be...but I didn’t really feel like I’d gotten there in those lessons.”(English as a second
language (ESL) candidate)These approaches—perhaps with the exception of the confessional approach—are
consequences of the high-stakes nature of the edTPA, and are consistent with the
reactions of those subjected to high-stake assessments, in general. In this case,
preservice teachers interpreted the assessment in terms of its functional or technical
requirements, rather than as an instrument for documenting more comprehensively
what it means to be a good and competent teacher. The primary goal of test-takers
via the approaches described above is to anticipate the kinds of competencies
envisioned by edTPA creators and those who evaluate the portfolios. The result is
that candidates’edTPA portfolios end up being less an authentic indication of their
practices than an indication of how they interpret and respond to required perfor-
mance criteria. This narrows the range of practices reported by the candidates and
evades the messier and more challenging aspects of teaching, especially ambitious
teaching that aims for exceptional outcomes. In short, candidates’representations of
teaching in the edTPA, and their approaches to constructing those representations,
tended to reduce teaching quality to technical performance outcomes rather than the
kinds of rich, complex dimensions of practice discussed by scholars like
Fenstermacher and Richardson ( 2005 ), Berliner ( 2005 ), and Zeichner ( 2012 ). Only
the confessional approach seemed to acknowledge this complexity; and those who
took that approach often adopted a defensive stance in doing so, as evinced below:
[The raters] don’t know me, they didn’t see me [student teach] for the whole eight weeks.
They just have this [edTPA portfolio], and that’s it. That’s scary to me. Not to say that I
don’t have confidence in myself...but in terms of my teaching experience, I’ll just tell you,
yeah, I have a lot to learn; I’m brand new; who doesn’t? I hope they’re looking at [the
portfolio] with the same sense, like,‘They’re not going to be perfect; they’re not going to
be probably the best teacher I’ve ever seen. But I can see where they’re going and where
they’re coming from.’Hopefully the commentary on the videos, the planning–everything- hopefully it shows how much thought went into my teaching.
40.4 Implications for TPAS in the Current Accountability
Climate
More than 30 years ago, in perhaps the most comprehensive study of American
schooling ever conducted, John Goodlad ( 1984 ) denounced the tendency for states
to focus more on the accountability of individual teachers and administrators via
carrot-and-stick policies than on collective educational commitments and dynamic
professional growth. When policy messages and initiatives are more about failures
than opportunities, he argued, policy makers often are left wondering why their
supposedly sensible solutions to the problems at hand were met with such insipid
and dissatisfactory outcomes. Even before Goodlad’s study, political scientist
Campbell ( 1976 ) warned against overusing measurements of social activity for the
40 Representing Teaching Within High-Stakes Teacher... 605