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Abstract

Teacher preparation and preservice evaluation practices in the US have seen increasing influence from social efficiency and productivity logics. While analyses of the impacts of such neoliberal ascendancies are diverse and numerous, this article focuses closely on the impact of neoliberalism in preservice teacher evaluation and its impact on new teacher development. In particular, the teacher candidates who participated in this study shared their experiences with and perceptions of the edTPA, a relatively new, standardized portfolio licensure assessment published by Pearson, Inc. Analysis of qualitative case study data found that the regulatory influence of external surveillance created tensions with teacher candidates’ desire to learn and grow whilst completing their evaluation materials. Furthermore, analysis found that these candidates’ critical perspectives implicated their completion of evaluation materials. When more critical of neoliberal influences in evaluation policy, candidates’ materials were constructed in a performative manner.

Keywords

edTPA neoliberalism teacher evaluation preservice teachers teacher education performativity

Introduction

Since the beginning of the 20^th century, US education policies have increasingly emphasized technical efficiency and standardization (Kliebard, 2004). These trends have accelerated in the last 30 years, ushering in a new kind of Taylorism that aspires to efficient, factory-style production of educational outcomes via layers of accountability and widespread standardization (Au, 2011). This new Taylorism can be seen in the language and work of schooling, often stressing measurement and comparison while diminishing democratic jurisdiction, public assets, responsive curriculum, and critical perspectives (Berliner, 2011; Cuban, 2012; Goodman, 2013; Habermas, 1991; Orfield and Frankenberg, 2013).

The proliferation of neoliberal ideologies has also had an undeniable impact on beliefs about what it means for a teacher to be demonstrably good. These discourses have become normalized (Rizvi, 2017), despite teacher educators’ efforts to the contrary (Gaches, 2018). This issue is often discussed under the headline of teacher quality, although there is conflicting evidence about whether teachers are truly the deciding factor in student academic achievement. Regardless, teacher preparation – especially that which is provided by university-based teacher preparation programs – has come under fire by organizations such as the National Council on Teacher Quality, which argues that teachers are not well-prepared, and that private entities may improve upon traditional models by integrating open markets as regulatory forces (Greenberg et al., 2014). Such criticisms have furthered distrust in the profession and been used as justification for increased oversight and testing of teachers. Among the many efforts to fix the US’s recent teacher education “problem” has been increased regulation and accountability (Cochran-Smith, 2004) or efforts to raise the bar for teacher licensure and the profession as a whole (Darling-Hammond and Hyler, 2013)

Within this political and cultural context emerged the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) – a high-stakes portfolio assessment for new teacher licensure. The edTPA arose from a tradition of portfolio-based teacher performance evaluation. Portfolio assessments have traditionally been used for formative learning and/or licensure or credentialing (Wei and Pecheone, 2010), but had previously not been scaled for national use as a tool for vetting new teachers. The edTPA arose from the implementation of the Performance Assessment of California Teachers (PACT) and California legislation requiring performance assessments for teachers (Hébert, 2017). Then, the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity began development of the edTPA, eventually partnering with the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education with the goal of developing a “performance assessment that [could] be commonly administered across institutions and reliably scored by [external] experts in teaching” (Sato, 2014: 422). This new test, it was argued, was an improvement upon prior measures of teacher preparedness, and would serve as a rigorous bar similar to those seen in other professions (Darling-Hammond and Hyler, 2013). It was argued that the inclusion of the testing and publication giant, Pearson, was necessary to meet the demands of nationwide distribution and scoring (Sato, 2014). However, the partnership with Pearson raised questions about corporate influence and increased standardization of teacher preparation programs (e.g. Au, 2013).

While analyses of neoliberalism on educational policies are diverse and numerous, the focus of this article will be the intersection of these ideologies with preservice teacher evaluation and development. First, I offer an overview of efforts to standardize teacher education and hold teacher preparation accountable through the edTPA, then I provide an overview of my study’s conceptual framework before summarizing the methods utilized for my qualitative investigation. The remaining sections in this article provide the results of this analysis through the stories of two teacher candidates, Mark and Emily, whose perceptions and experiences provided evidence of the ways in which the discourses of accountability influenced their development and teaching practices within the context of the edTPA.

Accountability and standardization in teacher education

In the current climate of policy in the US, the management tools of teacher preparation are accreditation requirements, state teacher preparation standards, and licensure testing (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). These particular mechanisms reached new breadth with President George W Bush’s administration’s 2001 iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB required each state to implement standards for preparation, ushering in the new, “highly qualified” licensure status requiring teachers of core academic subjects to hold a bachelor’s degree, pass state licensure exams, and demonstrate content area competency as specified by their states (Bales, 2006; USDOE, 2009). With the change in Presidential administration, many NCLB provisions were adapted or removed. However, licensure exams and portfolio assessments remained common (Goodman et al., 2008; Hutt et al., 2018). Furthermore, school reforms initiated during the Obama administration’s Race to the Top increasingly emphasized standardization and the use of data – primarily standardized test data – among criteria for successful initiatives. Specifically, US states and school districts were awarded federal funding for implementing explicitly outcome-based teacher evaluation measures (Close et al., 2019). This shift unleashed a great number of data-driven reforms, including several involving corporate actors interested in addressing the teacher quality problem through reforms on initial preparation (Zeichner, 2010). The presence of free-market players in these regulatory and reform efforts has grown in recent years, shifting the locus of control away from localized preparation programs and professional organizations, thus challenging traditional definitions of high-quality training and professionalism (Cochran-Smith et al., 2013; Zeichner, 2014). The edTPA is one of the more recent turns in this long and winding road.

