Interstate New Teacher Assessment And Support Consortium Research Articles

Assessment of Math Teachers’ Dispositions to Improve Urban Teacher-Leaders’ Growth and Effectiveness

This paper focuses on the dispositions of in-service math teacher-leaders, as defined in the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) Standards by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) on 10 sets of critical dispositions. Teachers (N = 281) were assessed using versions of two instruments developed as part of the Disposition Assessment Aligned with Teacher Standards (DAATS) battery. One instrument is a self report questionnaire called Beliefs About Teaching 2 (BATS2), and the second is a guided reflection, the Experiential Teaching Questionnaire (ETQ2). Item analysis and scoring were done utilizing the Rasch model of item response theory and scaled on a modification of the original Krathwohl affective taxonomy. A discussion of the validity and reliability of these versions of the instrumentation is included, along with a qualitative review of sample responses illustrating the scoring. Finally, there is a discussion of the standards, indicating that the participating math teacher-leaders were consistent with the InTASC Standards. One conclusion is that math teacher-leaders have a lower than expected ability to value diverse learners in valuing diverse learners.

Pengembangan Profesional Awal Guru Pendidikan Agama Islam dan Strategi untuk Melanjutkan Pengembangannya

Teaching is lifelong learning. Turning on all the time, new and old teachers, beginners or professionals will still grapple with how to improve many aspects of teaching, each year demanded to show more improvement. Every idea considers continuing professional development throughout your career. This article examines the following questions: 1. How to start assessing a teacher's professional skills? 2. Do teachers need to understand the standards used by others to assess their professional skills? 3. What model is used to describe the teacher's journey from 'beginner' to 'expert'? 4. How do expert teachers assess themselves and how do they overcome and adapt to change? 5. How can teachers collaborate to make structured observations of their work, as required by the assessment requirements? The results of the discussion concluded: 1) The complexity of assessment that binds teachers and schools continues to increase because assessment is used for various purposes in different contexts; 2) Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) was formed to create "compatible with institutions" standards that can be reviewed by professional organizations and state institutions as a basis for licensing beginner teachers. The InTASC standard (Miller, 1992) is written as 10 principles, which are then further explained in terms of teacher knowledge, disposition, and performance; 3) There are many different theories describing the journey of preparation for beginner teachers to become professionals, this requires time, effort, and support and finally changes follow the predictable stages of development; 4) Teachers with high levels of expertise can observe and adapt their own actions. To do this, they must be in harmony with the feelings and behavior of children and pay attention to what children do and say, rather than focusing primarily on themselves, otherwise they do not equate judgment with testing. they take into account test scores, but their judgments are transient and are based on a much broader bank of evidence, specifically that progress over absolute scores and children's knowledge and context; 5) Teachers rarely can be authentic and accurate participant observers because of the inherent differences in their roles, but student / teacher collaborators have a unique perspective on insiders and outsiders, colleagues and observers, class members involved and critical collaborators

Outcomes of primary teacher education in Finland: an exit survey

Seven final year cohorts of Finnish pre-service primary teachers (N = 384) were given an exit survey, which measured their estimated attainment of knowledge and experience in the 10 domains of professional activity considered critical for new teachers in the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards. The results indicated that the profile of the graduates was uneven, showing low levels of satisfaction in the fields of special education and cooperation but high levels of satisfaction in the fields of reflective practice and planning. The satisfaction with the estimated knowledge and experience achieved was divided into three components of pedagogic, instructional and complex skills satisfaction. The central role of teaching practice was considered to be reflected in the results. The areas of low satisfaction were those in which the amount of teaching practice in the teacher education curriculum was considered insufficient to generate enough experience. This was especially so in the field of special education and in meeting the diverse needs of students. The 10-item INTASC scale showed sufficient psychometric qualities. The results are also discussed in terms of the suggested exceptional quality of Finnish teacher education.

