College Hosts Assessment of Teacher Certification

11/04/2014 

Teacher education faculty from SUNY schools throughout Central New York will convene in Cortland Friday, Nov. 7, to assess the impact of New York state’s controversial new teacher certification requirements.

The gathering of 65 faculty members from SUNY Cortland, Binghamton University, SUNY Oswego, SUNY Oneonta and Empire State College will allow teacher education professionals to assess how SUNY education majors across the region are handling the new standards.

“All the campuses have been analyzing how their education majors are performing on these new tests and have been adjusting their curriculum accordingly,” said Andrea Lachance, dean of SUNY Cortland’s School of Education. “But this event will allow us to learn from each other and share both our successes and challenges in preparing our students for an ever-changing educational landscape.”

In addition to the three new exams – the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST), the Educating All Students Test (EAS) and the Content Specialty Tests (CST) – teacher candidates in New York are also now required to score well the edTPA.

The edTPA requires video recordings of candidates teaching lessons in classrooms as well as extensive written analysis and reflection on an aspiring teacher’s classroom experiences.  This new assessment was rolled out last fall, meeting with considerable resistance.

“It’s ironic that much of the negative publicity on the new state certification exams has focused on the edTPA because our SUNY Cortland students are doing very well on that assessment,” Lachance said. “Currently, about a third of our students are getting scores in the ‘mastery’ range, which means they are scoring at a very high level. I think this speaks to the strength of our teacher preparation programs which have always had a strong reputation for quality.”

Friday’s meeting of the five members of the SUNY’s Central New York Regional Teacher Education Network is titled “Getting Beyond the Numbers: Collegial Conversations About New Teacher Candidate Evaluations, Data, and Outcomes.” 

The convening, scheduled for the Cortland Ramada Inn, is made possible by a grant from the SUNY Teacher Education Network (S-TEN).