Accountability and the edTPA

The edTPA represents a teacher portfolio assessment turned large-scale, high-stakes licensure test with corporatized administration. Portfolio assessments like the edTPA are often considered formative learning tools for teachers (Pecheone and Chung, 2006). Furthermore, creators and advocates for the edTPA note its roots in teacher education practice and research (Sato, 2014), and that it brings its own educative benefits (Atkins, 2016). However, since being scaled for implementation across the country, the construction, management, and scoring have been standardized and managed by a large corporation, Pearson, thus changing the nature of the assessment and candidates’ engagement with it. As a nationwide, externally scored, and standardized requirement for licensure (i.e. high-stakes test), the edTPA presents many of the same risks as its K-12 counterparts. Standardized testing has long been accused of prompting a narrowed curriculum, teaching to the test, and an overall deskilling of teaching (Apple, 1995), and researchers are finding that the edTPA – despite being a multimodal portfolio assessment – can produce similar effects, including disadvantaging under-resourced candidates and teacher education programs (Greenblatt, 2018).

Additionally, the edTPA has the potential to service comparative market mechanisms by providing a metric for competition among traditional teacher preparation institutions (Sleeter, 2008). A recent inquiry in New York State’s implementation of the test found that the edTPA’s intended objectives and educative benefits are often not realized due to complicating factors like the high stakes associated with the test (Greenblatt, 2019). And while some teacher educators have found ways to reconcile their programmatic values with the demands of the assessment (Miller et al., 2015; Peck et al., 2010), others have seen a narrowing of teacher education practices as departments have sought to align programs and candidates to assessments and accreditation or preparation standards (Conley and Garner, 2015; Cronenberg et al., 2016; Madeloni and Gorlewski, 2013; Parkison, 2016). Scholars critical of the edTPA have urged the field to consider the dangers of edTPA-related cottage industries seeking profits from teacher candidates and preparation programs (Dover and Schultz, 2016; Dover et al., 2015; Henry et al., 2014). Au (2013), in particular, noted the potential for exclusion of teacher educators and institutions from the licensure process and the “sanitization” of department principles. And while the edTPA is not explicitly exclusive of social justice perspectives (Sato, 2014), it is silent on such issues as inviting potential dilution of multiculturalism and an increased preference of perspectives of privilege (Cochran-Smith et al., 2013; Gurl et al., 2016; Madeloni, 2015; Nygreen et al., 2015). As a teacher educator working in a state that had recently implemented the edTPA as a licensure requirement, I became aware of these criticisms, but it became clear that much less was known about just how such influences impact new teacher development. The following section briefly outlines what researchers have recently uncovered about the impact of the edTPA on candidates’ experiences.

Teacher candidates and the edTPA

Much has been written about the impact of the edTPA on the experiences of individual teacher candidates. Early on, researchers in New York and Washington, two early adopters of the assessment, noted the tensions and concerns that the edTPA produced for candidates when attempting to represent their teaching practices in the best light. They felt pressure to represent an orderly picture of teaching and were fearful that scorers would not appreciate the complexities of their individual teaching contexts (Meuwissen and Choppin, 2015). Other research has found that the edTPA helped teacher candidates learn more about their students and their teacher selves (Huston, 2017), enact their own teaching ideas instead of scripted curriculum (Ahmed, 2019), and improve their reflective practice. However, others found that reflective gains were tempered by the edPTA’s cumbersome logistical demands (Margolis and Doring, 2013). Indeed, mentor misunderstandings and the time-consuming nature of the edTPA can be subtractive forces in the student teaching experience (Clayton, 2018), which may be particularly problematic for candidates of color who already face a myriad of barriers to the profession (Petchauer et al., 2018). Furthermore, the developmental and educative gains that the edTPA may produce can be undercut by candidate context – specifically, their cooperating teachers’ understanding of the assessment’s requirements and their capacity to support (Kissau et al., 2019) – and the capacities of a candidates’ organizational context to comply with policy demands (De Voto, 2019). Contextual specificities can lead to compliance- or inquiry-based implementation, which can encourage resistance and narrowed experiences (De Voto et al., 2020), which can cause candidates to find the edTPA an inauthentic picture of who they are as teachers (Shin, 2020), ultimately seeding frustration, fear, and undermining their learning (Kessler, 2019). However, more research is needed to explore the specificities of preservice teacher identity development at the intersection of licensure or evaluation policy.