Student Teacher Dialogue in an Electronic Community of Practice: Cognition Level Related to the INTASC Standards

Teachers are constantly being evaluated based upon their ability to provide the best education for their students. These evaluations are done at a macro level, where teachers must meet state and national mandates that deem them highly qualified, and at a micro level, where teachers must display proficiency as effective teachers through teacher education standards. Specific to preservice teachers, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) aligns standards based upon what preservice teachers should know and be able to do. The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency in which student teacher blog posts in an electronic community of practice related to the InTASC standards, as well as determine the average level of student teacher critical thinking displayed in the blog posts related to those standards. Student teachers most frequently blogged about the Professional Learning and Ethical Practices standard as compared to the other nine InTASC standards. It was found that for blog posts discussing InTASC standards, overall critical thinking was displayed at knowledge, comprehension, or application levels. It is recommended that future studies utilize open coding in order to gain a broader insight of the student teachers’ discussions.

Unsettling Conversations

Equipping teachers for the full range of diversity of students in today's schools has long been a shared concern among teacher educators. Bilingual education, special education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and urban education are among the several responses to this fundamental educational goal. These responses, however, although critical for moving the project of educational equity forward, have tended to produce conversations within diversity communities in teacher education rather than across them. The aim of this special issue is to open up what we believe to be a long overdue conversation among scholars from different diversity communities within teacher education to begin to think about what is needed if we are to advance teacher education that is responsive to the full range of diversity of students and that takes account of the multiple markers of identity that characterize individuals and groups of students--disability among them. This special issue grew out of a major session that took place at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) titled Diversity Frameworks in Teacher Education: Where Does Special Education Belong? The purpose of that session was to initiate a dialogue among teacher education leaders in multicultural education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and special education to begin to unravel the enduring and thorny problem of why, given the longstanding rhetoric of preparing teachers for diversity, there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of special education within the larger discourse of diversity of race, class, culture, and language. The roots of that session can be traced back to discussions that began in 2002, during a 5-year joint, federally funded project housed within the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) in the Council of Chief State School Officers, with AACTE as one of the lead partners. In response to the call for special education teachers to become highly qualified under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), teams participating in this project, representing 45 states and made up of higher education faculty in general and special education and their respective counterparts at the state level, started to grapple with the question of what it meant to prepare novice teachers for in this new policy context. Team members began to raise important issues about preparing general education teachers for students with disabilities as an integral part of teacher education reform. With this special issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), we broaden this question for the teacher education community: How can we work together to advance a more complete vision of diversity, one that does not merely attach disability to a long list of social markers of identity, but rather works from the assumption-and indeed the fact--that the children and youth for whom we prepare teachers do not have just one diversity identity, but rather multiple diversity identities that interact with and nest within one another in different and often complex ways. We appreciate the willingness of the scholars whose work appears in this issue--Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Curt Dudley-Marling, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Robert Rueda and Jamy Stillman, and Ana Maria Villegas--to join us in a rich conversation that pushes at the outer margins of the many diversity communities in which their and our work is typically situated. …

Are Administrators Disconnected? A Comparison Case Study of Important Teacher Dispositions in Elementary Science

The identification of dispositions as a gauge for teacher effectiveness has become a part of manyschool systems and teacher education programs. Accrediting agencies, such as the National Councilfor Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment andSupport Consortium (INTASC), have been instrumental in emphasizing teacher dispositions’ presencein higher education institutions and local schools. NCATE defines dispositions as: "Values,commitments, and professional ethics that influence behaviors toward students, families, colleagues,and communities and affect student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator’sown professional growth" (2006, p. 53). NCATE and INTASC strongly suggest that teachers havecertain dispositions to allow for teacher effectiveness (Smith, Knopp, Skarbek, & Rushton, 2005;Thornton, 2006; Koeppen & Davison-Jenkins, 2007). Administrators’ view of teacher dispositions isvaluable as well. They will need to assess teachers’ dispositions to determine the effectiveness ofinstruction and their attitude towards the teaching profession.

The Development and Validation of a Teacher Preparation Program Follow-Up Survey

Students in my applied advanced statistics course for educational administration doctoral students developed a follow-up survey for teacher preparation programs, using the following scale development processes: adopting a framework; developing items; providing evidence of content validity; conducting a pilot test; and analyzing data. The students developed the survey items by using the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) principles as the framework to operationally define the knowledge and skills that highly qualified teachers should possess. The students analyzed the data from the pilot study for their final exam in the course. The follow-up survey currently is being used by our university for program evaluation, improvement, and accreditation.

