Bringing Context Into the Performance Assessment for California Teachers: Adapting Mandated Performance Assessment in Alignment With Teacher Education Program Goals

• 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

Findings from previous papers indicate that PACT has the capacity to provide teacher educators with insights about what our PSTs learn in and from our respective TEPs. They also suggest, however, that certain important aspects of PST development remain obscured or overlooked in PACT and/or our implementation of it. Drawing on these aforementioned findings and their connections to the broader literature on performance assessment and equity-minded teacher preparation, this paper presents recommendations for a more contextually sensitive approach to PACT implementation. Specifically, recommendations emphasize the critical role of teacher educators in adaptively implementing PACT with the goal of maximizing PST learning and generating actionable insights for program improvement.

This paper applies socio-cultural learning theory—specifically, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)—as a lens for considering how teacher educators might utilize PACT to support PSTs’ learning in relation to intended TEP goals. From this theoretical perspective, learning is necessarily situated within consequential social, cultural, and historical contexts—contexts wherein relations between subjects (i.e., learners) and community are mediated by artifacts and rules, and wherein participants negotiate the distribution of tasks, powers and responsibilities (Cole & Engeström, 1997; Roth & Lee, 2007). Figure 1 depicts the common triangular heuristic for this collective and contradiction-rife view of learning and human activity, also referred to as an “activity system.” As a “conceptual map,” this heuristic helps make visible the various actors and artifacts that mediate PSTs’ contextualized learning processes and outcomes.

Figure 1: Activity System



Drawing on CHAT, we argue that the introduction of mandated performance assessment into the landscape of teacher education represents the introduction of a new and consequential artifact (i.e., PACT) with the potential to powerfully mediate learning within the activity system of any individual TEP. However, we recognize that PACT’s mediating role can play out in various ways and with various consequences for learning. For example, as research has shown, introducing high-stakes assessments into education settings has often led to a narrowing of the curriculum and a tendency toward ‘teaching to the test’ (e.g., Valli & Chambliss, 2007). We face this risk in teacher education, too. Indeed, the value of any assessment tool lies in its thoughtful and contextualized implementation. Thus, teacher educators’ adaptive practice holds potential to help ensure that PACT functions in the service of TEP learning goals, rather than as a goal unto itself.

To that end, this paper draws from across prior papers to articulate the potential risks of PACT if left to mediate learning in ‘unchecked’ ways. It also theorizes an approach to adaptive, contextually-specific PACT implementation; specifically, it underscores the importance of teacher educators re-mediating PACT such that its implementation encourages and adequately captures PSTs’ developing understandings about how to facilitate rigorous learning among their students. In closing, we offer as one example an approach that we developed collectively and are piloting with the goal of pressing PSTs to demonstrate more comprehensively in PACT what they have learned from our TEPs about teaching diverse students in high-needs schools.

Authors

• Jamy Stillman, University of Southern California

• Adele R. Arellano, California State University - Sacramento

• Kathryn Struthers, University of Southern California