This interview features Katie Ledwell, lead author of “Unstandardized Responses to a ‘Standardized’ Test: The edTPA as Gatekeeper and Curriculum Change Agent“. We asked Katie to share her experiences behind the research. The article, by Katie Ledwell and Celia Oyler, is published in the March/April 2016 JTE issue and is currently available online here.
Q. What motivated you to pursue this particular research topic?
As a teacher educator and a student of education policy, I am always interested in the ways that policy shapes curricula in K-12 and higher education contexts. Therefore, when it became clear that students in the Elementary Inclusive Program at Teachers College would need to complete the edTPA for state certification and that the edTPA was framed by its designers as a catalyst for program improvement and curriculum change, I began to wonder whether or not the edTPA would serve its function as a curriculum change agent in our program. I also wondered whether or not it would prevent weak candidates from entering the teaching profession, as many policymakers hoped. In that sense, its fair to say that the study, which ultimately involved interviews with nineteen teacher educators from 12 programs at Teachers College, grew out of a personal and professional interest in whether or not the edTPA would serve its intended functions in our program, where I am an instructor, a field supervisor, and an edTPA GA.
Q. Writing, by necessity, requires leaving certain things on the cutting room floor. What didn’t make it into the article that you want to talk about?
Many participants discussed the labor-intensity of edTPA implementation. For example, some teacher educators discussed the ways in which their workload had grown as well as the exhaustion that students seemed to experience throughout the process of completing the edTPA. However, because our paper focused on two specific outcomes, gatekeeping and curricular change, our findings on the hidden costs of edTPA implementation (such as increased workloads and increased stress) seemed to be outside of the scope of our article. Perhaps other researchers will take this up!
We also gathered a lot of rich data on whether or not participants found the demands of the edTPA to be paradigmatically aligned with their program’s philosophy. Originally, I suspected that teacher educators from programs which were paradigmatically aligned with the edTPA would report the deepest edTPA-related curriculum changes, while those experiencing paradigmatic conflict with the edTPA would resist curricular change. However, this was not the case. We did not find a relationship between paradigmatic alignment and edTPA integration. As a result, some truly fascinating participant statements on differences and similarities between program philosophies and the edTPA’s philosophy did not make it into the paper.
Q. What current areas of research are you pursuing?
My research continues to explore the intended and unintended consequences of education policy. In response to recent New York State mandates placing new requirements on admissions to teacher education programs, I’m conducting a quantitative study of associations between the Elementary Inclusive Program’s admissions selection criteria and measures of program success; my goal is to explore which traits at admission predict success in student teaching and graduate-level academic work. I’m also serving as the project manager on a large-scale qualitative study of the teacher evaluation system in New York City. Finally, I’m interested in relationships between policy shifts and teacher beliefs, and I hope to design a study in the next two years that allows me to pursue that interest.
Contact the authors: Katie Ledwell (ledwell@tc.columbia.edu) and Celia Oyler (co74@tc.columbia.edu)