Adequate Yearly Progress of Students with Disabilities: Competencies for Teachers

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA '04) raise the achievement expectations of all students, including students with disabilities. These requirements place new responsibilities on institutions of higher education and state educational agencies to ensure that teachers are knowledgeable about state academic content and achievement standards and expectations. This paper puts forth competencies for teachers in this new era of standards-based education that were developed by the Educational Policy Reform Research Institute (EPRRI), in collaboration with the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO), and validated by participants at a national symposium on teacher quality. The paper also compares these competencies with Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) model standards and the state standards for beginning teachers of one state to see whether current standards contain the proposed competencies. In conclusion, these competencies are proposed as a supplement to existing standards and are envisioned as an aid in matching existing standards to federal and state requirements.

Bridging the Gap between Schools of Education and the Needs of 21st-Century Teachers

Schools of education must prepare teachers to meet the myriad needs of the diverse learners in today's classrooms. Ms. Holm and Ms. Horn discuss the essential components of a preparation program that will equip teachers to know and understand who their students are and how they learn. IF THE WORK of teachers is to evolve into the practice of true professionals, it will need to be supported by a dynamic, reciprocal connection between educational theory and practice, one that is clarified and strengthened through the work of other professionals in the field. Such professionalization of teaching requires not only the possession of a specialized body of knowledge, but also the understanding that practice expands and is validated through ongoing research and reflection. If teaching is to become a recognized profession, teachers need a model of preparation that is in line with the demands and realities of teaching, and schools of education have a critical role to play. They are in the best position to guide the progress of preservice and practicing teachers as they move along the continuum of professional growth from novice to master teacher. The groundwork for this continuum is already in place. The alignment of the standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) establishes a powerful framework for this professional model.1 The NCATE standards require schools of education to demonstrate how they are incorporating new knowledge about subject matter, teaching strategies, learning styles, and student diversity into their teacher preparation programs. The INTASC standards outline the skills and knowledge that beginning teachers should demonstrate in order to receive an initial license. The standards of the NBPTS define the characteristics and practices of accomplished teachers. Together, these sets of standards for preparation, initial licensing, and advanced certification create a solid continuum of teacher development. Building on these efforts, schools of education that have woven these standards into the fabric of their programs can help teachers understand the expectations and realities of the teaching profession. They create a context for learning that starts their students on the journey toward expertise and prepares them for the challenges of today's schools. The essence of the knowledge, skills, and understandings that teachers need in order to successfully traverse this continuum is encapsulated in the five core propositions of the NBPTS.2 This set of beliefs captures current thinking in the field of education and provides a blueprint for meeting the myriad needs of the diverse learners in today's classrooms. Schools of education that incorporate the standards into their preparation programs equip teachers with the following: * knowledge and skills that will help them know and understand who their students are and how they learn, * knowledge and understanding of the content of the disciplines and of the instructional strategies that can be used to create powerful learning experiences, * an understanding of the role of assessment and how to design assessments that will inform practice and guide student learning, * habits of reflection, and * a collaborative approach to their work with colleagues, families, and communities. The Changing Face of Today's Learners With the diversity of learners in today's schools, the importance of knowing who those students are and how they learn is one of the most critical factors emerging as we become a global society. No matter how difficult the challenges of diversity, every student in school has a right to a teacher who understands his or her needs and knows how to move students along the pathway of learning.3 What does understanding diversity imply for teacher preparation programs? …

Making connections: Service‐learning competencies and beginning teacher standards

Service learning is gaining recognition as a powerful tool to promote student learning in K‐12 and higher education classrooms. In an era of standards‐based assessment and accountability, pedagogical strategies must be aligned with a unified vision of effective teaching as defined by the standards. This article discusses the connection of service‐learning competencies to nationally recognized beginning teacher standards, such as Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC). It also provides specific examples of strategies that various teacher education programs have used to infuse the pedagogy of service learning into courses while addressing the INTASC standards.

