Impressions: Challenging Proclamations of edTPA as Education's Panacea

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Systems Governing the Teacher and Child: Fabricating School Communities in the Era of Education Reform

Abstract

This experimental analysis begins by threading the intangible qualities of teaching via the abstract and connotatively varied word impressions through critical stances on the currently contested high-stakes teacher licensure assessment edTPA. Deceitfully simple when used, impression harbors so many nuanced connotations: etymologically, I trace contemporary, common usages back to the Middle French verb empresser, which—similar to applications of impression today—carried multiple meanings according to the OED Online: “to press, imprint, to torment, oppress, to constrain, harass, urge” (2015). When sitting in an edTPA training session (2015, January) and hearing utterances that our preservice teachers need a performance-based assessment so they can truly demonstrate what they are able to do in a classroom (italics indicate paraphrasing), the subtextual impressions declaratively assert that teachers are not being adequately prepared to successfully run their own classrooms. As Peck, Singer-Gabella, Sloan & Lin (2014) write, “programs of teacher education are essentially driving blind, operating without trustworthy measures of program outcomes to guide efforts at improvement of practice” (italics in original, p. 9). A further impression extends that teacher education programs need greater over-sight to ensure the creation of quality instructors (Interim Report, 2013; McKinsey & Company, 2007). This analysis problematizes efforts from profit-seeking organizations to standardize a complex profession and questions the unintended consequences of a national, systematically scored series of videotaped lessons of preservice teachers and students.

When associating the wide range of understandings offered by thinking through applications of one word—impression—as connected to what a teacher/teaching is and how assessments like edTPA strive to standardize what becoming-teacher is as well, I reason through Daniel Tröhler’s method of decontextualizing terminology used in curriculum history, then elaborate upon edTPA as an event of productive power that promulgates a predetermined, highly contextualized definition of a teacher. To place one group’s or program’s or organization’s definition of teaching upon all teachers and teacher education programs across the United States erases possibilities for other notions of the teacher that do not align with this standardized norm. The type of teacher that edTPA molds is consequently treated as the only conceptualization of what truly successful teaching is. All the aims of edTPA contribute toward training teachers to think, act and process information through a particular way of reasoning.

When further considering ongoing, contentious reforms mandated by those outside the classroom in the vein to “improve education,” criticism from within seems existentially onerous since one realizes the possibility of unintended consequences that might contribute toward further damage to not just teacher’s morale but also working conditions and most importantly students; therefore, criticizing teacher education and the field in general must be contentiously albeit cautiously conducted.

Author

• Corinne Ehrfurth, University of Wisconsin - Madison