Theoretical frame: socially constructed teacher selves

My investigation was founded in the understanding that teachers grow and work in deeply complex sociocultural contexts. The development of teachers’ professional identities, for example, is a constructive process implicated by a multitude of personal and social factors, including psychological and interactive experiences (Friesen and Besley, 2013). It is also strongly influenced by a teacher’s professional settings. This work is also agentic, particularly in moments of tension when teachers find themselves renegotiating or defending their sense of identity in relation to their environments or contexts (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2018).

Indeed, power, agency, and culture are deeply significant factors in the construction of teacher identities. To this point, Zembylas (2003) argues that conditions of power influence the trajectory of a teacher’s identity construction. Building upon poststructuralist conceptualizations of agentic identity development within cultural and political contexts, Zembylas expands these theories by considering the role of emotion, saying that teachers’ identities are formed “within specific school political arrangements, in relation to certain expectations and requirements” that set the rules for how teachers should experience and enact their emotions and construct their identities (p.226). In contexts like the one in which my data were collected, policy, culture, and regulation loom large in teachers’ experiences, implicating what they may see as possible, appropriate, or safe. Artifacts or discourses of regulation often communicate model teaching practices and teacher selves sometimes creating tension (Jansen, 2001; Søreide, 2007). Indeed, research has found that teacher identity construction is in constant dialogue with individual political beliefs and classroom practices (Journell, 2008), which have implications for retention or persistence in the profession (Day et al., 2005). The ongoing negotiation of identity development is often shaped by or in friction with institutional factors, including national education policies (Ye and Zhao, 2019). This construction is characteristically dynamic – especially in the early preservice years – and has been found over and over again to be subject to a multitude of factors (Beauchamp and Thomas, 2009).

Educational policies have implications for teachers’ day-to-day realities and professional self-concepts. For instance, Lasky (2005) found that political and social contexts such as school reform have the potential to shape teachers’ understandings of self, purpose, and interactions with students. These influences are made possible by the complexity of education policy enactment. Ball et al. (2012) assert that policy implementation often relies on layered translations and interpretations in school settings, and teachers are likely to enact policy in nonlinear ways. School policy and reform also have the ability to influence a teacher’s emotional experience of their work and their overall feelings of satisfaction and efficacy. For example, Van Veen et al. (2005) found that teachers can feel shame, anxiety, and anger when facing school reform, resulting in loss of satisfaction and engagement. These findings echo results from other inquiries, such as that of Achinstein et al. (2004), who found that school, district, and state contexts influenced teacher recruitment, development, and overall opportunity for professional socialization and growth. Furthermore, I would assert that preservice teachers are acting within a particularly complex professional and developmental reality. Their path to the classroom is implicated by layered policy enactments at the individual, institutional, and professional levels. Simultaneously, they are learning how to teach, how to assert their identities as teachers, and how to situate themselves and their work while under the gaze of diverse and numerous stakeholders.

Therefore, power is also a factor in the construction of teacher identity, especially in the context of surveillance of practice by evaluators. My understanding of power’s constructive influence on teacher development is informed by Foucault, who stated that the self is formed through an ongoing process of incorporating, interpreting, and internalizing disciplinary structures (Foucault, 1977). This process, while subtle in the construction of most individual’s identities, can be described explicitly in the construction of teachers. Evaluation procedures and rubrics, like those associated with the edTPA, operate as discursive tools for communicating norms of practice. They work in coordination with their scoring procedures for vetting and controlling who is fit to be in the classroom.

Furthermore, individual’s choices about self-representation are influenced by regulatory frames or rules that dictate the enactment of self or, in this case, a professional self (Butler, 1990). And although individuals assert agency in the taking up or rejection of certain rules (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2018), the very choices or tools available have been laid forth by sources of power, inviting conformity or resistance (Butler, 1990). Therefore, just the “expectation ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (p.xv), and repeated considerations of a self-reinforce, naturalize, internalize, and manufacture identity. I assert that, in the highly regulated context of preservice teacher preparation, new teachers develop their professional identities within a particularly surveilled environment characterized by the varied audiences for whom they must be vetted before gaining licensure. While some of these stakeholders are colleagues or mentors, others, like the edTPA scorers, are anonymous observers.

In short, context – including policy and reform – can be powerful forces in the professional, emotional, and developmental paths of teachers. As teachers grow into deeper understandings of their work and selves, they do so with repetitive enactments of teacherhood, which are influenced by their social contexts.

Performativity in teacher identity construction

To extend upon the previously cited research on teacher identity, data in this study were interrogated via the concept of performativity (Ball, 2003; Butler, 1990). In the simplest terms, performativity refers to the social representation of self through repeated actions enforced or inspired by power (Ball, 2003; Butler, 1990). The performance of self is, therefore, a consolidation of impressions or actions enacted by individuals in the social context. The concept of performativity, which originated with Butler’s (1990) theoretical work, revolutionized the way we consider sex and gender identities; the reverberations of performativity have found salience in numerous theories of social phenomena – for example, economics (Cochoy et al., 2010) and geography (Nelson, 1999). Among the diverse interpreters of Butler’s theory of performativity are educational political theorists (e.g. Ball, 2003; Ball et al., 2012). It is important to note that such applications, including those in education, are not direct translations. However, an application of the concept of performativity, as first argued by Butler, contextualizes the choices individuals make within rigid regulatory frames.