Linking national standards: A reflective process

This article describes the reflective process used by a group of early childhood faculty members to study national standards in order to improve their teacher education program. The standards studied included those from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children (DEC/ECE). The reflective process and study resulted in changes in field experiences, course requirements and activities and assisted in state and national accreditation.

Reforming Teacher Education

In the media and in public policy discussions, there is intensified emphasis on the quality of public education and the nation's teaching force. Teacher preparation in particular has received enormous attention as part of highly publicized and politicized efforts to get tough about results and standards with concentrated pressure on the higher education institutions that prepare teachers either to get better at teaching or get out of the business. Current pressures on teacher education have bite as well as bark, with some of the teeth provided by new mandatory Title II reporting, which will affect eligibility for federal funding and result in a federal report card on the states and on teacher preparation institutions. It is useful to note that there are at least three agendas driving reforms in teacher education at national and/or state levels: the professionalization agenda, the deregulation agenda, and what some people are calling the over-regulation agenda. Although overlapping in certain ways--with the degree of overlap dependent in part on the regulations and professional relationships established by individual states--these three agendas are also competing and even contradictory in other ways. The professionalization agenda for reforming teacher education is part of efforts during the past several decades to establish a professional knowledge base for teaching and teacher education and on efforts by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) to professionalize teacher education. Particularly influential on the current professionalization agenda was the publication of What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future [NCTAF], 1996) and the materials and initiatives that followed it. Spearheaded by NCTAF and Linda Darling- Hammond, key professional organizations are now collaborating on a common national system of teacher preparation and development based on professional consensus and high standards for teacher preparation, initial teacher licensing, and board certification of experienced teachers. Alongside the professionalization agenda, however, is the well-publicized and now well-known movement to deregulate teacher education by dismantling teacher education institutions to break up the monopoly that the profession has too long enjoyed. Spearheaded by conservative political groups and foundations such as the Fordham Foundation and the Pioneer Institute, deregulationists assert that the requirements of teacher preparation programs and state licensing agencies present unnecessary hurdles that keep bright young people out of teaching and focus on social goals rather than academic achievement. Chester Finn's Fordham Foundation, which frames its agenda in explicit opposition to professionalization, advocates alternate routes into teaching and high-stakes, state-level teacher tests as the primary gatekeepers into the profession (Kanstoroom & Finn, 1999). Although some of these tests have been criticized for their poor technical quality, their inconsistency with teacher education curricula, and/or their lack of validity as predictors of either teaching practice or student achievement, tests are generally accepted as public evidence that teachers are (or are not) meeting high standards. In addition to high-stakes tests, most states across the country now have additional new regulations intended to reform curricula, programs, and policies for teacher preparation at higher education institutions. In some states, new regulations are largely in sync with the professionalization agenda, focusing on performance-based assessments of teacher candidates that are linked to INTASC and NBPTS standards. In other states, however, new regulations represent unprecedented moves to establish external control of nearly every aspect of teacher preparation, including allowable arts and sciences majors, amount and content of education course work, quality and kind of subject matter preparation, and extent and type of fieldwork experiences that teacher candidates have in schools. …

Higher Education Culture—A Fit or Misfit With Reform in Teacher Education?

