Evolution of edTPA's Tensions for Teaching Candidates in New York and Washington States

• In Event: Implementing the edTPA—a National Performance-Based Assessment: Research on Concerns, Implications, and Impact

Abstract

Purposes and Framework
Recently, we explored how the edTPA’s positioning as a high-stakes certification test in New York and Washington generated tensions for preservice teachers during its first year of implementation (Authors, 2015). Tensions fell within three categories: (1) support tensions, or ambiguities about what modes of assistance are appropriate and allowable; (2) representation tensions, or uncertainties about how best to demonstrate complex, contextualized, continuous teaching practice; and (3) agency tensions, or difficulties in negotiating external factors that influenced candidates’ teaching practices. Ongoing inquiry allows us to compare candidates’ experiences across the first (2013-2014) and second (2014-2015) years of edTPA implementation in both states. Using Wei and Pecheone’s (2010) framework of teacher performance assessments’ different roles and Stillman’s (2011) typology for negotiating tensions of teacher learning in an accountability context, this paper examines how the tensions associated with edTPA completion and candidates’ interactions with those tensions evolved over two consecutive years.
Method and Data Sources
Across two phases of data collection (2014 and 2015), we employed a sequential mixed-method approach (Creswell, 2014), using surveys of 240 candidates at twelve teacher education institutions. From a voluntary subset of respondents, we interviewed about 50 candidates over both academic years, representing eight institutions in New York and three in Washington. The interviews focused on candidates’: (1) knowledge of edTPA’s purposes, contents, and contexts; (2) perceptions of edTPA’s positioning in their teacher education programs; (3) viewpoints about its fairness, credibility, and process of completion; and (4) experiences constructing their edTPA portfolios.
The research team analyzed stanzas of interview data through a qualitative process that involved paired coding by hand, with discrepancies resolved by consensus discussion, and the use of NVivo to manage coded data and create report sets for each code. From there, we generated explanations of specific tensions and candidates’ ways of mediating them, tracing explanations back to the interview data for verification and to double-check for credible alternatives (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Saldaña, 2013).
Results and Significance
Of the three aforementioned categories, we found the most substantial changes from 2013-2015 within support tensions and candidates’ mediation of them, with specific patterns as follows: (1) increasingly clear articulation of edTPA support guidelines for candidates, teacher educators, and cooperating teachers; (2) impacts of faculty’s and supervisors’ experiences addressing support tensions during the first implementation year; (3) effects of edTPA models and exemplars, provided by year one completers and used for instructional purposes; and (4) increases in cooperating teachers’ knowledge of and experiences with edTPA via mentorship of year one completers. By contrast, we found little evidence of change in representation and agency tensions, or in candidates’ ways of mediating them. These results suggest that the technical challenges associated with delimiting appropriate modes of support for edTPA-taking candidates within teacher education programs are more easily resolved than the normative challenges of defining and approximating effective teaching via edTPA and the political challenges of negotiating candidates’ pedagogical autonomy in service of edTPA completion.

Authors

• Kevin W. Meuwissen, University of Rochester

• Jeffrey M. Choppin, University of Rochester

• Hairong Shang-Butler, University of Rochester

• Kathryn Cloonan, University of Rochester