Moving Beyond "Heroes and Holidays" in Teacher Preparation: Teaching Performance Assessment That Drives Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• In Event: 79.037 - Walking Alongside Teacher Candidates: Embracing Collaboration During Clinical Practice and Teaching Performance Assessments

Abstract

In 2016, a state credentialing agency adopted a new set of Teaching Performance Expectations (TPEs) that presses teacher candidates to leverage PK-12 students’ “funds of knowledge,” and cultural and linguistic assets, as critical resources for organizing instruction and improving student learning. In order to address the new TPEs the state agency was tasked to redesign their Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA); a key aim of the reimagined assessment would be to drive teacher preparation programs to explicitly focus their curriculum and clinical experiences toward diversity, equity and inclusion.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the reconstructed state sponsored Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) is designed to disrupt traditional frameworks in teacher preparation that are anchored in deficit ideology; challenging teacher preparation to move beyond traditional “heroes and holidays” curriculum approaches to critical approaches that are grounded in critical pedagogy and explicitly address the nuances of social context, identity, and positionality on teacher development and student learning. Most teacher preparation programs address “diversity” through cursory multicultural approaches that might include a single course about diversity as part of the core curriculum, or through “culturally-connected” lesson planning activities that require candidates to plan for culturally driven units, or lessons, that are often simplified to diverse celebrations and songs (Nieto, 2000). In both of these instances, the focus is on surface culture, which tends to essentialize students who come from marginalized groups instead of addressing the inequities that these students face in the classroom as it pertains to access and inclusion (Tyler, 2016; Gorski, 2016). With that, more recent research relating to “diversity’ has called for a shift in teacher preparation that extends beyond multicultural approaches to more critical, equity-driven instructional practices (Darling-Hammond, 2015; Gorski, 2016).

Looking deeper into these trends, this paper reviews how the reconstructed TPA includes a number of elements that require candidates to gather sociocultural data about their students that allows them to be more inclusive, and equity-driven in their curriculum development and instructional practices. Preparing teachers to view, understand, and leverage student differences as resources and assets to their learning, shifts the pervasive deficit orientations that continue to be present in the thinking among many teachers today (Lambeth & Smith, 2016; Valencia, 2010). Moreover, the reconstructed TPA provides opportunities for programs to ground their curriculum in a framework that confronts equity and justice from a critical lens. In doing so, the reconstructed TPA will motivate programs to recruit teacher education faculty with expertise and experiences in these matters, thus diversifying department demographics. The inclusion of these elements emerged from the outcomes of design team perspectives, focus group data, and survey data that originated from pilot testing and an external bias review panel.

Authors

• Daniel Soodjinda, California State University Stanislaus

• Annamarie Mahealani Francois, University of California - Los Angeles