Collaboration and innovation in teacher education are essential ingredients for preparing teachers for increasingly diverse and challenging school populations. In the United States, one in five children lives in poverty, and the numbers of children who speak English as a second language are increasing rapidly (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997). If institutions of higher education are to prepare teachers for all students, current program structures and faculty roles must change substantially. Current practice, however, shows less than dramatic change. Some advocates of teacher education reform have cited funding patterns in schools of education, adherence to horizontal staffing of faculty assigned to specialized course loads, lack of public school teacher involvement, and an absence of a moral and ethical imperative throughout the program as barriers that continue to prevent reform and growth in teacher education (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1998; Tom, 1997). State policies allowing alternative certification, limiting the number of credit hours in teacher education programs, and prescribing discrete teaching behaviors in the evaluation of teaching also continue to impede program change (Darling-Hammond, 1996). Some faculty may perceive such state policies, along with other regulatory influences such as the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), as constraining program development in teacher education rather than as guides for quality. The Holmes Partnership accomplished certain outcomes in teacher preparation, such as the proliferation of the professional development schools (PDS) concept, but it did not take strong positions on state and national policy. The lack of unified action in areas of state policy by leading institutions of higher education may have contributed to the stalling of reform (Fullan et al., 1998). The literature of practice in teacher education urges reform that includes collaboration across disciplines essential to educating teachers for increasingly diverse student populations (Blanton, Griffin, Winn, & Pugach, 1997; Darling-Hammond, 1996). Those disciplines may include special education, social work, general education, family and child development, counseling sociology, and educational leadership. Researchers have identified barriers to cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education that are largely administrative or social in nature. Barriers may include lack of incentives in faculty reward structures, inordinate amounts of time in already burdened faculty schedules, absence of understanding of interdisciplinary program development by administrators, lack of institutional resources, unwillingness by administrators to engage in creative faculty assignments, differences in philosophy among faculty, special interests and protectionist issues held by faculty, rigid thinking, and lack of respect across departments (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997; Miller, in press; Miller & Stayon, 1998; Tom, 1997). The culture of higher education has traditionally maintained rigid conceptions about content and practices for preparing teachers (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Tom, 1997). A decade of rhetoric about reform and the proliferation of the PDS concept would suggest that reform in collaborative teacher education is underway (Holmes Group, 1995). Interpretation of the status of institutional reform, however, may depend on whether one reads institutional mission statements and other documents, or whether one talks with faculty. In this article, we discuss findings of a qualitative study undertaken to explore the culture of higher education as it fits with proposed reform in teacher education and further describe existing barriers and supports. Although reports from administrators and official institutional documents continue to describe trends toward reform in definitions of scholarship and reward systems for faculty (Glassick et al. …

Teacher Education Reform: An ERIC Bibliography

Reform in teacher education has been a pervasive subject of intensive debate and activity among educators and others, particularly in the years since the report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), and, more recently, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (Darling-Hammond, 1996) were published. The material reviewed here offers recent insights into a few issues: the role of administrators in reform; the current focus on standards for educational improvement; and the need to evaluate the effect of collaborative efforts between schools, colleges, or departments of education and public schools or school districts, known as Professional Development Schools (PDSs). The following selected annotated journal articles and documents in the ERIC database provide perspectives in these three areas. The education journals (EJ) cited in the bibliography are available at most research libraries. Education documents (ED) can be read at more than 900 microfiche collections in libraries, educational organizations, and school districts, or ordered online at the Internet web site of the ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS) at http://edrs.com. Paper or microfiche copies of documents can be ordered from EDRS at 7420 Fullerton Road, Suite. 110, Springfield, VA 22153-2852; (800) 443-3742 or (703) 440-1440; FAX (703) 440-1408; E-mail: service@edrs.com. Journals without an EJ designation are in the process of being included in the ERIC database at the time of this writing. Leadership in Education Reform Dilworth, M. E. (Ed.). (1998). Of course it matters. Putting the National Commission Report into action. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearing-house on Teaching and Teacher Education. ED 417156 In this response to What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (Darling-Hammond, 1996), leaders in four different levels of education reflect on reform efforts that address concerns about standards, teacher preparation, and ongoing professional teacher development. A school district superintendent presents organizational innovations in a large urban school system; the dean of a school of education examines the impact of the report recommendation on schools, colleges, and departments of education; the executive director of a state standards board discusses adapting new licensing standards to fit local needs; and the executive director of a professional development association describes the organization's efforts to create benchmarks for improvement. In the final section, the original report's author discusses responses of these and other leaders to the National Commission recommendations. Hinton, J. G. (1997, January). Administrative impediments to reform and curricular change in science and mathematics for preservice teachers. Paper presented at the Southwest Educational Research Association, Austin, TX. ED 362464 The author presents a case study of the reform of a preservice program for teachers of math and science. Critical to reform was the participation of two departments in revising their curricula according to the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics standards. The study focused on the process of change as it evolved in the two departments. Of interest here are the differences observed between the two departments in the scope and duration of the reforms, which the study attributes to the role of the department chair in promoting the reform. Although the faculties of both departments were actively engaged, and their mutual dean was supportive, successful reform was traced to the proactive role of the department chair. Standards in Education Reform Blackwell, S. (1997, March). The dilemma of standards-driven reform. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Phoenix, AZ. ED 410565 Blackwell examines the expectations for reform laid on teacher education by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards. …

