Assessing Preservice Teacher Equity-Based Dispositions: Connecting With Evidence by Practitioners, Researchers, Evaluators, and College Administrators

• In Event: Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers for Equity-Oriented Classrooms: How Do We Evaluate Their Effectiveness and Our Own?

Abstract

Problem
A lack of consensus persists about how to define, operationalize, measure, analyze, and use data about desirable “dispositions” in teacher education. Challenges include being too disconnected epistemologically and methodologically to permit systemic dispositional development of candidates. Little research exists about the pedagogical repertoire of teacher educators in naming, inquiring about, disrupting and developing dispositions for equity and social justice (Neumann 2013). This challenges integrative meta-analyses about the development of dispositions in teacher preparation programs or evidence for sustainability across pK-12 teacher preparation.

Objective and Perspectives
Researchers, evaluators and practitioners from four US teacher preparation programs began collaborating in 2016 to identify common research questions and share perspectives highlighting humanization, narrative inquiry, embodiment and affect, and dis/ability critical race frameworks to systematically develop and assess equity-based dispositions in teacher preparation programs. Findings shared at AERA’s 2018 and 2019 conferences supported how to help teacher candidates critically engage with the knowledge of dispositions, teacher identity work, and the embodied, relational, and affective complexities of teaching in an increasingly changing sociopolitical climate. The objective of this proposal is to further leverage these learnings for institutionalization and scaling.

Contexts and Methods
Situated in a five-year USDE-funded Teacher Quality Partnership preparing teacher residents in high needs districts in the Los Angeles basin, the authors are conducting an equal-status mixed methods study of a reflective practice and dispositions assessment system known as RT360. RT360 is grounded in: narrative inquiry, dialectical pluralism, communities of practice, and California's Teaching Performance Expectation #6: Developing as Professional Educator. 75% of our cohorts are people of color. The residency is managed by a College of Education currently accredited by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and formerly by NCATE.
The assessment system has become increasingly asset-oriented, triangulated with formative embedded assessments in university coursework and fieldwork as well as mediated by reflection protocols to support enacting equity-based dispositions. Dispositional data are triangulated across representative stakeholders including candidates, mentors and university faculty. RT360 system was designed with the long-term goal of being sustained across all the university’s teacher preparation pathways. Evidence sources of dispositional development are gathered prior to program entry and continue systematically throughout the residency. Each RT360 inquiry cycle involves core stakeholders participating in triangulated reflection using: resident and mentor weekly logs; pre-post and developmental surveys of residents, university faculty, residency coordinator and field-based mentors; peer cohort dialog facilitated by residency coordinator and collaboratively generated action plans. The 17 item online survey has dispositional items aligned to an observation rubric, and California TPE standards (2016).
Results, Significance and Next Steps
The RT 360 assessment is being institutionalized across the college’s preservice programs. This work offers a systematic approach to processes, criteria, assessment, and policies used to sustain and transfer disposition assessment to across diverse pathways. Dialectical pluralistic R&E strategies provide a way to more fully account for a wider range of network processes and complex projects that would otherwise be overlooked or under-specified by output-based performance measurement approaches. Future work will need to be expanded across institutions.
 

Authors

• Susan A. Tucker, Evaluation and Development Associates LLC

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