Keywords

Social Studies Content Challenges

To consider the evolution of performance assessment in general and edTPA in particular in the field of social studies teacher education, it is necessary to begin with the content challenges that have confounded social studies from its origins. In the 19th century, the small percentage of students who attended high school tended to study history, geography, and government. The study of history was dominant, and the emphasis was on a Eurocentric chronological study that was intended to foster patriotism (Evans 2004). The emergence of the disciplines of economics, sociology, and anthropology and the formation of disciplinary professional associations allowed for the development of the idea of an interdisciplinary content area that would foster citizenship and begin to address the social problems of a modern industrial society (Jenness 1990). From its inception, there has been a related and ongoing uncertainty within social studies as to the proper balance between the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and the study of social problems (Jennes 1990; Thornton 2008; Evans 2004). Overlapping with this uncertainty, a political issue quickly emerged: whether social studies should serve patriotic ends by promoting a traditional conception of the national culture for pedagogy.

Standards, High-Stakes Testing and Classroom Practice

In New York State (NYS), prior to the issuing of standards, the Department of Education had a long-established state curriculum and a 100-year history of state high-stakes tests in U.S. History and Global Studies/History (Grant 2001). In New York State, the high-stakes social studies exams are aligned with the state curriculum (New York State Education Department 1999), not the state standards (New York State Education Department 1996). Although the state standards contain aspirational language about developing students’ capacities for analysis, the portion of the state curriculum utilized in creating exam items is only the entry in the state curriculum listing historical events, rather than other sections analyzing those events. An emphasis on lower order thinking in state social studies examinations is a national phenomenon. A recent study has shown that in four states containing 20 % of the secondary student population in the United States (i.e., New York, Texas, Ohio, and Virginia) the high-stakes state social studies exams almost entirely ignore higher-order cognitive performances and overwhelmingly test recall of social studies content (Dewitt et al. 2013). There is national evidence that high-stakes tests that emphasize recall of content often influence social studies teachers to emphasize lower-order transmission of curricular content (Au 2007; Misco et al. 2011). New York State students and at least one fifth of United States students are, on the basis of this evidence, likely to encounter social studies education focused on lower order transmission.

Research on social studies teaching consistently reports a long-standing tendency to transmit social studies content without much student engagement or interest (Schug et al. 1982; Cuban 1993; Goodlad 1984), a practice that often neglects students’ capacities to be critical thinkers and change agents (Rugg 1923; Counts 1932) or capacities for higher level cognitive learning (Saye and SSIRC 2013). Observers have noted differences between the official curriculum, which has been defined as the curriculum that is “devised in advance by authorities beyond the classroom” (Thornton 2008, p. 16) and the curriculum that is generally taught in classrooms. One summary of the research noted that classroom social studies teachers have two overwhelming mandates, to control student behavior in the classroom and to cover the content (Barton and Levstik 2003). The states’ desire to transmit a shared national culture may result in a curriculum in which the teacher narrates a national heritage rather than engaging students in learning disciplinary understandings (Nokes 2013; VanSledright 2008). Social studies textbooks support and help to promote such teaching, as they are typically written in a passive and omniscient voice, relating events as inevitable rather contingent. History is presented as a mono-vocal narrative rather than a contested series of interpretations, bounded by evidence, and based around compelling questions (Holt 1990; Paxton 1999).

Opening up classrooms to student inquiry and requiring students to conduct research and present their findings to classmates also requires a teacher to depend upon student collaboration and cooperation, and presents particular challenges in classrooms with low achieving students (Rossi and Pace 1998). A teacher committed to big ideas in history (Grant and Gradwell 2010) or civic education (Epstein 2014; Hess and McAvoy 2015) may demonstrate more ambitious teaching and learning, but these teachers have been exceptional, in New York State and in national research studies. New York secondary schools mirror this long time national pattern of shaping classroom teaching around basic familiarity with historical events or people as they appear on state tests, and covering that content, rather than critically engaging with disciplinary knowledge. Secondary social studies departments in New York State commonly create curriculum or “pacing” calendars that mandate teachers to shape their classroom lessons around specific content items that, based on prior tests, are viewed as likely to be tested again in the current year. In some social studies departments in New York State, there is a more or less explicit understanding shared by teachers and administrators that teachers will cover the tested curriculum rather than emphasizing the analysis embedded in the state standards (Grant 2000). More creative teaching, or efforts to engage students in an in-depth analysis of a particular issue or engage with contemporary events may be pushed out of the required courses and found in elective courses that are not tested by the New York State examinations (Gerwin and Visone 2006). As a consequence of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top initiative, the New York State social studies exams have become a means to assess schools’ annual progress as well as teachers’ efficacy. As students’ test scores increasingly determine teachers’ evaluations and employment, teachers are often under pressure to teach towards the lower-order thinking on the state tests.

The Common Core State Standards for literacy, and for social studies, require more in-depth reading and analysis than the “coverage” curriculum represents. In recognition of this limitation of the current curriculum, New York State utilized Race to the Top funds in order to write a new “framework” that introduced language of social studies practices. Without eliminating content, New York State reorganized the curriculum around “key ideas,” building coherence by organizing material around concepts. For example, instead of learning about Muslim caliphates on one day and the Mongol invasion on another, “students will compare and contrast the empire-building processes of the Mongols and the Islamic caliphates, noting important disruptions in other regions” as illustrative of a key idea about political states and empires (New York State Framework 2014, p. 13). In addition, NYS has awarded a $3 million grant to a consortium of social studies curriculum developers to develop a toolkit of sample inquires keyed to the Common Core State Standards and the NYS Social Studies framework document. These inquiries represent ambitious teaching and learning with depth, analysis and materials far beyond a typical social studies unit. However, New York State has not yet revised the social studies Regents examinations that emphasize lower order recognition of broad factual coverage. Until the required graduation examinations are aligned with the new curriculum, teachers and schools are likely to prepare for the exams rather than teach in innovative ways that support the new curriculum.

Social Studies Content and the Standards Movement

The standards movement beginning in the 1980s and 1990s did not resolve the questions of the proper aims and content of social studies. In response to the 1992 Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which called for the development of national content area standards that omitted social studies, the National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) responded by unveiling curriculum standards that delineated the social studies content that should be taught at the K-12 levels (NCSS 1994). Although the document includes examples of assessments and descriptions of lessons for each of the disciplinary strands, at its core are ten thematic strands that mirror the established social science disciplines. Theme one, culture, equates to anthropology, theme two is time continuity and change, equating to history, and so on through economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and geography. Only the last three themes, science technology and society, global connections, and civic ideals are more integrative in nature. In 2010, the NCSS issued new standards that maintained the ten themes from the 1994 document (NCSS 2010). The 2010 document contains more elaborated examples of instruction and assessments to assist teachers’ with the formidable task of translating the ten themes into social studies curricula. In addition to curricular standards, the NCSS has issued documents entitled the “National Standards for Social Studies Teachers” (NCSS 1997, 2002), which, unlike the teaching standards for math and ELA, provide limited guidance for implementation.

Because nationally recognized social studies teacher education programs must demonstrate that they prepare candidates who are able to develop curricula to teach in each of the ten strands, the NCSS thematic strands carry significant institutional weight. Not surprisingly, this requirement has been criticized by some social studies teacher educators as being unrealistic and, in trying to do too much, as undermining other worthy goals of social studies teacher education (Wineburg 2005).