An Integrative Approach to Portfolio Evaluation for Teacher Licensure

The purpose of our overall research agenda is to develop and evaluate a methodology for the assessment of teachers in which experienced teachers, serving as judges, engage in dialogue to integrate multiple sources of evidence about a candidate to reach a sound conclusion. The project that provides the venue for this research agenda is the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), which is developing a portfolio assessment system to assist participating states in making a decision about teacher licensure. To develop the theoretical foundation necessary to support and evaluate such dialogic and integrative assessment practices, we turn, in part, to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, as a complement to psychometrics. In this article, we characterize and assess the processes in which judges, trying out an integrative approach to portfolio evaluation for the first time, engage as they collaboratively construct and document their conclusions, and we locate this work in the larger research agenda. The premise of this project, which is being carefully evaluated in the course of inquiry, is that these integrative practices cannot only lead to an epistemologically sound evaluation of teaching but also promote an ongoing professional dialogue of critical reflection on teaching practice. Current calls for reform in the professional development and practice of teachers consistently highlight particular themes—that successful teachers integrate complex evidence about their students’ learning and the context in which they work, that they engage in ongoing critical reflection about their own teaching practices, and that they work as members of active learning communities (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 1995; INTASC, 1992; Lieberman, 1990; Little, 1993; Lord, 1994; Meier, 1995; NBPTS, n.d.; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996; Richardson, 1990; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Consistent with this reform effort is the movement toward performancebased licensing and certification of teachers and the preparation of accomplished teachers to serve as judges for these assessments (INTASC, 1995; NBPTS, 1994). These are important steps toward bringing assessment practices in line with the goals of reform. As important as these steps are, there exists a substantial disjunction between the assessment practices teachers typically engage in as judges or readers in large-scale assessment and the goals of the current reform movement. While psychometric theory has advanced to accommodate the evaluation of complex performances (e.g., Cronbach, Linn, Brennan & Haertel, 1995; Wiley & Haertel, 1994; Mislevy, 1994), conventional procedures for evaluating these performance assessments typically have individual readers working independently, scoring one exercise at a time, blind to the candidate’s performance on other exercises. To reach a decision about certification, these independent scores are algorithmically combined and compared to a cut score predetermined by a

Teaching in Dangerous Times: Culturally Relevant Approaches to Teacher Assessment

New teacher assessment tools claim to provide more evaluation of teacher competency. However, some aspects of these new assessment tools may actually serve to reinscribe a narrow set of teaching practices that fail to serve all well-particularly of color and living in poverty. This article looks at some of the debate surrounding teacher assessment and raises questions about what is missing in so-called authentic assessments of teachers. INTRODUCTION In the popular book, Dangerous Minds (initially released as My Posse Don't Do Homework in 1992) former-Marine-turned-teacher LouAnne Johnson is credited with turning around the class from hell-a group of urban African American and Latino students on the road to failure in school and in life. This book (and subsequent motion picture) was just one more of what Strop (1996) identifies as among the teacher-as-savior genre of filmsmovies that construct an image of teachers, particularly White teachers, as rescuing urban students of color from themselves, families, and communities (Baker, 1996). Closer examination of these celluloid pedagogies reveals characters who, with missionary-like zeal, struggle to give otherwise hopeless students hope, raise these students' abysmally low levels of self-esteem, and steer them away from the path of wanton self-destruction. Unfortunately, most of the teachers in this film genre pay little or no attention to the academic achievement of students. Thus, while many audiences applaud the Hollywood teacher-images' amazing social work, interpersonal, and cross-cultural communication skills, few real-life educators and/or educational researchers would point to any of these histrionic teachers as exemplary classroom instructors. Nonetheless, what the actors teaching on the silver screen do with students Delpit 1995) dubs other people's children is seen as just fine-as long as no one in the real world tries to do the same things with the whom most of the nation's educators view as their own. Given the changing demographics of the student body in the United States and the bifurcation of public school student populations into groups of haves and have-nots, it is important to understand that, rather than confronting dangerous minds, teachers of urban students of color are teaching in dangerous times. One of the most urgent issues facing this perilous era and the cadre of teachers who serve in it is that of being able to more accurately measure what students know and are able to do. Much attention has been paid to new forms of student assessment that purportedly do just that (Newmann & Associates, 1996). However, communities of color, which historically have raised questions about the potential biases built into traditional test measures, have challenged the purpose and design of many of the new assessments (The College Board, 1985; Educational Testing Service, 1991). The scrutiny of student assessment has been accompanied by a focus in the educational community at large on teacher assessment (Darling-Hammond, 1988; Wise, DarlingHammond, & Berry, 1987). Within three years after the publication of the U.S. Commission on Excellence in Education's (1983) A Nation at Risk report, two national studies focusing on the need to improve the nation's teaching force emerged: the Holmes Group's (1986) Teachers for Tomorrow's Schools and the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession's (1986) A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. Among the suggestions offered by these bodies in the mid-1980s were: (a) higher standards for admission into the teaching profession, (b) elimination of the undergraduate degree in education, and (c) improved assessment measures for both preservice and inservice teachers. This era also saw the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC). …

