Assessment, Education, & Equity
For this artifact/reflection pairing, I have chosen a paper I wrote as a reflection on the edTPA, a commonly used assessment for pre-service teachers in university-based programs. Also included is the "Problem Tree" some of my classmates and I created to illustrate the issue. The reflection appears first, followed by my original paper below.
Reflection
In October (of 2019) my classmates and I read about edTPA and created a “Problem Tree” as an illustration of the issue. The edTPA is a post-secondary version of a standardized test. As a high school English teacher, I used to hate when my students had to take standardized tests, because I knew that the results were not indicative of their actual abilities. The scripted nature of those tests do not lend themselves to demonstrations of other ways of knowing. They are not equitable.
The edTPA creates inequity in a less overt way, which allows it to claim that it promotes equity while still perpetuating White culture. My reflection essay explains the issue in more detail, but suffice it to say, it represents another neoliberal attempt to put lipstick on a pig and then charge people to pucker-up.
As a future educator I am going to have to wrestle with this kind of issue. At UNM, we don’t use edTPA, but we do have an online platform with which our students are forced to interact in order to track their assignments, time-logs, observations and other records or data for evaluation purposes. The students even have to pay for access to this platform, which the site proudly says they’ll have access to for eight years after graduation, so they can continue building their portfolio for career advancement. The argument is that a system is needed to keep up with all of the records required for licensure by the state. This is true. The system is supposed to make it convenient for everyone, but therein lie the problems. Students spend so much time trying to navigate the system that they get frustrated and stressed out, which is not what we want for our pre-service teachers. Our students are too busy navigating neoliberal trees to see the forest of pedagogical practices we are trying to impress upon them. The experience of becoming a teacher is hard enough as it is. When we add a cumbersome platform to decipher, it only compounds the difficulty for our students.
I am trying to transition from thinking like a teacher to thinking like a teacher educator. As I continue to grow into the role, I will continue to think about how we are assessing our pre-service teachers and how much we are allowing capitalistic neoliberalism dictate what we are asking our students to do. I will be looking at these systems with a critical eye for instances of institutional White supremacy and places where we can improve our cultural responsiveness.
I am beginning to see the bigger picture in teacher education. It would be easy to get lost in the weeds of edTPA, but the reality is that there are so many factors that go into the preparation of teachers that it seems unnecessary to get hung up on such a small slice of the pie. Placing teacher candidates with good mentor teachers, ensuring that our pre-service teachers understand culturally-responsive teaching, helping them grow their pedagogical content knowledge, and so much more go into the job of educating future teachers. I have often noted that the job of being a teacher is like an iceberg, until you’re fully acquainted with it, it’s enormity is impossible to gauge. It is the same in teacher education. Many of the actual responsibilities exist below the surface of casual observation. Now that I’m learning to navigate the slippery surface of this iceberg, the burden becomes choosing which rough patches at which I want to chisel away.
The edTPA creates inequity in a less overt way, which allows it to claim that it promotes equity while still perpetuating White culture. My reflection essay explains the issue in more detail, but suffice it to say, it represents another neoliberal attempt to put lipstick on a pig and then charge people to pucker-up.
As a future educator I am going to have to wrestle with this kind of issue. At UNM, we don’t use edTPA, but we do have an online platform with which our students are forced to interact in order to track their assignments, time-logs, observations and other records or data for evaluation purposes. The students even have to pay for access to this platform, which the site proudly says they’ll have access to for eight years after graduation, so they can continue building their portfolio for career advancement. The argument is that a system is needed to keep up with all of the records required for licensure by the state. This is true. The system is supposed to make it convenient for everyone, but therein lie the problems. Students spend so much time trying to navigate the system that they get frustrated and stressed out, which is not what we want for our pre-service teachers. Our students are too busy navigating neoliberal trees to see the forest of pedagogical practices we are trying to impress upon them. The experience of becoming a teacher is hard enough as it is. When we add a cumbersome platform to decipher, it only compounds the difficulty for our students.
I am trying to transition from thinking like a teacher to thinking like a teacher educator. As I continue to grow into the role, I will continue to think about how we are assessing our pre-service teachers and how much we are allowing capitalistic neoliberalism dictate what we are asking our students to do. I will be looking at these systems with a critical eye for instances of institutional White supremacy and places where we can improve our cultural responsiveness.
I am beginning to see the bigger picture in teacher education. It would be easy to get lost in the weeds of edTPA, but the reality is that there are so many factors that go into the preparation of teachers that it seems unnecessary to get hung up on such a small slice of the pie. Placing teacher candidates with good mentor teachers, ensuring that our pre-service teachers understand culturally-responsive teaching, helping them grow their pedagogical content knowledge, and so much more go into the job of educating future teachers. I have often noted that the job of being a teacher is like an iceberg, until you’re fully acquainted with it, it’s enormity is impossible to gauge. It is the same in teacher education. Many of the actual responsibilities exist below the surface of casual observation. Now that I’m learning to navigate the slippery surface of this iceberg, the burden becomes choosing which rough patches at which I want to chisel away.