The designation of teacher, although obviously distinct from expressions of gender, can be considered one complex example of a socially constructed self, influenced by external forces of regulation and power. Butler (1990) asserts that a body is “constructed” but is not fully formed, and there are many modes or disciplines through which one can discuss bodies (e.g. biology, history, psychology, religion, society, culture), complicating the construction of gender. Likewise, I assert that a teacher is never fully constructed and is subject to influence by a diverse set of contexts. Teachers’ understandings of themselves and their practice are dynamic and multifaceted (Beauchamp and Thomas, 2009). There are elements of teacherhood and teacher practice that transcend even the most detailed standards of practice or evaluation. An understanding of these elements is responsive to the many discourses that are at play in an individual’s life – that is, the social/cultural, political/economic, and individual/personal.

The construction of self is, therefore, an interactive, interpersonal process; anticipated actions and repeated rituals of teacher combine to construct the professional identities of teachers. How one thinks about teaching, being a teacher, and the social representations of teacher inform the creation of the reality. Furthermore, preservice teachers are in a constant state of constructive embodiment of what it means to perform and, therefore, be a teacher in complex contexts. And, for better or worse, one very strong message sent to preservice teachers during their preparation and student teaching experiences is the importance of evaluations and assessments.

Performativity and performative policy enactment

Extending Butler’s (1990) ideas, Ball’s (2003) discussion of performativity uncovers the impact of neoliberalism on teachers’ work and selves. Ball states that teachers are subject to market forces, managerialism, and positivism, resulting in performative enactments of teaching. In his discussion of the “terrors of performativity” in British education policy, Ball also categorized teachers’ responses to neoliberal accountability policies into three categories: spectacle, cynical compliance, and game playing. This analysis found that the value placed on categorizing, measuring, politicizing, and labeling teachers caused emotional stress, transforming what it meant to be a teacher. Tensions with the positivistic definitions of good teaching can lead to oversimplification of teachers and their work, and teacher resistance.

The object- and outcome-based language of neoliberal reforms requires that teachers frame their work and professional identities in terms of new ethical systems (Ball, 2003). Numerical rankings and scored rubrics may encourage this kind of thinking in teachers who may sense they “can become more than [they] were and be better than others — [they] can be ‘outstanding’, ‘successful’, ‘above the average’” (p.219). In this way, rubrics themselves can be discursive tools; they carry the authority to communicate values through what is included, what is excluded and how (Clayton, 2017), and what counts as good teaching. While others have noted that rubric-based evaluations and assessments can be particularly reductive (Flynn et al., 2015), more needs to be done to examine the intersection of such mechanisms on new teacher development. To this end, the cases of two preservice teachers below provide contrasting examples of the taking up or rejection of social tools in the construction of teacher self during the construction of the edTPA.

Methods

Knowing that teachers’ identities are socially constructed and influenced heavily by policy contexts, this study sought to examine the following: what are candidates’ perceptions of teacher licensure policy (via the edTPA) during their student teaching experience? What can be learned about their development in relation to this evaluation? While the results of this study should not be seen as generalizable to every context, the questions were intended to tease out the inherent complexities of teacher development the context of neoliberal evaluation policy and practice, and these findings can be seen as transferable to similar contexts (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Data from this study were pulled from a larger investigation of teacher candidates’ experiences with the edTPA. Narratives from two participants were the subject of my analysis due to these two candidates’ contrasting elicitations about their own choices and developmental progression. The teacher candidates participating in this study will be referred to by their pseudonyms, Emily and Mark, and their teacher preparation institution will be referred to as Midwestern University. Emily and Mark attended an undergraduate teacher preparation program at a large institution in the US state of Illinois, and I was their former methods instructor. Emily and Mark volunteered to participate in the study after my time as their instructor had concluded. At the time data were collected, Illinois had required successful completion of the edTPA for initial licensure for approximately four years. Mark was a white male candidate in his early 20s, who prided himself on being politically engaged and critically minded. Emily was a white female candidate in her early 20s, who was engaged in multiple professional and academic organizations for new teachers and university students. Both candidates were strong students who had received academic scholarships and similar distinctions.

Qualitative case study methods guided this study (Yin, 2002). Five to six semi-structured interviews of approximately one hour in length were conducted during the semester with each candidate. I also observed their teaching and collected artifacts from their edTPA portfolios for contextualization and triangulation. My analysis of narrative interview data was guided by the concept of performativity (Ball, 2003; Butler, 1990), and is grounded in current understandings of new teacher identity development (e.g. Lasky, 2005). More specifically, initial themes were developed according to salient issues present for each teacher. These included discussions of development and self, as well as emotional responses, including the tensions they felt between who they were as teachers and what was represented in the edTPA. These themes were then collapsed into more coherent categories with a critical-theoretical lens, informed by the literature on teacher identity, and Ball’s (2003) interpretation of Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity.