What Matters Most for Teacher Educators

In the preface to What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996b), Governor Hunt expresses the hope that this report will launch a great debate about the critical link between improving the capacities of teachers and the future of the United States (p. iii). Through the use of persuasive detail and compelling prose, the report clarifies the crucial role of teachers in educational improvement. For the most part, teachers and schools escape the derision usually heaped upon them in national reports. The new challenges facing teachers form the starting point for arguing the need for better teachers. Teacher educators should certainly applaud one of the commission's basic premises: Recruiting, preparing, and retaining good teachers is the central strategy for improving our schools (p. vi). Recruiting, preparing, and retaining good teachers is at the heart of our job as teacher educators. This report provides both prescriptions and examples of improving recruitment, preparation, and retention of good teachers. The preface foreshadows the centerpiece of the report: Standards for students and teachers are the key to reforming American education (p. iii). At nearly every turn, the authors answer the question, How can we have competent and caring teachers in every classroom? with standards and assessments. In this analysis, I examine the authors' proposals to use standards and assessments to achieve the report's goals. I will also appraise the recommendations for preservice teacher education and the nature of the report's action plan for implementing these recommendations. I will not deal with the many good ideas related to the essential tasks of hiring teachers, the professional growth of experienced teachers, or improving the conditions in which teachers teach. A Positive Beginning The report offers much for teacher educators to rally around. First, the report boldly declares qualified teachers as the most important ingredient in education reform (p. 3). Second, the report places the task of preparing new teachers squarely on teacher educators. Although Darling-Hammond has elsewhere offered an even stronger argument against alternative teacher education programs, she clearly makes the case for college/university-based teacher education in this report. And finally, the report focuses on goals that we can all rally around: recruiting, preparing and supporting excellent teachers in all of America's schools and a caring, competent, and qualified teacher for every child (p. 6). There is a significant omission: Although the authors often call for caring teachers, their know and can do lingo that has emerged as the mantra of the standards movement loses the personal, ethical, and value-centered components of good teaching. The central difficulty with the report is the overemphasis, mis-emphasis, and uncritical emphasis on standards and standards assessment as the means for producing caring and competent teachers for every classroom. The authors provide a standards/assessment solution at every turn. They provide the hoary and the homely analogy of the three-legged stool to rest on: accreditation, licensing, and certification (p. 29). They make outrageous claims for this solution: for example, Because accreditation is not required of teacher education programs, the quality of Programs varies widely. (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996a, p. 13). This is, at least, a misattribution of causal correlation. There is likely as much variation in quality among NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education)-accredited programs as among those unaccredited; many well-known model programs have not chosen to be part of the NCATE accreditation process. To suggest that NBPTS (National Board of Professional Teacher Standards), NCATE, and INTASC (Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium) offer the most powerful tools we have for reaching and rejuvenating the soul of the profession (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996b, p. …