Education Commons^™

Moving Writing Out Of The Margins In Edtpa: “Academic Language” In Writing Teacher Education, Sarah Hochstetler, Melinda J. Mcbee Orzulak

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The edTPA, a standardized teacher performance assessment developed by Stanford University and launched by the Pearson corporation, is quickly becoming a national measure of preservice teacher effectiveness. As more states adopt this assessment as a required component of successful completion of teacher education programs and licensure, we are compelled to critique the design, implementation, and evaluation of this high-stakes testing instrument. Our goal is to articulate the effects of this assessment on writing teacher education and the teaching of writing more broadly. Specifically, we argue that programmatic or individual interpretation of the edTPA can marginalize writing instruction (and writing teacher …