I have just completed my work on my California single-subject teaching preliminary credential. This allows me to teach middle or high school. (If you know of any
schools in the Los Angeles area looking for a history teacher, feel free to
contact me.) Work on this credential involved classes, four months of unpaid
student teaching, and the completion of both cycles of the CalTPA (California
Teaching Performance Assessment) exams. I passed both parts of the exam with plenty of wriggle room so I can say without accusation of sour grapes that the
CalTPAs are models of how not to design an assessment. This is ironic as the CalTPA
Cycle 2 exam is specifically about constructing assessments.
The CalTPA exams consist of two parts (Cycle 1 and Cycle 2) and are meant to
be taken during student teaching. They include large writing sections as well
as videos of the perspective teacher in action in the classroom. (Yes, you need
to get students to sign permission forms in order to film them.) Cycle 1
centers on a particular lesson that you teach and how you adapt that lesson
with three focus students in mind. One student should have some sort of special
need. A second should be an English learner, and a third should face some kind
of challenge outside of school. (This could be, for example, an immigrant
student or someone who is homeless.) Cycle 2 deals with a sequence of lessons
and assessments. Furthermore, one is supposed to evaluate how students did on
the exam and, based on the results, either offer an extension of the lesson or
reteach some part. It should be emphasized that the CalTPAs are not something
that you can simply complete in an afternoon. Each of them requires weeks of
planning and writing. Together, they serve as the dominant assignment of the
four months of student teaching. Furthermore, you have to wait at least three
weeks between the time you submit until you get back your results.
Each Cycle is graded based on a series of rubrics. (Cycle 1 has eight
rubrics and Cycle 2 has nine.) Each rubric is graded on a scale of 1-5. To pass
Cycle 1, one needs to score at least a 19 and to pass Cycle 2 one needs to score at
least a 21. If you score a 1 on any two rubrics in a Cycle, you fail. In
practice, the goal of each of the Cycles is to score a 3 on at least three of
the rubrics, assuming you get 2s on everything else. Scoring a 4 or a 5 on a rubric requires a whole new level of work so it does not make sense to pursue it.
Instead, one should focus on getting as many 3s as possible. (For Cycle 1, I
got all 3s for a score of 24 and this was considered exceptionally good. For
Cycle 2, I got seven 3s and two 2s for a score of 25.)
There are a number of purposes for an assessment. A pre-assessment tells the
teacher what students already know. This allows the teacher to modify the
lesson to better cover what students are unfamiliar with. Furthermore, the
teacher now has a baseline to compare future assessments and decide if students
have actually learned anything. Next, there are assessments as learning, where
students answer questions or practice doing the material as a means of gaining
mastery. These usually have a strongly informal quality to them. Finally, there
are formative assessments where students demonstrate what they have learned. A
crucial concept underlying all three of these forms of assessment is that they
are not about judging students. If anything, they are about seeing if the
teacher has done their job and figuring out how they can improve. Furthermore,
assessments are not supposed to be high-stakes affairs. There should be lots of
assessments over the year. Students are going to do well on some and not so
well on others. Everyone has the right to the occasional bad day without
suffering serious consequences.
In addition to these three kinds of assessments, we should acknowledge the
existence of qualification assessments to sort out those with a particular
ability from those who do not. By definition, such assessments do judge
students and it is inevitable that they will be high stakes with actual consequences
for failure. In the real world, we require such assessments. There is a place
for the SAT, the AP, and even the CalTPA. That being said, when such
assessments are employed the burden of proof should be on the testers to show
that their assessment legitimately is about whether the student has mastered the
material and is qualified for a particular position as opposed to merely being
well suited to pass the test. For example, the flaws of the SAT and AP exams
can be measured in terms of how they have inserted themselves into the
curriculum and are being consciously taught.
On the surface, the CalTPA exams test prospective teachers on material that
is important for teaching. Teachers should be able to craft lessons and units
with the needs of students in mind. Furthermore, assessments should be given as
a means to generate useful data about what students are learning as opposed to
teachers simply imagining that students have learned material because it was
taught.
The fundamental problem with the CalTPAs is that, because they contain such
lengthy instructions and detailed rubrics, the tests, in practice, are not
about how well prospective teachers understand lesson design and assessments
but how carefully they have read and comprehended the CalTPA instructions and
rubrics. It should be noted that many of the rubrics have a number of different
parts and messing up even one of those parts will get you a lower score. This
is the kind of assessment that a well-meaning and competent student teacher can easily
fail simply because there was an honest misunderstanding on a few minor points.
What makes this possibility frighteningly plausible is that about half of the
rubrics on each of the Cycles center around the video clips that you send of
your teaching. Did you demonstrate exactly what they were looking for? Even
worse, did you get the students to show what was needed and to speak loud
enough for the filming equipment to pick up? While lesson and assessment design
is important for teaching, I do not want prospective teachers judged on their
ability to film their classrooms.
As you need to pass both exams to get a teaching credential, the stakes are
high. This creates particular stress if, like me, you do student teaching in
the winter semester. I ended up submitting my Cycle 2 exam at the beginning of
May and then had to wait until June to get the results. If I had not passed on
my first attempt, I would have needed to resubmit my material to try to pass in
July, jeopardizing my chances of getting a job for the Fall.
In truth, the CalTPA exams could easily be fixed. My solution would be to
divide the test down to the individual rubrics and allow for the evidence used
in the rubric (whether written or filmed) to be submitted one at a time. You
would still need to score a 40 on all the rubrics together, but now the stakes
and the stress would be lowered. As you finish gathering the evidence for each
rubric, you submit it. If you get a 3, you are fine and should move on to
submitting the next piece of evidence. If you do not get a 3 then you should
either resubmit the evidence or simply make sure that you do better on the next
rubric. By the time the final rubrics come around, the stronger students will
have already passed and will not need to spend a month worrying.
With such a design, there will be much less reason to worry about having
misunderstood something as such misunderstandings will be picked up quickly and
rectified without serious consequences. This is how we handle major assignments
in school. Students hand in drafts for particular parts of the assignments.
This makes it practically impossible for a student acting in good faith to fail
as problems will be picked up early on and fixed.