In 2013, NCSS adopted a new standards document, the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards, also known as the “C3 Framework” (NCSS 2013), which narrows the required social science disciplinary content to civics, economics, geography and history. Perhaps in recognition of the difficulty inherent in asking teachers and teacher educators to address the wide range of disciplinary content in earlier documents, the C3 standards are designed to align social studies with the emphasis contained in the Common Core standards for English language arts. The C3 standards emphasize the need to provide students with opportunities to engage in inquiries pertaining to civic life (the third “C” in addition to the Common Core’s college and career readiness) and to do so in such a way so as to draw on the literacy skills promoted by the Common Core State Standards.

Complicating matters for social studies teacher educators is that although programs must show evidence that they are preparing candidates to teach each of the ten NCSS themes to receive National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, now Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, CAEP) certification until at least 2017–2018 when the C3 framework will be the basis for national accreditation. Furthermore, state departments of education have issued their own content area standards, which diverge to a greater or lesser extent from the NCSS standards. For instance, the New York State standards do not include anthropology, psychology, sociology, and international relations. However, the standards do require 21 credits of history and geography. New York State teacher education programs must accommodate a national mandate for broad social science knowledge and a state mandate focused on history.

Professionalization: The edTPA in Social Studies as an Aspirational Document

The edTPA, introduced to New York State in 2013, emphasizes practices requiring generally more analytical thinking in social studies classrooms. Many of these mandated practices have been called for by scholars whose work has been widely associated with efforts to raise the intellectual quality of teaching in general (Tyler 1949; Wiggins and McTighe 2005; Erickson 2000) and social studies and history teaching in particular (Brophy et al. 2008; Grant 2003; Levesque 2008). In light of the long-standing plea for depth over breadth in social studies (Newmann 1988, 1991), one desirable feature of curriculum design that has been incorporated into the social studies edTPA handbook is the requirement that candidates develop a series of lessons that are conceptually aligned with targeted understandings and core concepts (SCALE 2014). While there has been a tremendous effort within the field to encourage social studies teachers to teach conceptually driven units, the edTPA initiative is the first to explicitly require that preservice teachers enact a conceptual unit in a classroom. The edTPA handbook incorporates a number of scholars’ recommendations for social studies education, including: the requirement that teacher candidates incorporate Common Core literacy standards in their learning segments (NCSS 2013); that candidates develop a rationale for their learning segments (Hawley 2010); that candidates design assessments that allow students to demonstrate their conceptual learning of central focus conceptual goals (Avery et al. 2002); that candidates assess students’ abilities to perform higher order thinking skills (Newmann 1991); and that teacher candidates assess whole-class learning patterns as well as individual students’ learning (Gallavan 2009). In these requirements the edTPA picks the side of higher-order disciplinary knowledge over rote transmission of social studies content in a univocal narrative, and requires different practices that diverge from the default pedagogy of social studies as described earlier.

In this sense, the edTPA is a force for professionalization, as defined in this volume, because it emphasizes an active role for social studies teachers in determining classroom instruction. Rather than a PowerPoint or worksheets that cover the names and events mandated by the next topic on a pacing calendar, the edTPA social studies handbook sets forth a vision of the teacher as choosing disciplinary concepts integral to some specific content; identifying academic language necessary for understanding the concepts (not simply content vocabulary); selecting sources at different levels (e.g., primary, secondary); and devising strategies based upon student prior knowledge to help students articulate multiple interpretations of the content.

A useful innovation for social studies programs is that the edTPA provides a means to initiate the long-called for increased understanding and interaction between schools of education and schools as sites for clinical experience (Zeichner 1999). Candidates cannot simply reproduce the “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie 1975; Shulman 2005) that many have seen as a significant obstacle to improving instruction in social studies and other content areas. Looking at the plethora of standards documents, which have provided incoherent and unwieldy guidance for the field, it is clear that an advantage of edTPA social studies is that it might provide the means to engender greater coherence among stakeholders. In the past, our social studies program utilized classroom observations rubrics that emphasized the use of historical evidence for higher order thinking and making judgments about events at different levels of analysis (Zevin 2007). Yet, candidates frequently told supervisors that their cooperating teachers required that they cover a set amount of material at a pace the precluded reflection and analysis, and supervisors were left on their own to negotiate the type of pedagogy they will be able to enact with their cooperating teachers. Supervisors can now point to the NYS requirement that candidates pass the edTPA, which entails developing at least 3–5 lessons around a central focus and teaching fewer topics with more depth and analysis.

Our program anticipated that the introduction of edTPA in social studies would be extremely challenging and, given the long-noticed resistance of pedagogy to change (Cuban 1993), quite likely frustrating. The implementation of the edTPA might be challenging because it requires that teachers develop conceptually focused learning segments to address the unwieldy curricula mandated by the NCSS and state agencies. Developing conceptually based curricula would be amount to an entirely unprecedented change (Cuban 1993; Thornton 2008). The introduction of the edTPA might be frustrating because given the current demands of curriculum and testing, at least in New York State, our program anticipated that without direct intervention from the state (which was not forthcoming) to focus and reduce the required curricula, cooperating teachers would pressure students and supervisors to interpret the language of edTPA in such a way so that the state social studies curricula will be transmitted to students.

In this tension between classroom practice focused on transmission and classroom practice focused on disciplinary knowledge and analysis, of crucial importance is not simply what the edTPA handbooks say, but how submissions are scored. Because implementation of the edTPA in 2013–2014 took place without exemplar units, faculty experience with scoring units, and multi-year piloting efforts, we did not know how actual edTPA materials would be scored. For instance, if a traditional unit topic in social studies such as “the Cold War” is accepted by edTPA scorers to be identified as the central focus of a three to five lesson learning segment, then it is not likely that there will be a change in the traditional transmission of social studies content, given the lack of conceptual understanding required for this central focus. It is unclear whether a chronological treatment of social events, that most likely follows a textbook narrative (Thornton 2008), will be accepted as an adequate learning segment by edTPA standards. If so, once enough cooperating teachers have passed through the edTPA with transmission based units the edTPA as enacted by scorers, and despite the aspirational language in the handbook, will support low-level transmission of a heritage curriculum. It will take more than one year of experience with the edTPA to reach a conclusion, and scoring protocols and rubrics may also be adjusted, so any verdict on the edTPA will necessarily be provisional, limited to a particular moment in edTPA policy. In that spirit, we now turn to a case study of the first year of edTPA in New York State in a social studies program.

The Implementation of the edTPA in a Secondary Social Studies Teacher Education Program

In the years prior to the consequential edTPA implementation, the vast majority of students completing the program obtained initial state certification by September 1 following their May completion of the program. Nearly all students achieved certification by the following January. Some undergraduates needed an extra semester to earn their BA degrees, and in any given year roughly 10 % of the students in social studies have needed to retake the social studies Content Speciality Test once. Students who did not pursue initial certification usually did so out of their own choice. Some graduates opted to attend law school, and others found teaching positions in private schools and so did not need to pursue certification. A few program completers relocated and utilized the college coursework to seek certification in another state. None of the program factors changed in 2014, but there were far different certification rates after the edTPA, and two new examinations—the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST) and Educating All Students (EAS)—became certification requirements.

In spring 2014, twenty-two student teachers in the post-baccalaureate initial certification program were placed into classrooms. These are people who already have a BA and are switching careers, so they are driven to obtain certification. They were also compiling an edTPA portfolio based solely on rubrics and the handbook, without any exemplar cases for them to consider. Six of the 22 students, 28 % of the students, did not submit an edTPA by December 2014, half a year after completing student teaching. Three of the students took and failed one of the other certification examinations first. This pattern of deferring the edTPA, the most expensive test, until after passing all other, less expensive tests, is evident in our other programs. Only one post-baccalaureate student submitted the edTPA before taking the other three exams. One student, holding foreign citizenship, had no clear path to employment, and he did not take any exams at all, including the edTPA.

