ABSTRACT

Teacher performance assessments are positioned as a high stakes assessment that are aimed to ensure that preservice teachers are ready for professional practice in education contexts. The move to incorporate them in institutions has its origins in concerns that teacher education is a policy problem with varying standards of preparation across the sector. The article draws from research literature on the USA edTPA, which is used widely to benchmark graduate and undergraduate teaching capacity across the schooling and early childhood sectors, to consider how teacher performance assessments evoke a range of wicked problems for the early childhood sector in Australia. While they can be seen as a means for the teacher educator sector to regulate itself to ensure that “high quality” “profession ready” graduates are credentialed, there may be an attendant narrowing of pedagogy and emerging issues for a sector that is already undervalued, underfunded and fragmented. The authors highlight the importance for Australian preservice teachers to focus their efforts on pedagogical relations in early childhood education settings, gain proficiency in play-based learning, and participate in relationships that produce ongoing, socially and culturally contextualised assessments.

摘要

教师绩效评估被定位为一项高风险评估，旨在确保职前教师为教育环境中的专业实践做好准备。将它们纳入机构的举措源于担心教师教育是一个政策问题，整个部门的准备标准各不相同。这篇文章借鉴了美国 edTPA 的研究文献，该研究广泛用于衡量学校教育和幼儿教育部门的研究生和本科教学能力，以考虑教师绩效评估如何引发澳大利亚幼儿教育部门的一系列棘手问题。虽然它们可以被视为教师教育部门自我监管的一种手段，以确保“高质量”“职业准备”毕业生获得认证，对于一个已经被低估、资金不足和支离破碎的部门来说，教学方法和新出现的问题可能会随之缩小。作者强调了澳大利亚职前教师将精力集中在幼儿教育环境中的教学关系、熟练掌握基于游戏的学习以及参与产生持续、社会和文化背景化评估的关系的重要性。