¿Passing PACT, y qué? What PACT Captures (and Doesn’t) When It Comes to Quality Teaching

• In Event: Putting PACT (Performance Assessment for California Teachers) in Context and Context in PACT: Teacher Educators Address the Content and Assessment of Quality Teaching in Preservice Preparation

Abstract

A “teaching event”—PACT’s core requirement—chronicles three consecutive lessons taught by the PST within his/her student teaching placement. Teaching events typically include more than 50 pages of text wherein PSTs respond to a series of prompts meant to elicit their description and analysis of the three lessons. The teaching event additionally includes numerous artifacts generated in relation to the lessons (e.g., copies of student work, handouts and instructional materials, lecture notes, etc.), as well as short video clips of the lessons themselves. In most cases, the teaching event text offers important insights regarding PSTs’ beliefs and attitudes about teaching, learning and their students, windows into PSTs’ emerging teaching practice, as well as a sense of the dilemmas PSTs encounter in everyday classroom life.

As a group, we were interested in learning about the degree to which and how our PSTs demonstrated within the PACT teaching event an understanding of what it means to contextualize practice and/or the actual capacity to contextualize their teaching. Specifically, we identified the top scoring 5-10% of teaching events from three semesters of completed PACTs across our respective institutions (where candidates complete the program each semester), and from each content area. We also identified teaching events of select candidates who may not have scored in the top 5-10% but whose practice we anticipated (based on coursework, student teaching supervision, etc.) would exhibit high levels of contextualized practice. With this set of teaching events, we utilized the collectively-designed contextualized practice matrix (presented in Paper 2) to assess PSTs’ (a) in-depth knowledge of students; (b) capacity to identify students’ assets and interests; (c) responsiveness in planning and instruction to students’ assets and interests; and (d) use of assessment information to appropriately identify instructional next steps that are academically rigorous and responsive to students’ assets and interests.

Using this analysis, we address the following questions:

(a) What are the different ways that PSTs contextualize their practice, as evidenced by their descriptions and analyses in the teaching event?
(b) To what extent do their efforts to contextualize practice vary based on the content they are teaching and their grade level assignments?
(c) To what extent do official teaching event scores correspond to teaching event classifications on the contextualized practice matrix?

With our findings, we are able to provide a rich set of cases that reveal how PSTs grapple with responding to their students’ needs, interests and assets, thereby adding to research on PSTs’ and new teachers’ efforts to implement a culturally responsive pedagogy (Nieto, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 2001; Michie, 1999; Schultz, 2008). We also contribute to the growing body of evidence about content pedagogical knowledge (Shulman, 1987) and about PSTs’ emerging content pedagogical knowledge (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008; Grossman, Schoenfeld, & Lee, 2005). Finally, we contrast the PSTs’ categorization on the contextualized practice matrix with the PSTs’ scores on PACT teaching event rubrics and offer preliminary conjectures about the factors that contribute to discrepancies, where they exist.

Authors

• Pia I. Wong, California State University - Sacramento

• Margarita I. Berta-Avila, California State University - Sacramento

• Adele R. Arellano, California State University - Sacramento

• Cristina Alfaro, San Diego State University