From the Desk of Jane Ashdown: Assessing Our Teachers

Ensuring our teacher candidates are effective beginning educators is the goal of new assessments recently adopted by the New York State Education Department. All teacher candidates seeking initial teacher certification on or after May 1, 2014, will be required to take certain new exams, including a Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). Originally developed by Stanford University faculty and staff with substantive advice from teachers and teacher educators, edTPA is a subject area-specific, performance-based assessment centered on student learning.

At Adelphi, our teacher candidates videotape their classroom teaching as a tool for reflection on student learning and on ways to promote greater success for students. Faculty from the Ruth S. Ammon School of Education is already involved in field testing this assessment and ensuring our program curricula prepare candidates right from the start for this capstone experience.

Video recording is not new to our teacher candidates; it builds on our ongoing video reflection project, now in its third year, which uses recordings of teaching to improve a candidate’s classroom instruction. We also support mentor teachers from our partner schools with workshops for certification with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). Since its inception, the NBPTS has used video recording to assess accomplished teaching.

Performance assessment is a vital building block for strengthening teaching as a profession. It is our duty as educators to prepare teacher candidates for the classroom, as well as these assessments.