Balancing the Understandings Gained Through Qualitative Assessments and the Need for Student Achievement Data

• In Event: 46.038 - Designing Innovative Urban Residency Programs: Using Multiple Measures to Connect Theory and Practice

Abstract

After reading the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education’s Blue Ribbon Panel's report (2010) that focused on clinical practice, one couldn’t help but reflect on our chosen path of developing the Los Angeles Urban Teacher Residency (LAUTR) programs. These ruminations brought up a number of issues when integrating sustained and meaningful clinical practice into a teacher education program: How do you transform an existing program on the fly? How could we fund the clinical aspect of a residency program beyond a federal grant? What bureaucratic obstacles would we face in transforming teacher education? And most importantly how would our program be judged?

These questions, along with the re-prioritization of clinical practice in the federal administration, helped us build a foundation for the program. But just as the blue ribbon panel report helped us confirm our direction, residents from our program have become that same confirmation for the program leaders and stakeholders. Through various qualitative means, namely weekly blogs from residents, interviews by external evaluators, and informal interviews conducted by professors with a keen interest in driving policy and practice, the residents have given our program leaders critical feedback into how we can better train teachers for urban settings. Resident feedback combined with feedback from our district partners’ veteran teachers and reform minded principals make the constant thread of qualitative feedback very strong. This feedback has allowed our program to grow and helps us become more effective in measuring what is good teaching for urban students in our community. All of this qualitative data has helped our program develop and adapt within a university setting, but the most painful part of the evaluation process has been waiting for the quantitative based value-added scores of the small number of residents who fit the criteria to be included in the district evaluation into the impact of teachers on student achievement. This wait was painful because we knew how much this one result would influence whether or not people deemed our program effective. It is this individual measure that provides a short cut into judging effectiveness. Understandably, value added numbers can be important, though we recognize the need for a balanced approach to engaging with data.

Our pathway for evaluating effective teaching for urban students in our community was laid through the engagement of multiple stakeholders: Educational reformers, community-based organizations, parents and professors all came together to ask ourselves what is effective teaching and many of our thoughts had a qualitative foundation. Effective teachers care about equity, have a strong knowledge base, develop effective pedagogy, are collaborative and are professionally responsible. The evaluation of these practices often takes on a qualitative form. In this paper, we report on the ways we have used our qualitative data to inform our program, reflect on most appropriate data to collect, and how to integrate these learning experiences into formal course work. After this entire process we are left to wait. We wait for the number to tell us how we are really doing.

Author

• A.Dee Williams, California State University - Los Angeles