Chapter 7: Not Just For Preservice Teachers: edTPA as a Tool for Practicing Teachers and Induction Support

In 2010, the University of Maryland (UMD) was among the first teacher preparation programs to pilot the teacher performance assessment edTPA^®. Six years later, over 725 teacher preparation programs across 39 states are using edTPA in some fashion. Currently eight states (Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin) require an officially scored edTPA for either program completion or teacher licensure, with six states (Alaska, Alabama, California, Deleware, Hawaii, West Virginia) requiring either an officially scored edTPA or another teacher performance assessment for program completion or licensure. By 2019, three other states (Connecticut, Iowa, Tennessee) will require edTPA, with one state, North Carolina, requiring edTPA or another assessment (AACTE, 2017). Programs in non-mandated states have more leeway in how they use edTPA. Some of these programs require all candidates to complete official scoring. Other programs rely on local evaluation having faculty or K–12 partners serve as assessors. Local evaluation is different from edTPA official scoring, as it uses qualitative ratings (emerging, proficient, and advanced) as opposed to numeric values of 1–5, used in official scoring. Local evaluation provides programs the opportunity to implement edTPA without having candidates pay $300 for national scoring; however, in most cases it does not have the same reliability and validity standards that are found in official scoring.