“Big Ideas”

Shared in the Breakout Sessions during the June 18, 2014

Emerging Evidence Promising Practices Conference

Common Coreand Implication for Teacher Education

  • Content area ELA Literacy and Academic Language should be applied across disciplines
  • Using engageNYwebsite and collaborating with partner teachers to teach Common Core
  • Helping new teachers advocate for themselves and their students, using professional language
  • Good teaching is good teaching regardless of curriculum. Accessing engageNY web site
  • How do we help our students access the Common Core: read them, including the introduction and appendices

edTPA: Topics and Lessons Learned Session

Strengths

  • Made us stronger with focused content
  • edTPA has helped us become stronger instructors
  • providing moral support
  • allowed us to be focused on what is exemplary teaching (teaching standards for the profession)
  • Question for SUNY Buffalo: If no curriculum mapping is being done as part of edTPA, then what is the basis for future mapping?
  • Nature of university and school partnership: edTPA forced faculty to rethink the strength of their partnerships with K-12 schools.
  • What are the changes coming in the new edTPA handbook? Can you send us a copy of the changes so we don’t have to “discover” them?
  • Remarkably similar stories were told
  • edTPA has educative value
  • Leverage to do what we believe, and what classroom teachers need, to meet their students’ needs
  • Movement from reactive to more thoughtful
  • Alignment between edTPA/National Board/New York State Teaching Standards
  • All presenters modeled the value of using the edTPA as a focal point of inquiry
  • Appreciated attention to and analysis of Academic Language
  • Appreciated attention to and support for residency in keynote
  • Thanks for mentioning that we can provide support for edTPA

Challenges

  • Partnership. Mentors.
  • Cost is prohibitive.
  • We need information on the breakdowns of the results of NYSTCE exams
  • Need exemplars of videos to share with students
  • We need more info on why students earned a 2 or 4 on a given rubric–the language of the rubric is not enough!
  • Programs presented were mostly graduate [programs]. Want to hear more about undergraduate challenges
  • State Education needs to be aware of conflicts (e.g., state conferences) of organizations when planning scoring, content, etc. meetings. Need more “heads up” when inviting people to attend scoring/content review type meetings
  • We were hoping to move beyond basic edTPA information [and learn] more on mechanics of working with mentor teachers
  • What happens to retake students beyond the safety net? Superintendents’ perceptions? The safety net may not be so safe for students who don’t pass – it may be a red flag to employers.What were some of the efforts to work with mentoring/cooperating teachers? How to make it work for schools? The impact of students “taking over the classroom” – what was the information/what were the descriptors regarding the mentor teachers?
  • What has happened to what student teaching looks like? Focus was on edTPA and it was still distracting: edTPA distracted students from their student teacher placements
  • Undergraduate/graduate. Certificate requirements are the same, whether an individual is getting initially certified at the bachelor’s or master’s level. It would be helpful to facilitate conversations and differentiate PD to learn from others with similar programs how they are approaching the work.
  • What happens to student teaching going forward (e.g., freshmen)?
  • About edTPA this past spring: this was a very frustrating process for faculty and students – some learning, but not sure it was worth the angst. Conference sessions were helpful, however – some great ideas for ways to prepare our students more effectively.
  • When certificate is K-12, edTPA takes too much time out of one setting. No option for 14-week placement as State requires an elementary and secondary placement. edTPA is too difficult for students who have only one 14-week placement.
  • We need more help with local school districts and getting their buy-in to the edTPA. They are totally involved in their own problems (with APPR, etc.) and don’t want student teachers or even observers in their classrooms. Add videotaping and it’s just harder for us to gain entry.

Questions

  • How to train/help mentor teachers? Establish partnerships? Identify residential schools? Advocate for the State to mandate teachers to be mentor teachers?
  • Information on retakes across the state was confusing and full of questions.
  • Program support for retakes?
  • Can we offer future workshops to differentiate between beginner and intermediate participants working with edTPA?
  • Middle school vs Secondary – there is confusion about which handbook to use. Also, the handbooks differ depending on the subject
  • Retakes – disservice for not using them this round. How will students who pass the ATS-W as their retake be reported? How does this reflect on institution’s pass rate?
  • How do we deal with how much time edTPA takes out of student teaching time?
  • How much of the edTPA language can we use in the “practice” assignments that build up to edTPA?
  • How to develop collaboration with mentoring teachers? How to have effective willing mentor teachers assigned to student teachers?

Miscellaneous:

  • To Buffalo: Great critique but avoid the discourse of critical theory and academic freedom by addressing, for example, how does curriculum revision occur?
  • Task Force ought to be tasked with looking at the larger picture, moving past the “how to” of edTPA
  • What might we change in our approach (add or take away) based on results?
  • What is P-12’s understanding of edTPA? How is edTPA going to impact employment decisions for hiring of new teachers?

School Building Leaders Session

Questions

  • Will edTPA close the gap to best practices for leadership?
  • Studies on effectiveness (simulated data set)?
  • When to introduce?

