Chapter 14: The Edtpa–Pbl Union: A Program Journey

Problem-based learning (PBL) has always been a foundational element of our Secondary Education Residency I program. However, only recently have we intentionally leveraged the latent power of PBL to help our students successfully navigate and complete the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). As new requirements emerged such as edTPA and CAEP, the power and meaning of our PBL scenarios diminished. Simultaneously, students were expressing opinions that edTPA was just another hoop to jump through to obtain a teacher’s license, while facilitators were struggling to defend edTPA as an exemplary model for best practices and preparation for future classroom evaluations. Thus, there was an urgent programmatic need to reengineer PBL as the vehicle to make edTPA the centerpiece of our Residency I program. In this chapter, we will share our edTPA-PBL journey along with specific materials and excerpts from our team’s edTPA-PBL scenarios as well as strategies for how to start this process in your own context. As Residency I program facilitators, we must ensure that our teacher candidates can effectively plan, instruct, and assess. Ultimately, our candidates’ success lies in the purposeful union between edTPA and PBL.