The following cases represent two snapshots of preservice teachers. The result of this analysis is a deep dive into what happens at the intersection of neoliberalism and the development of a teacher-self. Therefore, a theoretical treatment of the data is used to organize the discussion of findings.

The intersection of teacher development and policy: the cases of two teachers

What follows are the narrative cases of Emily and Mark and their experiences learning to teach while completing the edTPA portfolio assessment. These cases are represented individually to maintain focus on both participants’ distinct perspectives. These two cases illustrate the ways in which the discourses of power can act upon the construction of new teacher selves and how these teacher selves may be performed in an evaluation context. This examination of the edTPA affords a particular opportunity to unpack the discourses of neoliberalism in interaction with the construction of a teacher self. Emily and Mark’s enactments of teaching for evaluation demonstrate the complexity created at the intersection of power, economic rationalizations, and the social construction of a good or test-worthy teacher.

The case of Emily: evidence of how power “works” a new teacher

Emily identified as a high-achieving student and preservice candidate. She had attended a well-resourced suburban school district prior to beginning her undergraduate path and had experienced successful school experiences throughout most of her life.

Internalization of the discourse of good teacher

The foundation of Emily’s construction of teacher-self was that she was one who generally succeeded in educational pursuits and was distinguished among her peers. Emily demonstrated evidence of having internalized the discourses of accountability, particularly that which defined what counted as good for students and teachers. She believed teacher evaluation to be a necessary part of her professional growth and learning and valued the role of externally implemented tools for a more “objective” evaluation of practice. For example, she said the following about what she saw to be the purpose of teacher evaluation:

[Teacher evaluation is] to improve and inform your practice. We need high standards. [It] puts the label of what was the problem and I'm like, oh I never would have been able to label that, but now I can keep that in mind as a concept or a general thing to continue working on.

Emily saw evaluation and assessment as important tools to demonstrate performance and to keep growing her skills as a teacher. She also showed some evidence of internalizing the discourses of teacher quality, measurement, and improvement, believing evaluation was not only there to help her improve but also to “raise the bar” for the profession. Early in the semester, she stated that “evaluation is important for the status of teachers and schooling in general society.” She also felt that new tools for evaluation like the edTPA could be used to counter arguments that teachers “have an easy job” or are granted tenure regardless of the quality of practice. In this way, evaluation held the profession accountable. Therefore, as Emily constructed and performed the role of good teacher, she did so in accordance with the discourses of accountability. This can be considered an example of how power does, works, or constructs a new teacher through repeated performances of good teacher (Butler, 1990). However, in the high-stakes evaluation context of the edTPA, the discourse of teaching excellence became even more pronounced and eventually problematic for Emily.

While many student teachers felt the pressure to perform well on the edTPA, Emily’s internalization of teacher quality enforcement produced particular stress. She was caught in tension with attempting to negotiate her identity with the edTPA’s new assertions of what good teachers should be (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2018). As evidence of this, she pushed herself to spend “way too much time” on her materials and even developed lessons that were more assessment-heavy than she otherwise would have. She felt this was required due to the emphasis that the edTPA placed on assessment and her understanding of the role of assessment in instruction. Emily spent many, many hours preparing and refining materials for the edTPA, often prioritizing it over other teaching tasks. For example, she chose to summarize the lengthy handbook and rubrics (46 pages in total), to create what she called a “handbook for the handbook” in order to outline the best plan of action. The authority of the test was reinforced by peers in her program from whom she sought advice:

I definitely always knew from the start that it was a huge deal, in terms of the workload …. [Previous teacher candidates said], “This is going to take you forever. It’s one of the most overwhelming things I’ve ever done in my life.” So, I knew I needed to prepare well.

The regulatory power of the edTPA was reinforced by existing discourses about what was acceptable performance for strong students. This inspired Emily to do “everything in [her] power to prepare for this thing,” as she took advantage of other resources available in order to do her best. “[I was] getting information from people who’ve already done it, going to every single one of the sessions on how to do the edTPA, scoring myself on the rubrics.” In this manner, Emily forged ahead, determined to construct the highest quality presentation of her teacher-self for the scorers. However, the more Emily strove for compliance, the more tensions she experienced between the assessment and what she valued in her teaching:

When I actually tried to do this thing, like – fit this [the edTPA’s] [complicated] structure into a real life class that wasn't set up the way I ever would set up [my own] class, and already had all of these [other] things that I needed to do no matter what [for my cooperating teacher], and a rigid schedule with tests – I only had two weeks for every unit, and the units were so bulky with content. So, it was really hard to spend three days on one task, which is what you have to do for the edTPA.