An even smaller percent of undergraduates submitted edTPA portfolios in social studies during the first year of consequential implementation. Ten out of 22 students submitted an edTPA portfolio by October 2014, while one more submitted in November. Just over half the student teachers completed this requirement, and the half who did not were unable to pursue certification. Four of these ten undergraduates needed the fall 2014 semester to complete the BA, so they were not eligible for certification. All four chose not to submit an edTPA portfolio, and by the end of 2014 only one of those students had submitted an edTPA portfolio. This student submitted the edTPA portfolio only after taking all three of the other examinations.

In sum, by the end of 2014, fifteen out of 44 student teachers, or 34 % of teacher certification candidates in social studies, had not submitted an edTPA portfolio (Table 6.1). There was an edTPA submission rate of only 66 %, just two-thirds of all students in the social studies program. Because only two students in the program failed the edTPA, the pass rate is 93 % (27 out of 29 candidates who submitted an edTPA passed). It is unclear how to interpret this number, and what it means for our program. If we assume that the candidates who submitted an edTPA were the stronger students, or the better self-regulated and self-efficacious students, or the students whose classrooms most resembled what the edTPA requires, or the candidates who were simply willing or able to collect permission slips for filming, it is possible that the students who did not submit an edTPA would have been more likely to fail or submit an edTPA that could not be scored. We do not know how many of the fifteen candidates who did not submit an edTPA portfolio would have passed and how many would have failed. Several students shared that financial considerations have prevented submission. Although the state provided a limited number of vouchers to pay for edTPA submission, far more were requested than were available. Apart from finances, another issue preventing teacher candidates from submitting is the inability to collect artifacts, which might be related to the challenges of obtaining consent forms from students or technical difficulties.

Table 6.1 Pass/fail results for the edTPA in secondary social studies education
Full size table

The edTPA, in these specific ways (expense, uploading classroom video and student work and sending it out of state, permission slips, scheduling filming, collecting and copying student work) privatizes student teaching supervision. Prior to the edTPA, candidates fulfilled all requirements for student teaching in great part by being in the classroom and sharing those experiences with the cooperating teacher and the college supervisor, who provided immediate feedback without the requirement to digitize student work. Any classroom videotaping was strictly informal for formative candidate feedback. Any problems that occurred with the placement were resolved by the supervisor, or the student teacher was moved to another placement. Student teachers reflected on their own lesson planning, their teaching, and student learning that resulted from student teaching. Supervision occurred directly in the classroom, the evaluation of which was based upon the shared experience of an entire class period and repeated four times over the course of a semester. Student teachers reflected on lessons they experienced with the supervisor, and with artifacts that could be examined jointly. This model stands in stark contrast to the edTPA, for which a candidate’s reflection on the student teaching experience takes place in isolation with no guidance, formative assessment, or support. Privatizing the evaluation of student teaching by moving the assessment outside of the college to the website of a multinational corporation has introduced significant expense, difficulties, and uncertainty for our teacher candidates. Entirely apart from pass rates for the edTPA, the mere existence of this expensive, private certification requirement removed one-third of our candidates from eligibility for certification.

Professionalization

The edTPA is intended to change clinical practice by forcing student teacher candidates to look beyond their own lesson planning, to provide differentiated instruction, and to attend to the level of student learning that results from their instruction.

Impact on Clinical Practice

The edTPA has changed our social studies education program in myriad ways. For example, the requirements of the edTPA led some of our candidates to negotiate with their cooperating teachers for greater depth in some classrooms. It provided the faculty with a language to demand more as well. In prior years, when a cooperating teacher refused to allow a greater depth of teaching, faculty and student teachers rarely confronted the teacher. Student teachers feared that a confrontation would anger their teacher ruining the experience, while faculty supervisors sought to avoid needless conflict with school personnel. Supervisors spoke up as advocates when student teachers agreed that they wanted a stronger role, or would design different curriculum. Few student teachers spoke up that way, and instead we usually moved a candidate to another placement. The edTPA has in some instances changed that dynamic as student teachers are willing to advocate for the in-depth teaching they need in order to submit an edTPA portfolio. For example, in fall 2013 during the Initial Clinical Experience two student teachers at a large (3000+ students), traditional high school reported that their cooperating teacher said that the candidates could not teach a set of lessons built around a single central focus as defined in Curriculum and Assessment. We contacted the Assistant Principal for social studies with whom we had already discussed the edTPA requirements. She explained to the cooperating teacher that, indeed, these students could teach for a week around a single central focus, and that the pacing calendar was advisory.

Student teachers completing their Initial Clinical Experience in middle schools were also able to teach units with greater depth. One student spent a week on the Salem Witch Trials with a gifted and talented class, used the lesson plan and other artifacts for her edTPA and was the first student to submit a social studies edTPA, and scored in the mastery range. Inspired by her curriculum, which she presented in class, another student teacher with a middle school placement proposed to his cooperating teacher that they, too, spend a week on the Salem Witch Trials. His cooperating teacher suggested that Salem could take up, at most, five minutes of class time, and that a week would be needed to cover Northern, Southern, and Middle colonies. The college supervisor spoke to the cooperating teacher, and ultimately the student was allowed to teach a one-week unit focusing just on the New England colonies, a compromise position. We also asked why, if this was a middle school, there was so much pressure to cover curriculum, since middle school students did not take any statewide coverage based social studies tests. It turned out that this middle school is attached to a high school, and they had switched to teaching a year of American history in ninth grade, and then having the students take the U.S. History Regents exam at the end of ninth grade, after three straight years of American history. Although the test would not be given for another two and half years, this teacher was already in a hurry to cover material that would be tested, rather than spending time on Salem. Although the school allowed our candidate to spend a week teaching about New England, the principal requested that we not place any student teachers with them in the spring, or the coming year. The edTPA requirements for depth, as our student and then our supervisor articulated them, raised too many concerns about their pupils’ success on the Regents exams. After many years of consistent placements, we had no students in that school in 2014–2015.

These three cases, where conflict developed with a cooperating teacher directly over the edTPA requirements, were the exceptional cases. In other schools candidates were able to manage a change that accommodated the edTPA requirements without a conflict, perhaps because they did not make such dramatic alteration to the curriculum. At a school that defines itself as open to inquiry, but still gives the Regents exams, the cooperating teacher of one student required him to cover the same amount of material that she had planned for that week. However, instead of teaching on lesson about the 19th century nation state of Italy, and one lesson about Haiti, and one lesson about revolutions in Latin America, she allowed him to redesign the week as a small unit with a central focus on 19th century nationalism, and have groups working on each of the nations/revolutions that she would have taught separately. This created much greater coherence in the classroom and allowed each group to work in greater depth, since they had several days to look at the document packets he put together for each national revolution. This is the type of adjustment we coached students to make prior to the edTPA, yet before the edTPA we had much less success getting student teachers to insist that their cooperating teachers allow them such latitude.

These experiences with the edTPA underscore a point made above when describing policy issues in social studies, that teaching three to five lessons with a central focus, requiring students to engage with texts, either secondary or primary sources, write something formative, obtain feedback, and then proceed to a summative assessment that responds to the feedback, is not common practice in most social studies classrooms. Teaching 3–5 lessons that meet the edTPA requirements can be a shock to the system in schools that promote a “cover the topics” (coverage) approach to curriculum. We required students to teach 3–5 lessons around a common focus twice during their fall placement in an Initial Clinical Experience- once for assignments in the Curriculum and Assessment Course, and a second time to obtain edTPA submission materials. We know that students did, in fact, negotiate with their cooperating teachers in order to teach in greater depth, assign more documents and writing, record their classrooms, and collect student work samples. In academic year 2013–2014 students enacted in the classroom more of what we demanded in the syllabus than they have in past years, because those are demands made by the edTPA.