Final Take-Aways / Big Ideas

  • Where are the resources at the national level to support educator preparation?
  • How do we overcome the continued accountability pressure of data from assessments in tested subjects to transform from solely assessment oriented to data literacy with a comprehensive picture of a student?
  • Field placement experience before course work?When is the optimal time for student learning about data? When in the developmental continuum should data literacy be introduced?
  • How collaboration fits into IHE curriculum. Data teaming is so important and the collaborative inquiry model is at the heart of it. How do schools of education prepare candidates to work collaboratively?
  • Overlap of educator best practices/student practice
  • Recognized need for stand-alone course plus embedded (demos-faculty-collaboration). Is it better to have stand-alone data courses or data concepts integrated into existing curricula? The latter is more practical, but there is still a place for the former
  • Coaching practice
  • Evidence-based feedback with multiple measures – feedback to students to schools of education must be based on data or evidence from which decisions can be made. For any sort of data use, it is imperative to triangulate across multiple measures, whether a teacher using data to understand a student or a professor trying to understand a teacher candidate or an evaluation of a school of education
  • Assessment vs. data literacy
  • Teach faculty to be comfortable with data reports (Is there agreement on IHE instruction?)
  • What are resources/skill sets needed in IHE to institute?
  • Leaders must be “literate” to sustain/support a data culture

Data Use Session

Questions

  • Where do we find data to indicate equitable opportunity?
  • How to move from numbers to instructional decisions?

Take-Aways

  • Regulatory issues from edTPA impose on teacher preparation in the same accountability manner as state summative assessments do for students
  • Just because data may be psychometrically sound does not make them meaningful, informative or useful for program improvement
  • What are the next steps, what have we learned and to whom should we be talking?
  • Resources: usingdata.terc.edu; Twitter: @tercusingdata; datafordecisions.wested.org
  • Need to move from analytics to action

Big Ideas

  • edTPA “hijacks” time for seminar reflection (may even out)
  • Financial constraints re: edTPA seminars
  • How does edTPA affect grad requirements at IHEs
  • edTPA video requirements may limit other valued practices
  • Watch isnetwork.org webinar archive
  • Use of data inquiry to drive own program
  • ALST: Question the test especially for ELLs (poverty of data info is an issue). Lack of descriptive feedback
  • Data must be meaningful and manageable
  • Create own data when lacking from the state, e.g., candidate portfolios
  • Applaud the use of task deconstruction. What is expected? What is learned?
  • Where does equity data reside?
  • Data tells a story
  • Important implications for Task 3 on edTPA (Excel application)
  • Cooperating teacher may not model spreadsheet use – modeling is important (candidate brings a skill to practice classroom)
  • Data literacy=theory and strategy skills
  • View data as a reflection prompt “positive rather than deficit”
  • Teaming, collaboration essential in IHEs and K-12 field
  • Candidates wanted more time to write – differentiated grouping
  • Need strategies for expanding the [boot] camp intervention
  • How to balance multiple goals of student teaching against credential requirements?

ALST Session

  • Who is providing the monitoring of test construction of the April 20-May 9 ALST? Are there external reviewers? What is the inter-rater reliability?
  • The Ns are so variable; aggregated score comparisons are hard to make sense of
  • Who is writing and scoring these tests?
  • Writing on ALST: Don’t let your own beliefs get in the way; the document will support one side of the argument. Go with it!
  • Who externally evaluates validity and reliability of the test? Pearson needs to provide examinee (especially if failed) micro-feedback before charging for a second test
  • Injustice – ditto
  • Please show these data to Stephanie Wood Garnett at NYSED and ask what State Ed is going to do. Is ALST valid? Reliable?
  • ALST: the test is not valid

EAS Session

  • Can we get access to SUNY network resources (e.g., New Paltz ELLs)
  • Why isn’t Pearson providing validity data for EAS and ALST? We need it for accreditation
  • Need individual feedback
  • Bias in writing against second language learners
  • Cultural bias of the writing
  • Difficulty of training students to work with ELLs when there are none or few in schools. Importance of noting differences among ELLs mean differences in pedagogy.
  • Topics covered were extremely helpful but we would like more time with each topic. Perhaps fewer speakers per session. More time to visit websites to follow-up with discussions
  • Vanderbilt has a wonderful workshop at IRIS on ELLs (
  • Are there sub-scores for EAS?
  • Where are the navigation instructions for the test (e.g., tabs for IEP)?
  • How we introduce candidates to ELL issues directly is one thing, when it really needs to happen across the curriculum.

Clinically Rich Session

  • Lesson study can be infused on the graduate level
  • Partnership through agreements (MOU) PDs or summer camps
  • NYSED needs to be more flexible regarding student teaching
  • Problem of faculty entrenched in teaching what they want to teach (education and arts and sciences)
  • Education curriculum is too full in order to meet NYSED’s regulations – makes it hard to adjust
  • Intrigued by idea of redoing semester before student teaching
  • SUNY Oswego is a nice contrast of clinically rich and traditional
  • What successful elements of Clinically Rich can be successfully implemented into “traditional” programs?
  • Building partnerships – knowledge flows both ways – one party is not the “knower”
  • Clinically Rich benefits mentors, mentees, and students
  • CAEP Standard 2 defines Clinically Rich
  • Pre-student teaching experience – using time in a different way
  • The importance of partnerships
  • The issue of the lack of social studies/science instruction in the elementary grades is a serious situation that has a direct link to poor performance in middle/high school on state/Regents tests
  • Major need to re-conceptualize teacher training programs to allow for a longer more clinically rich set of experiences for all prospective teachers. This is in the context of not increasing the cost or length of programs if at all possible
  • Framing advanced methods courses (at the Grad MS level) around inquiry through Lesson Study would be fantastic

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