Other researchers have noted the tensions between the edTPA and the student teaching context (e.g. Clayton, 2018; Meuwissen and Choppin, 2015), and Emily’s experience further illuminated these complexities. However, a more critical analysis of Emily’s story speaks to the capacity of the edTPA to act as one more iteration of policy technologies enacting power over teachers. Performative enactments of neoliberal teacher excellence, such as Emily’s efforts to demonstrate compliance with the requirements of evaluation, were internalized and normative but became problematized for her once she was confronted with them in this new professional role.

Eventually, Emily came to feel that she did “not trust the edTPA” to repay her efforts with a passing score. As her experience with the assessment grew, she felt that the lack of transparency in scoring, the complicated directions, and the overall function of the test to “weed out” bad teachers was at odds with what she believed to be the purpose of assessment. Just as Ball (2003) observed in other educators, the overwhelming pressure placed on teachers by reform technologies led to a split between what Emily saw as appropriate for her students and what the test wanted.

Fabrications and tensions

As the semester progressed, Emily felt that some of the edTPA’s expectations contradicted what she believed was best for her students. More specifically, Emily found demonstrations of classroom assessment to be particularly significant due to the emphasis on assessment in the rubrics. So, she attempted to integrate as many pedagogical tricks as she could into her summative assessment (edTPA Task 3), creating an end product that was overwhelming to her students.

I gave them this huge honking assessment … . It was too much. I would never, ever give those assessments to this class again … . It was something I never would have done for this class … . I knew it was too much, but I was like, “I have to do all this for the edTPA.”

In her attempts to perform the role of good teacher (according to the edTPA’s rubrics), Emily worked against her best judgement. Ball (2003) labeled teacher actions like these as fabrications. Rather than producing an authentic teacher self for the edTPA, Emily constructed, or fabricated, a teacher that she thought was more edTPA-worthy – a teacher who focused primarily on assessment of her students and valued rigor in these assessments over relevance or responsiveness. This demonstrates the power of policy in interaction with a teacher’s professional identity construction. Emily was at the intersection of what she felt was best for her students and what she felt was best to present for outside evaluators of her work.

This experience left Emily feeling regretful and frustrated. Butler (1990) might assert that Emily’s feelings of frustration were manifestations of agency while being held subject to power. While Emily could not escape the enforcement of good teacher, she found ways to frame the influence of this power on the construction of her teacher self as inevitable, hence her frequent characterizations of the test as an “annoying” hoop to jump through with “unattainable” standards:

Just like my students, all I cared about is the number. If it’s above passing, fine … . I never want to think about the edTPA again in my life … . I just don’t, I don’t care. Truly, this does not represent my teaching … . Because I was fitting into this mold. I wasn’t able to make decisions that I thought were good for my class. I had to make decisions that I thought were good for the rubrics on the edTPA … . Yes, a lot of it does represent good teaching, but you can’t do all of these things at once.

By the end of her experience with the edTPA, Emily had gone from feeling nervous but ambitious to cynical and annoyed. She seemed exhausted by the effort required to demonstrate her worth as a good teacher and disconnected from the metrics that were being used to determine her worth as such.

The edTPA, with its externally monitored scoring, standardized rubrics, and complicated directions, was an overwhelming manifestation of accountability and economic conceptualizations of teacher quality. This challenged Emily’s original belief that teacher evaluation was a tool created for her benefit. Over the course of the semester, Emily’s efforts to perform accordingly created tensions as she strove to do all that was being asked of her. While she strove to comply with the norms of the test, she felt overwhelmed and somewhat abused by the expectations therein. She ultimately dismissed the importance of the test, despite her initial impulse to do her very best. Emily’s sense of tension or frustration with evaluation demonstrated a sense that the performance of teacher-in-evaluation must become decontextualized or reductive in order to adhere to the narrow, standardized metrics of evaluation.

The case of Mark: spectacle and cynical compliance

The regulatory influence of accountability and standardization were also present for the second participant, Mark. Mark was a high-achieving student, similar to Emily, but was less prone to accept the normative discourses of assessment and school achievement. While it was important to Mark to perform well on the edTPA, he found it less important to perform the good teacher according to the rubrics, finding value instead in his ability to push his students to question common assumptions in social and historical contexts. He, therefore, took steps to keep the edTPA at a distance, constructing a stance of critical disinterest in the test. He characterized his approach to the test as “just jumping through hoops” to get his teaching license.

My analysis of Mark’s experience with the edTPA found evidence of cynical compliance and spectacle to be his common responses (Ball, 2003). Like Emily, Mark experienced tension between the test, his teaching context, and his developing teacher self, but he stressed less and asserted that he was simply constructing a facade of teaching for the edTPA scorers. While Mark was just as subject to the discourses of efficiency and management as his classmate, Emily, his agentic construction of teacher self, was characterized by distinguishing and distancing his “real” teaching from the edTPA. For Mark, power is still doing teacher, but in a quite different fashion.