As a result of the experiences with the edTPA we changed our Spring 2015 student teaching syllabus to require our 2014–2015 student teachers to conduct at least one class focused around whole class student conversation. Rather than focus on a lecture or group work, we want our supervisors to observe a whole class discussion, or Socratic seminar, simulation, debate, trial, town hall meeting, or other form in which students speak for the greater part of the class, and for which students have spent some time preparing. We are willing to pull students from any classroom that does not agree to meet that standard. This requires us to work with supervisors and cooperating teachers to help student teachers build the capacity to conduct the kinds of discussions we believe necessary in good social studies classrooms, both to help develop student understanding of social science concepts and to develop the civic skills necessary for a healthy democracy.

The edTPA does not encourage a signature pedagogy in social studies, in the sense that a lecture or simulation will serve equally well for an edTPA unit. However, in insisting that three to five lesson maintain a single focus on a social science concept, and that students work in a formative fashion before they summatively demonstrate what they have learned in that series of lessons, the edTPA handbook in social studies articulates a version of professionalization that is at odds with much current classroom practice. Requiring teacher certification candidates to enact such practice as a requirement for certification sets one standard for professionalism. It raised the bar for our student teaching candidates in classrooms taking a “coverage” approach to the curriculum. Ultimately, after watching some of our candidates insist to their cooperating teachers that they had to teach differently, we changed our own program requirements to include a “conversation observation” that expresses our sense of a critical component of social studies education in a democratic society.

Performance Assessment

Student teaching is, by definition, only an approximation of actual teaching, since the student teacher is never alone with a class while that experience of being the only adult in the room is a defining characteristic of the current American educational system. No matter where he or she positions himself, in the back as a passive observer, in a small group or assisting a particular student, or at the side of a certification candidate as a co-instructor, the cooperating teacher is always, inescapably in the room. The college supervisor, too, must be present to observe, and his or her presence may inspire the students in the classroom to behave better (or worse) or work harder, and the lesson may be more elaborate, better prepared, and show the certification candidate in a better than average performance. Student teaching may show a great deal about a candidate, but it is not the same experience as the future role of a teacher alone as the instructor of record.

Acknowledging that limitation, our program still includes a substantial student teaching experience as preparation for teaching. We currently place student teachers in an Initial Clinical Experience of 150 h in a middle or high school in the fall semester, followed by a 190–240 h student teaching experience in a middle or high school (the opposite of the fall placement, so that students have both middle and high school experiences in our program) in the spring semester. Students are observed by a cooperating teacher who works with that student on a daily basis and is the one who provides direct feedback on lesson plans and work with students. College supervisors observe the student teacher 4 times during the semester, and currently hold seminars that meet six to ten times a semester for the students they supervise. Teacher certification candidates are, therefore, formally observed eight times over the course of the academic year.

In addition, our candidates take a course entitled Curriculum and Assessment in Social Studies in the fall semester while they are in the Initial Clinical Experience, and in the spring semester while student teaching all social studies candidates take an educational psychology course. Assignments in both courses draw upon their classroom work. On this basis of observed classroom performance and reflection on that performance, a series of faculty, supervisors, and cooperating teachers judge whether or not the performance that a given candidate demonstrated in the classroom placements deserves initial certification. Our criteria, and samples of some student reflections on the performance, are a basis for national bodies to review and accredit our programs.

The edTPA collects artifacts of three to five lessons within that two semesters of performance. University based supervisors who observe in the classroom, and school based cooperating teachers who host student teachers are the ones who observe and rate the candidates’ live performance. Like any artifact, the edTPA is a partial representation of a lived experience. In exchange, it offers a national rubric (as distinct from a national standard, as states set different cut scores) for assessing the candidates’ performance.

There are important ways that edTPA focuses student teacher attention on very specific matters that they should attend to, directing their attention to certain aspects of the performance in order to assess them, and in this sense it functions to increase professionalism and can enhance student teaching. Completing the edTPA also involve attention to the details of the rubrics simply in order to score all of the points in each of the repetitive sections, and in this sense it is merely a test. The high-stakes adoption in New York State, and the standardized scoring of a national rubric require a focus on the details of obtaining points in each rubric at the expense of the student teaching experience itself. In addition, candidates are worried about presenting lessons that are too untraditional for fear that they will not score well with the anonymous outside reviewers.

A contrast between two aspects of our students’ first sections of the edTPA, concentrating on the classroom context, illustrates the distinction between genuine reflection on the performance, and responding to all parts of the rubrics. A review of 8 edTPA portfolios submitted in May-June revealed that as a general rule our candidates identified prior academic knowledge, but did not distinguish students’ prior knowledge from cultural or community resources. These are, according to the edTPA rubric, separate kinds of prior knowledge and to earn top scores you need to describe both. The one effective description of relevant cultural knowledge came in relationship to a unit on the leadership of George Washington that happened to occur in a Catholic school. The middle school students in the Catholic school, whether or not they were Catholic themselves, possessed familiarity with worship and images portraying moments of devotion. This allowed them to view Arnold Friberg’s famous 1975 painting of Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge and identify that he was praying. This aspect of the rubric highlighted an authentic classroom issue—by and large our students look for academic content knowledge rather than considering community or cultural resources as sources of prior knowledge that might conceptually boost student understanding.

Our student teachers missed other points in the section on school context when they failed to discuss their central focus while writing about the students in the classroom. They are required to discuss their students’ prior knowledge in relation to the central focus, even as they describe the context for learning. This is a test-wise issue. Candidates fill out a form about their students that includes questions about whether or not the class is tracked, and the name of the textbook and other details. Then there is a chart asking for the number of students with specific learning needs in the classroom (struggling readers, English Language Learners, gifted, IEP) and the modification each student receives. The chart and guide on classroom context do not contain any slots for prior knowledge. Since the candidates go on to describe their central focus afterwards when they write about their lessons, and then also write about student prior knowledge in the commentary on their instruction (SCALE 2014, Task Two, prompt 3b) they often overlooked the prompt (SCALE 2014, Task One, prompt 2b) to write about prior knowledge when describing their central focus. Students who fill out information for their edTPA submission incrementally during the semester, as they are involved in the performance, naturally fill out the context for learning early in the semester, perhaps prior to knowing their central focus. When they write up their lessons for the edTPA, and look at the forms with all of the information on their students’ learning needs, without any slot for prior knowledge, they may miss the prompt to go back and include that element in writing about their central focus. They know that they have been writing about prior knowledge in Task Two, the reflections on instruction. Anyone who forgets to document prior knowledge in writing about a central focus may have fallen victim to a technical aspect of the forms and instructions in task one, rather than failing to attend to prior knowledge during the planning and teaching itself. No matter what happened in the classroom, or is contained in the lessons or elsewhere in the submission, the candidate cannot score above a 3 on Rubric Three.

Another rubric produced mixed results. Although candidates do describe students as struggling students or English Language Learners or having IEPs when they provide the context for learning, they can be fairly vague about how they differentiate for them when describing their lessons (Task One: planning commentary) or how they taught (Task Two: instructional commentary). For top points on the Instructional Commentary and the Assessment (Task Three, Rubrics 11–15) sections, candidates must refer in specific and convincing ways to their entire class, to individual students, and to groups within the class. They rarely mentioned those groups. It is not clear that requiring generalizations about groups of students in the classroom more authentically represents the student teaching performance than talking about modifications for individual students. Either way the certification candidates differentiated the materials for multiple learners. A student teacher who handed out differentiated materials to groups of students, but only wrote about differentiating for one individual student will score lower than the actual performance deserves. The performance itself may have contained the differentiation necessary to demonstrate teaching skill, while the documentation of the performance may fall short. A supervisor and cooperating teacher, both present in the classroom, know if groups of students are addressed, even while discussing one representative student. In these instances, the edTPA’s assessment of artifacts and representations misses parts of the performance itself.

