Delandshere, G.; Petrosky, A.R.
Description:
In this paper we examine how professional teaching standards, their assessment machinery, and the ideas of authority, expertise, and certainty they represent, regulate teaching knowledge in ways that keep teachers from engaging in the intellectual work necessary for the development of new understanding about teaching. To examine the tenability of this assertion, we consider the case of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the assessment it has put in place in the U.S. for the purpose of awarding national board certification to accomplished teachers. We chose, as a specific example, the Early Adolescence/English Language Arts standards and assessment which were developed for the national certification of English teachers who teach students ages 11–15. We first locate the assessment process and activities within the broader context of the standards-based reform in the US. We then examine the assessment requirements for English teachers and the representations of English language arts teaching these contain through an analysis of the practice activities recommended by the board, the actual assessment tasks, and the scoring system and rubrics used to evaluate the performance. Finally, as the standards and the assessment process were explicitly designed to improve teaching, we consider issues relevant to teachers’ autonomy and the subtle and not so subtle ways in which the assessment imposes a frame on teachers’ thinking and understanding of their work.