Cynical compliance

Ball (2003) identified cynical compliance as one among several strategies employed by teachers who are “fabricating” or performing teaching as they scrutinized or inspected for quality. Mark described his perspective on teacher evaluation as “cynical” early on in the semester, saying this test was a part of a larger trend of distrust in public school teachers and institutions. This perspective had implications for his performative enactments of evaluation procedures and tools. Rather than internalizing power, Mark engaged in an almost parodied tone of accountability and objectivity language when discussing his edTPA. He sought to insert cynical distance between his individual development as a teacher and such larger corporate reform pressures.

For example, Mark used an ironic tone when discussing the use of research to justify his instructional choices in the edTPA written commentaries. In our conversations about these issues, he often used terms such as “research-based,” “effective,” and “best practice” with a tone of sarcasm. With a note of irony, he said things like, “[g]ood practice has shown us that … ” or, “[i]t is more effective to … ” and “[t]here is research behind … ” when he described his choices for the edTPA. He used a sarcastic tone saying this, as if to indicate his cynicism in these measures of effective practice. He also mentioned several times throughout the semester that what he really learned from completing the edTPA was how to “prove” his teaching fitness for outside viewers. For instance, although he felt that he already knew what his students understood, he chose to be quite obvious in using “edTPA lingo” in his lesson plans and written reflection. All of this was done with a posture of suspicion regarding the purpose and function of the edTPA. Although he understood how some student teachers who came from “bad programs” could learn from the edTPA, it was a “waste of time” in his case. Yet, he was still questioning whether it was even possible to “really tell who’s the better teacher?”

Spectacle

Mark’s framing of the edTPA also demonstrated an example of what Ball called performative spectacle (Ball, 2003). More specifically, Mark chose to construct a spectacle of vocabulary instruction in order to easily demonstrate his understanding of teaching academic language. His edTPA lesson plan included skits for students to perform vocabulary terms, but he did not repeat this instructional method in his subsequent teaching and disliked the strategy all together. Mark also pushed the “explicit” teaching of vocabulary to a full three days of instruction. Like Emily, Mark felt pressure to “drag out” his teaching to three days in order to adhere to the test requirements. This kind of discrete language teaching was uncommon for Mark, who said he usually preferred to focus lessons on discussing complex social issues and big-picture trends such as global wealth disparities. A three-day deep dive into vocabulary was simply not Mark’s style, but he felt compelled to act out this type of teaching in order to fulfill the requirements of the edTPA. It also seemed necessary to construct an artificial segment of instruction because of a lack of fit with his cooperating teachers’ curriculum:

I felt like my required curriculum for the school wasn’t necessarily suited for the edTPA. I mean, I could’ve waited, but I wanted to get it done and over with, and the curriculum was human-environment interaction and the basic geography, and it really didn’t learn itself to the edTPA. Especially like the reading or things like that. That’s why I was trying to focus on the vocab. I mean … I didn’t think that they wanted kind of thing.

Mark also demonstrated performative spectacle in his choice of instructional methods for the edTPA. The implication of the edTPA rubrics and requirements for him seemed to be that he should be seen on video interacting directly with his students. Because he did not have a mentor available during filming to provide a close-up recording of his interactions with students, Mark chose to do a great deal of teacher-driven, direct instruction. Mark even mentioned the importance of showing his objectives and agenda on the board while he was filming his edTPA lesson. He said he normally felt that objectives were sufficiently communicated verbally, but he wanted to make sure they were clearly displayed on video for the edTPA scorer. This is a particularly salient example of spectacle; he needed to be able to show himself talking to his students in a manner that befitted the edTPA, performing vocabulary teaching for the camera. Interestingly, Mark also extended this particular spectacle of teaching to meetings with his university supervisor. He said he was “not worried” about it but was still afraid of “arbitrary judgements” of his teaching. So, he made sure to dress well, got a good night’s rest, and ate a good breakfast when he was being evaluated. It was almost as if to say these were the things he had learned to do on a high-stakes test day, and that was how he should perform preparation. He extended this to interactions during his edTPA video, finding that his spectacle of teaching was overly formal and not as relational as his “regular” teaching:

I was probably more formal than I would be because I knew I was going to be recorded. I was more – I wouldn’t say uptight, but more formal for sure … . They don’t really focus on [relationships with students]; they do say respect and rapport, but that’s just such a fake thing. [However,] I’ve noticed that that might be the most important thing in teaching this year, is rapport with your students … . I’m pretty relatable, I think. But I think that’s probably a strength of mine that didn’t get represented well [in my edTPA] because I had to do all this other stuff.

Discussion and conclusion

Mark and Emily were in the process of learning how to engage with rapidly revolving policy contexts, leveraging agency on the situation in whatever means were available to them. Their interpretation, translation, and enactment of policy was complex – subject to significant impositions of power, yet dynamic and agentic. As represented in the literature on policy enactment, these candidates were “engaged, coping with the meaningful and meaningless, often self-mobilized around patterns of focus and neglect, and torn between discomfort and pragmatism, but most are also firmly embedded in the prevailing policies discourses” (Ball et al., 2012: 625). Furthermore, while negotiating a complex policy landscape through performative enactments of teaching for the test, Mark and Emily were in the midst of constructing their own identities as teachers, which were demonstrably implicated by the edTPA’s requirements.