The edTPA emphasizes an aspect of social studies student teaching we value, an emphasis on multiple interpretations supported by evidence. Most of our student teachers, and most of their cooperating teachers do not easily or naturally challenge their students to consider different interpretations of documents, counter-arguments to their own position, or call on other students to offer a direct disagreement with another student’s point, based on evidence, and help the two students and the class explore that evidence and consider which of the two interpretations it supports. Yet such instruction, and a related focus on counter-argument in writing, is needed to reach the higher rubric scores. Here, the edTPA aligns well with our program.

Candidates struggled to address another edTPA question about what to do in the future to support students in developing the skills, vocabulary, and disciplinary abilities that candidates deemed lacking when they analyzed the student work. This reveals a weakness in teacher planning, particularly when it is based around a series of topics in history to be delivered in succession, and the goal of lesson planning is to devise a series of activities that engage students each time, but each assessment mimics the Regents examination. This doesn’t lead to the planning the edTPA emphasizes, in which teacher analysis of student work on one assessment leads the teacher to devise specific supports in the next lesson to address student weaknesses. Here the edTPA identifies a genuine teaching challenge.

We believe that we can push candidates towards teaching more material in greater depth with more attention to supporting students as individuals and groups, and following up on feedback by telling them that they NEED to teach another in-depth segment that builds on those same skills and concepts (keep that central focus!) in order to adequately describe how they supported students (individuals and groups) in the next unit.

We had a strange finding from our students who were in middle schools that allowed document work and greater depth, or schools that did not give the Regents exam, or courses that did not end in a Regents exam and were taught in a more authentic fashion. It turns out that the 3–5 lesson segment is not really long enough to encounter, in authentic terms, all the learning that the rubrics request. Two examples demonstrate this point.

A teacher in a classroom with a high level of authentic instruction (for a definition of authentic instruction see Saye and SSIRC 2013) spent a month on the narrative of Frederick Douglass. Her students read in-depth, debated issues Douglass raised, looked at multiple documents around the issue of slavery, and wrote analytical papers stemming from the book that they planned, drafted, and revised extensively. But the edTPA requirement that a candidate write about 3–5 consecutive lessons, rather than allowing 3–5 lessons drawn from that entire month on Douglass, made it impossible to write about that entire experience and it was excruciating to try and identify a three to five lesson segment with an adequate number of formative assessments prior to a summative assessment to demonstrate the ways that the candidate checked for understanding (edTPA Task One) in ways that supported student work on the summative assessment (edTPA Task Three). Revision usually took place across a longer period of time. In the end she abandoned all efforts to write about the month spent on Douglass, and instead wrote about five lessons on Reconstruction. This student received a 3 for every single rubric despite teaching with greater depth and attention to student learning than many of her peers. It simply was not teaching that was easily captured on the edTPA construct.

In a second case, a teacher in a seventh grade classroom studying the first half of American history, from colonization to the Civil War without any statewide assessment, developed a careful curriculum emphasizing the American colonists as a group of British (and other) settlers in North America interacting with other European settlers, Native Americans, and playing a role in international conflicts. His documents included Native American accounts, as recorded by the British, of grievances with the British colonists, and conflict over land. Over two months he helped students develop an understanding of the Americans as part of a larger struggle over land and empire in Europe and the New World. Alongside the narrative of a struggle for American liberty and rights of representation, he developed a complementary interpretation of an American colonial struggle for land within a larger British Empire. Following the French and Indian War, the British stationed 10,000 British troops along the Appalachian mountains to prevent colonials from moving west and renewing conflict with the Native Americans, as the British promised their Native American allies in the war against the French. Since these were 7th grade students he developed this idea about land slowly and deliberately over two months, patiently exploring many documents.

This larger emphasis on empire, and an American struggle for liberty that included a demand for no taxation without representation and also a right to settle land despite Native American claims or current treaties, did not fit within the 3–5 lesson edTPA frame. He agonized about how to choose lessons and what to submit. Ultimately, he chose three lessons from the wars of the American Revolution. Two compare later heroic representations of two battles with the less heroic actual events at the time (at Lexington the American minutemen fled when the British fired, and at Trenton the Americans snuck across the Delaware at midnight to capture drunken Hessian mercenaries celebrating Christmas Day). A final lesson, on Yorktown, showed Washington’s victory, but also demonstrated that there were many more British soldiers still stationed across North America. The British decided to cut their losses and stop fighting the war, rather than losing the ability to continue fighting had they chosen to do so. Ultimately, he submitted this as a unit around a common focus on the “myth of the American revolution” emphasizing that students at different levels of ability or understanding could write about a difference between events at the time and a later painting in the final essay, even if they did not grasp the larger point that the British chose to stop fighting. This partial description of the curriculum, that pulled together much bigger and more important ideas about land and empire, took longer to conceive of than actually planning and teaching the lessons. The student taught this material in the fall semester, but did not submit until the summer while we tried to arrive at a satisfactory description of a curriculum that drew upon two months of work while only describing the final three lessons.

On the other hand, as we feared, while it is difficult to represent authentic instruction that develops over many lessons, the edTPA submission with the highest score for evaluating student learning was constructed around a topic, The Cold War, with endless Cold War details, but no idea or social science phenomenon. As written, the edTPA emphasizes the need to have social studies instruction include facts but have students utilize those facts (evidence) to develop arguments and interpretations about important social science phenomenon. We have experienced some considerable success scaring our students into thinking that they need to teach with greater depth about an idea, a social science phenomenon, a persistent issue, and not about a topic. One might teach about “counterinsurgency” or “guerilla warfare” in a lesson segment about the Philippines American War, or about Vietnam. Those are generalizable phenomenon, rather than just topics. The Cold War edTPA raises a number of concerns, and if SCALE has achieved a high inter-rater reliability in their scoring, we need to presume that this is representative of what they will accept, rather than an exception.

The student wrote that the central focus of the submitted lessons was, “To analyze the origins, foreign policies, doctrines, foreign conflicts, and impact of the Cold War on international relations” and explained that formative assessments during the lessons would check “To see how well they are obtaining content information through these cooperative learning activities.” The summative assessment was “a thematic essay based on the central focus question, how did the Cold War shape international relations?” The problem with this central focus, from our perspective, is that it simply states a topic, the Cold War, teaches a bunch of facts about it, and then asks students to return the facts in an essay.

This is not a central focus around an idea, or a historical question, such as the inevitability of the Cold War, or the nature of a “Cold War,” or something about its major dynamics, or how close it came to destroying the planet. In contrast, consider the (lower scoring) central focus of the unit submitted on Reconstruction, “Given what the interpretation of freedom was after the Civil War, were the ex-slaves indeed free?” This question takes a specific concept, the nature of freedom, and asks students to define it and use evidence from their study of Reconstruction to take a stand and argue.

