Professional Standards for Teachers: “Pass the Message Game”

Introduction

This chapter examines how the passage of professional standards for teachers at the graduate level, used to assess preservice teacher quality, may have changed by the time they reach their intended audience at the level of the preservice teacher practicum, where they are intended to play a major role in guiding the experiences and assessment of preservice teachers and the work of their supervising teachers. The authors argue that there are both challenges and emerging opportunities involved in trying to ensure that preservice teachers are supported and judged appropriately against such standards. Consequently, this chapter extends the research reported so far by focusing more deeply on the extent to which video evidence collection in the feedback and assessment processes of preservice teachers on practicum is impacted by the transfer of knowledge such as professional standards for teachers. It addresses an emergent issue, which is the role and impact of such nationally used standards during practicum experiences, in keeping with the need for epistemic fluency (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2015). The findings showed that the alignment of a university program’s learning objectives within a practicum course, within an undergraduate program’s learning objectives, can be problematic when the standards are also used as a basis for practicum assessment.