Against the Script With edTPA: Preservice Teachers Utilize Performance Assessment to Teach Outside Scripted Curriculum

Abstract

This article reports on how the policy context shaped the development of two elementary preservice teachers’ (PSTs) literacy instructional practice. While student teaching emergent bilingual students in urban, high-poverty classrooms that utilized mandated scripted literacy curriculum, PSTs completed edTPA, a Teacher Performance Assessment, for their credential. Participants’ edTPA lessons represented the only time PSTs taught literacy outside the mandated curriculum’s script and in ways that were more aligned with their—and their teacher education program’s—ideals. Findings from this study show that it might be possible for PSTs and teacher educators to appropriate edTPA for their own purposes.