In addition to presenting a topic rather than examining a social studies phenomenon, the “Cold War” edTPA submission that obtained the highest score on Task Three of all submissions we reviewed wrote clearly about the achievements of the students in ways that did not always seem to correspond to student work. As one example, the teacher candidate explains that student two successfully responds to language demands in the Cold War essay when the student “uses language demand to compare and contrast NATO and the Warsaw Pact.” In the submitted work sample of student two’s essay, what the student does is simply list the names of the countries in the NATO Pact (citing a document) followed by a list of the names of the countries in the Warsaw Pact (citing a document). The next sentence explains that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact possessed nuclear weapons. From our perspective, the student work lacks analysis. It neither compares nor contrasts, it simply lists. We suspect that neither the edTPA scorer nor the edTPA backreader read the student essays and in scoring the assessment section (Task Three) relied primarily on the candidate’s description of the student work. This contrasts unfavorably with the way that supervisors and classroom instructors sit with teacher certification candidates to review and discuss student work.

Our concern is that our ability to demand greater depth and a central focus on an idea will be compromised once enough cooperating teachers can tell their student teachers that they just used a topic, a bunch of textbook writings, and then some fancy descriptive writing to pass the edTPA. Since the edTPA cannot directly assess the actual student teaching performance itself as a cooperating teacher or classroom supervisor can, but instead collects artifacts partially representing the actual performance, and then the candidate description of that performance, it is vulnerable to these outcomes.

Policy

As we have contextualized the edTPA within the broader debates over teaching and learning in social studies, we begin with a similar contextualization of our social studies program. The program advocates specifically for inquiry-based education, stressing more in-depth teaching than coverage, active learning experiences, disciplinary knowledge and civic engagement. The types of learning experiences we advocate are broadly shared by the social studies teacher education profession and reflected broadly in recent publications aimed at classroom teachers over the past several decades (Rubin 2012; Hess and McAvoy 2015; Hess 2009; Kobrin 1996; Gerwin and Zevin 2010; Zevin and Gerwin 2010; Lesh 2011; Barton and Levstik 2004; Epstein 2008; Turk et al. 2010; VanSledright 2010; Wineburg et al. 2013). We are guided by research findings that multiple choice questions do not test intended history cognition (Reich 2009; Wineburg 2004; Breakstone 2014; VanSledright 2013) and that the Document Based Essay question on the Regents Exam is an inauthentic representation of historical work with primary sources (Grant et al. 2004). Our programs views the NYS Regents Examination as a graduation requirement teachers must address, but not a goal guiding instruction, and any passing score from 65–100 is fine. We rely on recent research findings in a study that included extensive sampling in NYC and NYS demonstrating that students with more authentic social studies instruction scored slightly higher, and did no worse, on high-stakes tests of lower order thinking, despite the emphasis on depth over covering many facts in those classrooms (Saye and SSIRC 2013).

Our classroom strategies involve helping teachers consider an entire semester, rather than a single lesson, the framework for instructional planning, allowing them to carve out space for more in-depth inquiry, research, writing, revision and debate on some days, while providing a broad-framework at other times. A teacher might allow three days for a “sort” activity that acquaints students with one-paragraph descriptions of fifty events associated with the coming of the Civil War spanning 1789–1860, including provisions regarding slavery in the Constitution, the invention of the cotton gin, Westward Expansion, and the election of Lincoln. Having provided a broad overview, teachers might spend the next weeks looking in-depth at a few issues, such as the way that President Jackson asserted federal authority over North Carolina in a conflict over the tariff, but aided Georgia in Indian Removal policy that the Supreme Court argued conflicted with federal power. This approach to curriculum and teaching puts our college and our student teachers in opposition to the commonplace “coverage” curriculum typical of most American social studies instruction (Barton and Levstik 2003; Nokes 2013). In NYS it aligns us with the Common Core requirements for deeper engagement with textual analysis, extended writing, and thinking. In some instances it can put us at odds with our own student teachers, as well as local assistant principals and cooperating teachers, who fear that failure to cover particular facts may result in fewer students passing the Regents Examinations in social studies, or in lower Regents examination scores.

The edTPA, in advocating that three to five lessons occur around a single common focus and stressing the exploration of an important social science phenomenon, appears to require some in-depth teaching, and to the extent that it does so it is aligned with our program. Confining its interest to only a single 3–5 lesson sequence, the edTPA ignores the need, in social studies, for semester long planning, and to this extent it is not aligned with our program. Anyone can include a unique set of practices for 3 days with minimal impact on larger classroom patterns. The edTPA aligns with some of our teaching goals while ignoring others.

In addition, our city is a complex policy environment with over 900 public high schools open to any student across the entire city. This includes a consortium of over 30 schools with an exemption from most NYS Regents Examinations, including both the United States and Global Regents Examinations. Our college maintains a close relationship with a number of schools in this consortium. We have run grant-funded professional development projects with these schools, and we regularly place some student teachers in these environments. In the year that the edTPA was introduced, we had at least two student teachers in consortium schools. The edTPA might seem to fit well with schools that emphasize performance based assessments, including at least one in-depth research paper each year read and reviewed according to consortium-wide rubrics. However authentic instruction doesn’t always fit simply into a 3–5 lesson box; in one consortium school the students read Frederick Douglass’s entire autobiography across a month, and the writing and revision process unfolded across more than 3–5 lessons, and so did not fit well within the strictures of the edTPA.

One policy option, using the edTPA as a formative assessment, or introducing its use gradually across the state, allowing teacher education programs time to experiment with different forms of implementation without risking their students licensure or their own accreditation, has been utilized in every other state participating with edTPA, including Washington State, the only other state in 2013–2014 using the edTPA as high-stakes requirement for licensure. They had experimented with the edTPA as a formative measure for four years before requiring a specific score for certification. This approach was not considered in NYS. The state piloted the edTPA in Spring 2013 and required its consequential use for May 2014 graduates. In addition, NYS set the highest cut score in the nation. Moreover, NYS did not offer certain options, such as local scoring, that would have allowed faculty who chose to participate to evaluate their own students’ edTPA submissions in conformity with SCALE’s norming requirements. This option would have permitted at least some faculty members to gain greater familiarity with the way that SCALE interprets the rubrics. This could have helped significantly given the lack of any exemplar materials when the edTPA was introduced. In addition, since students receive limited explanatory feedback at all with their edTPA, merely the score achieved on each rubric, neither students nor faculty know why a particular edTPA submission received a particular score on a specific rubric. Had NYS pursued local scoring, an option SCALE makes available to states, teacher education faculty who participated would at least have been able to explain to students why their submissions received particular rubric scores.

In sum, the policy environment described above included a longstanding national history of social studies instruction covering a great deal of historical material while asking students mainly to memorize and manage this information (Nokes 2013) rather than engaging in higher order analysis. State standards and national standards emphasized interpretation over memorization. Social studies examinations, including the local New York State Regents however, remained rooted in lower order thinking. The college social studies program emphasized inquiry, at odds with much local practice. The edTPA itself has at least two policy contexts. First, the edTPA social studies handbook and rubrics themselves, that emphasize social studies concepts but only document 3–5 days of instruction. Second, the decisions that New York State made (and SCALE accepted) around statewide consequential implementation in a single year.

Privatization in Social Studies Education

All prior social studies testing material has been publicly available, at least in sample form. This is true at the P-12 level, where all past social studies Regents Exams (and statewide social studies examinations that were given in 5th grade and 8th grade) are available on the web or in an archive in their totality with scoring rubrics, sample essays at different scoring levels, and even the directions to be read out loud during test administration. This level of transparency has allowed the research community to openly share ideas and investigations about the examinations. One researcher had students think aloud while taking a test with 15 Cold War questions drawn from past Regents examinations, and presented evidence that for a number of questions knowing the factual information the question was intended to test did not reliably lead students to the correct answer, but “testwise” skills more reliably led to accurate answers (Reich 2009). Teachers can discuss questions and examination topics. This transparency is appropriate for a required statewide examination. The Content Speciality Exam in social studies lacks this degree of transparency. No past examinations are available for review. However, a full sample test, with questions, answers and their explanations, and a constructed response question with answers at different scoring levels are publicly available online. In contrast, all edTPA handbooks and exemplars are proprietary.