The findings from this study support the argument that although preservice teachers may be otherwise characterized as acted upon by policies or other sources of control or power, they are active agents in their own development, integrating new learning from multiple sources, and negotiating their professional selves at the juncture of numerous historical, political, and social discourses ( Tatto et al., 2017 ). Their perceptions and behaviors provide insight into this negotiation as it relates to one of the more significant influences on their development: evaluation.

Put simply, these candidates made particular choices about how to represent themselves and their practice in order to demonstrate their overall quality and productive capacities. Mark was developing into a teacher who took a critical, if not cynical, stance to education reform and market-oriented mechanisms. He, therefore, found it useful to situate himself and his teaching in opposition to these reforms, finding it easier to roll his eyes at the hoops he was required to jump through than to internalize the stress of the test. Emily, on the other hand, struggled slightly more as she worked to negotiate her values as a teacher with what was being presented (via the edTPA) as criteria for what counted as good teaching. These two cases illuminate the tensions, frustrations, and machinations that take place at the intersection of teacher development and neoliberal reform policy. This data complicates our understandings of the interaction among these forces, showing a process of agentic negotiation. There is complexity and, therefore, nonlinearity in policy enactment at the level of the individual teacher (Ball et al., 2012). Context matters, and preservice teachers’ actions, interpretations, prior knowledge, perceptions, and experiences yield significant influences on their enactment of teacher education policy and their performative construction of teacher selves.

Butler explains that the performative creation of self is a regulated process of repetition. She describes this as “taking up the tools where they lie” (1990: 145). The manner by which one “takes up” the tool is determined and constrained by the tool itself. This concept can be applied to teacher development and evaluation. The “tools” at work are both literal and figurative in this case. Discourses of accountability and efficiency run through teacher evaluation tools and the student teachers’ responses to them. The content of evaluation rubrics, for example, acted as both productive and punitive, shaping the work these two student teachers did in the classroom while holding implications for their licensure. Mark and Emily were aware of these controlling discourses, as evidenced by their performative shows of teaching. As (Applebaum, 2004) asserts, performativity is demonstrated in the ascribed categories produced and reinforced by normative enactments. Student teachers are ascribed with the category of “teacher-in-evaluation” and performed that role in manners that they saw fit. Unfortunately, as they focused on the logistical and practical strategies for constructing an edTPA-worthy teaching vignette, other, more democratic aims for their teaching were sidelined, exacerbating the overall deemphasis of social justice concerns common to other neoliberal initiatives (Molla and Pham, 2019).

Butler (1990) explained that her purpose in putting forth the theory of performativity was to illuminate some of the assumptions we make about gender. This could be said of my work as well. I am striving to examine some of the assumptions we make about teachers, particularly related to evaluation and technical-managerial definitions of teacher quality. Teacher evaluation is a field fraught with tension due to the competing ends embedded within modern evaluation tools and procedures. Just as teacher evaluation tools are used to facilitate formative development of teacher practices and professional growth, it is now also used as a gatekeeping tool; this is the case in each student teacher’ preparation program. The same is true for the edTPA, and these competing functions become even more pronounced in this preservice context. Each tool is built upon a collection of normative and naturalized assumptions about how a good teacher performs. This is true despite the intended flexibility and somewhat open-ended nature of the portfolio and observation-driven performance assessment formats. Standardized and rubricized measures are intended to be applied across contexts. So long as there are high stakes (e.g. licensure or determinations of fitness to teach) attached to tools like the edTPA, there will be the perception of a template, a norm, or an ideal toward which teachers should strive.

The field of teacher education should take pause to consider how and why student teachers may position themselves as resistant or in opposition to high-stakes summative evaluation procedures like the edTPA. The cases of Emily and Mark demonstrate the stress and frustration that occur when the values or constraints of the test are in tension with what is supportive, relevant, or valued for new teachers.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/orpublication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Meghan A. Kessler

Meghan A Kessler, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Illinois Springfield. Her research and teaching interests include early career professional learning, preservice teacher evaluation, and social studies teaching and learning. She has published in the areas of teacher subversion and resistance of educational reform, the edTPA licensure portfolio assessment, and teacher educator learning. She also specializes in social studies education, social studies teacher education, and civic education. Prior to pursuing her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, Meghan was a 6–12 grade social studies teacher.

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Performative enactments of teacher evaluation: Two preservice teachers and the edTPA

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Accountability and standardization in teacher education

Accountability and the edTPA

Teacher candidates and the edTPA

Theoretical frame: socially constructed teacher selves

Performativity in teacher identity construction

Performativity and performative policy enactment

Methods

The intersection of teacher development and policy: the cases of two teachers

The case of Emily: evidence of how power “works” a new teacher

Internalization of the discourse of good teacher

Fabrications and tensions

The case of Mark: spectacle and cynical compliance

Cynical compliance

Spectacle

Discussion and conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References