligned with Berliner’s also were among the most
apprehensive about the edTPA’s design and potential consequences—particularly
given its use as a high-stakes licensure exam, where entry into the profession is
contingent upon an unknown external evaluator’s interpretations of candidates’
representations. In the next section, we discuss one key implication of the edTPA’s
role in New York and Washington States: test-takers’decisions about what ele-
ments of teaching to demonstrate or conceal often reflected the ambiguity, exter-
nality, and high-stakes nature of the evaluation process.
40.3.2 Choosing What Elements of Teaching
to Demonstrate or Conceal
We begin this part of our discussion with comments by two candidates who were
concerned about test evaluators’interpretations of the assessment criteria, relative to
the different ways teachers might portray their practice:
A lot of people are conflicted about what they think raters want to see...You’re trying to
figure out, do they want to see me diffuse a situation, or do they want to see me teach a
perfect class? (elementary candidate)
When you imagine that the scorers are looking for this perfect classroom, you focus on
different things than you would if you thought the scorer was going to value reflection and
improvement...I think that’s one of the biggest faults in this whole process: you don’t
know what the scorer is looking for. When you’re a candidate and you’re completing this
process [for certification], that’s excruciating. (secondary music candidate)These interview excerpts demonstrate candidates’hazards of applying particular
selection criteria to their instructional artifacts and choosing what tone to strike
when writing about those artifacts.
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