The edTPA diverges from scoring practices for P-12 social studies tests that have two essays. In New York State local teachers score those exams. Teachers within a school used to score their own students, and recently scanning and scoring over computer has allowed the state to have teachers score tests from students at other schools rather than their own. In both cases teachers from within the same public system score the Regents exam essays and understand the basis for scoring decisions. To set the cut score for a Content Speciality Test, New York State convenes a panel of teachers, teacher educators, and content specialists to review each question on the CST and determine how the least capable but still worthy of certification teacher candidate would perform on that question. Without commenting on the validity of such a cut score system, it is local, publicly involves the stakeholders, and leaves a record of the judgments on each question. In the case of the edTPA, although SCALE sets the scoring metrics for each handbook and maintains the interrater reliability involved in scoring each handbook, the private for-profit Pearson Corporation selects the scorers. Rather than selecting local scorers, the Pearson selection process chose scorers from across the nation. Although they claim that scorers are all qualified teachers in the subject area, we understand that to mean that the scorers have the appropriate certification area license, but that seems to be the only requirement.

Prior to the introduction of new certification examinations in 2014, completing teacher education coursework led almost directly to certification. Students completed a number of one-shot seminars on topics such as detecting abuse and neglect of children, preventing drug abuse, or responding to bullying. They also took fairly inexpensive tests in their content area and tests of pedagogic knowledge. At $300 the edTPA is a far more expensive examination. In addition, the students must pay $100 to redo a section of the test, or $200 for score verification, which does not rescore the examination but ensures that it was scored in a psychometrically reliable fashion. Certification examinations, combined, now require hundreds of dollars to simply take each examination once. Failing and retaking an exam costs more.

Privatizing the evaluation of teacher candidates has another impact, the uploading of material including the work of public school students and classroom video of secondary students to a proprietary website. These videos are then transmitted out of state, to wherever someone reviewing the edTPA submission is located. The files are in compressed format that makes uploading and sharing them much simpler than longer files of full classroom lessons that have been used informally and formatively in teacher education coursework. The videos and use of student work raised significant privacy concerns. Candidates must obtain written permission from students’ parents to include the children in an edTPA video, and to submit student work in an edTPA sample. In classrooms where only a few students return those forms, a candidate may only be able to include those few students in the edTPA video submission, a handicap for the candidate. Moving the certification process away from the local teacher education program and to a remote national system, and uploading all of the secondary student work and images and turning it over to a private company posed complicated privacy issues, and the need to comply with a complex permissions process put some certification candidates at a disadvantage.

Affordances and Constraints for the Program in Social Studies Education

In ways similar to those described in Chap. 4 in relationship to mathematics, the edTPA has reinforced our programs’ message that social studies instruction should not consist of a series of facts about one topic after another, but rather should consist of consideration, in sufficient depth to allow for student thought, investigation, and analysis, of important ideas and concepts in thinking about human society. Our program emphasized concepts and inquiry. Our candidates often reacted by pointing out that their future students needed to know facts to pass the Regents examinations and graduate high school, and that the teachers they had observed and their cooperating teachers covered one thing after another without time for student debate or research projects. The edTPA added legitimacy to our demands for depth and ideas. Rather than unreasonable academics demanding the impossible we became the allies of our students as they sought ways to convince their teachers to allow them more in-depth lessons. With our students’ advocacy, supported by our supervisors, we achieved specific breakthroughs as described in the earlier portion of this chapter, in students successfully negotiating to a week (rather than for five minutes or a day) on student inquiries about witchcraft in Salem, religious beliefs in colonial New England, democracy and imperialism in Athens, and nineteenth century nationalism in one country.

In addition, the edTPA brought a renewed focus to student prior knowledge. In our experience, many of our attempts to focus candidate planning on student prior knowledge were met with the reply that “students don’t know anything” about any of the material being taught, and certainly most student teachers focused on prior academic knowledge. In rubric three the social studies edTPA requires some attention to prior academic learning to earn a 2, and a 3 requires justifying learning tasks in terms of prior academic knowledge or cultural knowledge—a 4 requires description of both academic prior knowledge, and existing personal/cultural/community assets. Although only the candidate in the Catholic school successfully met the requirements for a 4, the requirement changed candidate resistance to searching for prior knowledge into a willing search for prior knowledge. It bears mentioning that this not only aligns with the importance of attending to student schema and misconceptions as stressed in cognition studies (Donovan and Bransford 2005) but is also central to culturally relevant pedagogy, a central concern for social studies educators (Branch 2005).

As reported in earlier chapters on mathematics and English education, we adjusted our syllabi in the Curriculum and Instruction course that accompanies the Initial Clinical Experience by eliminating longer curriculum assignments. Perhaps to a greater extent than in other programs, we adjusted our syllabi to assist our teacher certification candidates by requiring them to write about the context for learning in their school, and to craft one entire 3–5 lesson inquiry, complete with video and student work, to teach and reflect upon as a rehearsal for the edTPA. Our candidates had to teach at least two such inquiries around a central focus, since one was turned into us, and another one was used for the edTPA. They were free to share video, lessons and student work during class that might be used in an edTPA, but they had to have materials to hand us for grading that would not be used in the edTPA. Writing roughly the entire process associated with the edTPA took up the great majority of the possible assignments one could assign in the course. This may be an extreme reaction to the edTPA, but it bears remembering that there was no time to integrate elements of the edTPA across the various courses in our program. We had a quick look at the edTPA in a spring 2013 pilot, and then our 2013–2014 students were faced with a consequential implementation and no cut score had been set. Our curriculum narrowing claimed two significant intellectual victims, semester long planning, and civics, each at the heart of our understanding of effective social studies implementation.

One curriculum assignment at the center of the Initial Clinical Experience tackled the problem, previously described, that social studies curriculum typically consists of a series of topics, without any explicit attention to how students develop disciplinary knowledge and skills across the semester. For example, in NYS 11th grade American history includes as topics the Mexican American War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and Vietnam. Typically, each war might be taught as a unit, or a part of a unit, and would be assessed by a test that resembles the US History Regents exam. The documents or readings assigned for each war, and the test, would all be of comparable difficulty, and the assessment would not change either. One can describe this in edTPA terminology as requiring the same language function each time.

To varying degrees, depending on the instructor, the Curriculum and Assessment course in social studies had a curriculum assignment that attended to planning across an entire semester. These assignments didn’t require 65 lessons, but rather some lessons from different units, and assignments across the semester. This allows beginning teachers to plan explicit teaching of a specific disciplinary skill at a beginner level, and to increase the complexity across the semester. As an example, one might begin with helping students read a single document, and work on drawing inferences from the evidence in one single document, taking into account the source, perspective and purpose of that document. A different assignment might ask students to contextualize a single document. A later lesson might have students compare two documents and see if the documents corroborate each other, or if they present conflicting accounts of the same event. Later in the semester, students might analyze several primary sources with attention to sources, context and corroboration, and then read a portion of an essay by a historian and use their evidence to assess the historian’s claim. Planning for a semester also lets teachers think about what all of those wars might have in common, and what they might want students to learn about how America fights wars generally. In order to prepare for the edTPA we completely discarded this semester long approach, and merely required two sets of 3–5 lessons around the same central focus. So while students may gain from the edTPA, they also lose powerful teacher preparation we used to give them.

