RM Winter 2017 FINAL

45 / 72

Reading Matters
Teaching Matters
Reading Matters | Volume 17 • Winter 2017 | | |45|
ABSTRACT — In South Carolina, the introduction of the Read
to Succeed (R2S) Act has presented new possibilities—and new
challenges—for literacy teacher educators. As more pre-service and
in-service teachers seek to fulfill the R2S coursework requirements,
literacy teacher educators must find new ways to provide meaningful
assessment experiences. This article introduces six authentic
assessments that can be adapted for pre-service and in-service
teachers enrolled in a variety of literacy courses: a multicultural book
blog, literacy videos, literacy action plans, coaching observation
reports, professional development presentations focusing on
culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and Teaching Tips.
It’s the second day of my Literacy Foundations course,
and I’ve asked my group of seasoned in-service teachers
to do a quick think-pair-share around the following topic:
Discuss a positive personal experience with assessment. I’ve
intentionally left the question open to interpretation, and I’m
expecting a rich discussion of best assessment practices.
At first, there’s silence. Gradually, students begin to pose
questions to their colleagues, sounding both doubtful and hesitant.
“Like on the SAT?”
“The Praxis? The Teaching and Learning one, maybe?”
“Not the GRE.”
“Do you think it can be an assessment
that we did in our real classrooms?”
As I move around our not-real classroom, prompting students
to think outside the standardized assessment box, I soon
realize that my class – filled with talented in-service teachers
with more than a century of collective teaching experience—
is stumped. While one student points out, “I just don’t think
I’ve ever had a positive experience with assessment,” another
puts it more bluntly: “Assessments are always terrible.”
As I reflected on this conversation, I realized that even as
I espoused the benefits of authentic formative assessment
in the P-12 classroom, my own assessments often failed to
make meaningful connections to the practices that shape the
schools and classrooms in which my students would and did
work. In short, I had often failed to practice what I preached.
So, I set out to transform my not-real assessments into
authentic measures of learning that involved “opportunities
for developing and examining teachers’ thinking and actions
in situations that are experience based and problem oriented
and that include or simulate actual acts of teaching” (Darling-
Hammond & Snyder, 2001, p. 524). In this article, I introduce
six authentic assessment ideas that can be adapted for both
pre-service and in-service teachers enrolled in a variety of
literacy courses and share the success stories and roadblocks
that my students and I encountered in this journey.
Assessment of Pre-Service and
In-Service Teachers
“The work of teaching is both complicated and complex…if we
understand teaching as a highly complex endeavor undertaken by
professionals, then we are compelled to develop assessments that are
highly sophisticated and nuanced.” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 266)
In recent years, researchers, policy-makers, and teacher
educators have begun to develop summative performance-
based assessments of pre-service teacher candidates. One such
assessment, the edTPA, was developed by faculty and staff at
Stanford University’s Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity
to emphasize, measure, and support the skills and knowledge
that all teachers need from Day 1 in the classroom. In 2015-
2016, it was used by more than 800 teacher education programs
across 40 states (Pecheone &Whittaker, 2016). Proponents argue
that the edTPA is a “step toward more authentic ways to assess
readiness for teaching than the typical standardized tests about
pedagogy that use multiple choice items and are disconnected
from authentic teaching situations” (Sato, 2014, p. 2). While
some critics have questioned the role of Pearson Education
(Au, 2013), other scholars have decried the assessment’s lack
of attention to local cultures and contexts (NAME, 2014).
Despite the controversy, recent analyses of the edTPA, such
as a policy brief released by the National Education Policy
Center (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016), have found that this tool has
the potential to “prompt professional learning for candidates,
programs, and institutions under some conditions” (p. 15). As
Sharon Robinson, the president of the American Association of
Colleges for Teacher Education stated, “These findings [regarding
edTPA] are very encouraging. They certainly indicate that, to date,
the wisdom of the profession has created the most viable tool
for innovation in teacher education” (McCabe, 2016, para 5).
However, despite the growing attention to more
comprehensive and performance-based assessments of pre-
service teacher candidates, there have been few efforts to re-
envision assessments used within teacher education coursework.
Learning to PracticeWhat I Preach:
Designing Authentic Literacy Assessments for
In-Service and Pre-Service Teachers
By Robin Jocius, The Citadel