Inside English/Language Arts Standards: What's in a Grade?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88058/1/RRQ.36.2.5.pd

The control, content, and consequences of edTPA: World language teacher educators’ perceptions

Implemented in more than 870 teacher education programs across 41 states and the District of Columbia, edTPA is marketed as a content-specific, standardized portfolio assessment of beginning teacher performance. However, concerns about edTPA and its content-specificity are pervasive. To that end, the researchers surveyed teacher educators with World Language edTPA experience (N = 88) to ascertain their perceptions of the assessment, including its impact on teacher candidates, teacher education programs, and clinical placements, as well as the resources required, support experienced, and consequences perceived as a result of its implementation. Using Cochran-Smith et al.’s (2018) framework of teacher education accountability, the researchers explore issues of control, content, and consequences related to power relationships and the World Language edTPA, centering on the assessment’s intended content-specificity, while recounting an ACTFL task force’s efforts in 2016 to influence the assessment’s content

Trade and divergence in education systems

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

The Paradox of Being a Teacher: Institutionalized Relevance and Organized Mistrust

In the article "The Paradox of Being a Teacher: Institutionalized Relevance and Organized MistrustW Daniel Tröhler describes the paradoxical nature of the teaching profession which arises out of the mismatch between the excessive expectations imposed on teachers and, at the same time, the constant mistrust shown to them for fulfilling these expectations. The paradox is related to the cultural shift of the educationalization of the Western world – that not only are a wide variety of social, economic and moral problems defined as educational problems but, in addition, education itself is placed at the core of the historical process and expected to fulfil future ideals. According to Tröhler, educationalization was reinforced by the tradition of modern educational thinking and especially by certain inherent fundamental religious motives. The author defends this thesis with the help of two, at first sight very divergent, figures in the history of education: Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi and Burrhus F. Skinner. Common to these thinkers is, according to Tröhler, their argument which is constitutive of the cultural shift of educationalization but, also, their shared view that in order to save the younger generation from the corrupting forces of external society, certain ideal conditions for making the natural development of the children possible are needed. Tröhler underlines the religious motives behind this idea. The task of education is to take care of the salvation of the younger generation, to protect the “God’s creation” against the world of artificial moral corruption. The educator’s task is, then, to be God’s deputy, substitute and imitator, to secure the existence of this moral order. This religious background helps us, according to Tröhler, to understand those enormous expectations that schools and teachers meet even in secular contemporary societies. This raises the question: should one reject expectations, which no one can fulfill

Realizing General Education: Reconsidering Conceptions and Renewing Practice

General Education is widely touted as an enduring distinctive of higher education in the United States (Association of American Colleges and Universities, [11]; Boyer, [37]; Gaston, [86]; Zakaria, [202]). The notion that undergraduate education demands wide‐ranging knowledge is a hallmark of U.S. college graduates that international educators emulate (Blumenstyk, [25]; Rhodes, [158]; Tsui, [181]). The veracity of this distinct educational vision is supported by the fact that approximately one third of the typically 120 credits required for the bachelor\u27s degree in the United States consist of general education courses (Lattuca & Stark, [120]). Realizing a general education has been understood to be central to achieving higher education\u27s larger purposes, making it a particularly salient concern