A central purpose of the social studies is preparing citizens and addressing social problems. The edTPA handbook lacks the word citizenship, the word civics appears on page one in a footnote to the National Standards for Civics and Government, while the word news is entirely absent and “present” appears on page 28 only to require a candidate to identify which students present in a video are the focus students and which are not. The edTPA places no value on connecting history or social science to the present, addressing civic issues, or addressing contemporary news sources. Instruction involving any one of these goals might fit into the edTPA rubrics, but they are not valued as such. Yet our program explicitly values a notion of authentic intellectual work (Newmann and Associates 1996) that stresses connectedness to the present, or consideration of persistent historical issues (Saye and Brush 2006; Saye and SSIRC 2013). Past methods curriculum used to include requirements for explicit connections to the present, not simply “current events Fridays,” but integrated into the curriculum. Candidates in a global studies course might prepare assignments that asked students to study Islam in the news now as well as the past, or ask their students to consider contemporary revolutions when studying the French or Russian Revolution. In an election or primary year we would require all student teachers to prepare some election curriculum and showcase election related work during the Curriculum and Instruction course, whether it was middle school student ads for various candidates or a high school student analyzing an issue. While instructors will speak with student teachers about elections, there will no longer be a common emphasis across syllabi on engaging with state and national elections. The edTPA, as currently addressed, simply takes up too much curriculum space, and doesn’t value it. Indeed, the Common Core wants to prepare students for college and careers, but not as citizens.

Concluding Thought: Gambling It All on a Losing Wager

As a performance assessment, the edTPA implies that if teachers demonstrate they can do the tasks that the edTPA measures, then all will be well in the classroom. In the case of social studies, the edTPA measures candidates’ abilities to assess prior knowledge, differentiate instruction, identify language functions, plan 3–5 lessons around a central focus and language function, and assess student learning (or lack thereof) to plan for next steps. The edTPA does not measure semester-long planning or civic engagement. The implication, particularly in states that adopt the edTPA for consequential use, is that in the absence of the edTPA, teacher education programs have not prepared candidates adequately in these areas. As detailed above, the edTPA has had, for our program, significant affordances in having students push harder for opportunities to teach in-depth.

Yet there have been significant constraints, some related not to the edTPA alone but to the policy environment. New York State has rushed to require teachers to pass the edTPA with the highest cut scores in the nation without making other changes in social studies, such as eliminating the low-level recall multiple choice Regents exams in history. This lopsided policy represents a significant gamble that the primary reason why social studies instruction does not look more like the rubrics on the edTPA is because teachers have never learned how to teach in that challenging fashion. This is a huge bet, and decades of research in social studies education suggest that it is a losing proposition.

Barton and Levstik (2004) noted, “there simply does not seem to be any evidence that teacher knowledge is the variable that predicts practice” (p. 251). They cite studies showing that a history teacher who earned a history Ph.D. and knew about social history approaches and post-modern debates still taught a “single story” course, and that education students who developed complex understandings of history in a historiography course and took a methods course that combined imparting history content with pedagogical know-how still aspired to tell good stories and put clear notes on the blackboard. They conclude that as long as teachers are expected to cover the curriculum and maintain control, pedagogical change is unlikely. Wineburg and Wilson (1993) make the same point, that it is not the certification standards prospective teachers must meet that matter, but the daily conditions that determine what happens in the classroom:

Setting new standards for teachers is one thing; providing the conditions for their attainment quite another. For teachers on a vast scale to attain such standards, schools as we know them would have to change. Yet we wonder, for example, how many policymakers would consider a school day in which a third of a teacher’s time was devoted to reflection and ongoing study of the discipline he or she teaches? A school building that provided teachers with a carrel of their own removed from the hubbub of ringing bells and other demands? An approach to teacher in-service that looked less like an EST seminar and more like the sustained learning activities that characterize true professional development? (p. 764)

As this paragraph suggests, many school structures work against teaching with historical depth, rather than covering material that may be on the test. The lack of community for teachers who instruct classrooms in this manner prevents them from sharing the burden of cutting the curriculum, developing alternative assessments, or crafting lessons similar to those that the edTPA describes. The lack of time built into a teaching day for those activities is also unavailable for staying abreast of current historiography or perusing the vast and increasing number of sources that on-line archives have made available, or the latest work on teaching. Moreover, the tests in social studies are aligned with covering a great deal of material, rather than testing disciplinary reasoning or in-depth readings.

The edTPA focuses on teacher knowledge of content, student literacies, and academic language function as though nothing else occurs in schools. Although the “context for learning” form asks candidates to describe “any special features of your school or classroom setting (e.g., charter, co-teaching, themed magnet, remedial course, honors course) that will affect your teaching in this learning segment” and to list “any district, school, or cooperating teacher requirements or expectations that might affect your planning or delivery of instruction, such as required curricula, pacing plan, use of specific instructional strategies, or standardized tests” none of those lists have any impact on the scoring rubrics, so a candidate may list them but no scorer takes them into account. Rubric One, focused on planning, requires lesson plans to tie facts to concepts, interpretations and arguments and there is no clause such as “UNLESS these students failed the state test once and they are reviewing facts to try and pick up enough multiple choice questions to pass” or “unless it is after May 1 and teachers are reviewing all of 9th and 10th grade to prepare for a state history test based largely on recalling facts.” SCALE provides no checklist to state officials for determining how many of those factors a candidate can survive, or at what point it simply is not feasible for a state to require the edTPA in a particular subject unless the state changes its mandates or school funding structure. SCALE lacks a form for candidates to use in assessing a state test for alignment with the edTPA secondary social sciences history handbook, in order to conclude that a classroom focused on preparation for those exams will impede a candidate from designing instruction that will consistently score over a “2” on the rubrics and prevent the candidate for reaching the “cut score” required for certification. Although the edTPA allows a candidate to list factors, since they do not affect the rubrics, the edTPA as it is scored focuses on candidate performance to the exclusion of the structural factors that also impact teaching.

Adopting the edTPA as a high-stakes measure for certification is to gamble that social studies instruction covers facts without linking them to ideas because teachers don’t know how to do otherwise, rather than looking at tests, curriculum mandates, and other demands of schooling. Focused solely on requiring teacher candidates to produce a particular performance over three to five lessons, the edTPA is likely to lack predictive validity if, as prior studies in social studies demonstrate, it is broader schooling structures rather than candidates’ pedagogical content knowledge or dispositions towards teaching that determine how they approach the classroom. The edTPA may usefully push our candidates and cooperating teachers towards more authentic instruction for 3–5 lessons, at the price of narrowing the teacher education curriculum, undermining academic freedom, and reducing the number of teacher candidates who complete certification requirements. In the absence of changes to the nature of social studies assessments, or the work conditions Wineburg and Wilson (1993) describe, or an elimination of simple curriculum coverage as a goal of instruction and greater acceptance of noisy classrooms as Barton and Levstik (2004) argue, the edTPA is unlikely to change classroom instruction once teachers are certified and subject to all of those pressures in their own classrooms. Education faculty need to re-align entire sequences of courses to ensure that candidates have the precise experiences that generate the necessary artifacts for edTPA, and cut back on other valuable assignments to allow student teachers to complete the portfolio. Teacher certification candidates must now focus on 15 rubrics that could hinge on their ability to supply historical literacy instruction, a positive aspect of edTPA, without addressing the barriers they will face as teachers if they attempt to make this their daily curriculum, and not a special 3–5 lesson interruption in traditional teaching.

In the next and concluding chapter, we build on prior chapters’ examinations of the impact of the edTPA in the content areas of mathematics, English, and social studies in order to consider the affordances and constraints of edTPA for teacher preparation overall.