AAQEP Annual Report for 2023

Department Learning Outcomes

The Art and Design Education department (ADE) is part of Pratt’s School of Art, and as such works closely with other departments in the school such as Fine Arts. The ADE department also works closely with departments within the School of Design such as  Communications Design and Industrial Design.  Thus, the administrative and academic boundaries between the professional degrees in art and design education and the content areas—fine arts and design—are permeable and cross-disciplinary.   Pratt is one of the few teacher education programs in the country that prepares teachers in design as well as art.

Pratt launched the Center for Art, Design, and Community Engagement K­-12 in 2013, with current ADE chair, Aileen Wilson as Founding Director and ADE visiting assistant professor, Tara Kopp as  Deputy Director. Professor Wilson served as Director from 2015-2020. The founding of the Center K-12 signaled an increased commitment to K-­12 education at Pratt. The Center’s mission is to increase access to instruction in art and design for young people by leveraging the resources and expertise of the Institute to support school­ age children, city wide public schools, and youth­ serving organizations.

State Certificate, License, Endorsement, or Other Credential 

Number of Candidates
enrolled in most recently completed academic year (12 months ending 06/23)

Number of Completers
in most recently completed academic year (12 months ending 06/23)

Visual Arts (all grades)

Visual Arts (all grades)

Visual Arts (all grades)

Visual Arts (all grades)

Visual Arts (all grades)

duplicated

unduplicated

E. Summary of state license examination results, including teacher performance assessments, and specification of any examinations on which the pass rate (cumulative at time of reporting) was below 80%.

F. Narrative explanation of evidence available from program completers, with a characterization of findings.

Completer Employment/Further Schooling Report

Provider-Selected Measures

Explanation of Performance Expectation

15 indicators with performance descriptions (see ADE Modified version of the edTPA Handbook)

TPA Results spreadsheet

ADE 403/613 Professional Practices had 12 students preparing their TPA. Of the 12, there were 11 TPA submissions in 2022-2023 (of whom 3 are not program completers. 1 of those 3 non-program completers failed TPA and 1 did not submit).

Explanation of Performance Expectation

Level or Extent of Success in Meeting the Expectation

Revised Program Rubric (2023-24): A Focus on Meaning Making, Authentic Learning, CRP)

In the QAR we determined that the ADE Program Rubric needs to continue to evolve to reflect the improvements we are making to our program as well as changes to our performance assessment (see below NYS Certification). We have revised the rubric twice since our accreditation, in January 2022 and Summer 2023). We have made two revisions to the ADE Program Rubric since our Accreditation. In January 2022 we added a criterion on Meaning Making and in June 2023 we added several other new criteria as well as an “examples” column in all criteria to increase the instrument’s usability by students.

In January 2022 we revised the ADE rubric to be more explicit and included a new “Meaning Making” criterion and incorporated “meaning making” into additional new criteria “Incorporating Visual Resources” and added a definition of Meaning Making to glossary. This addition was sparked by a discussion between two faculty members who were conducting a Rubric Review of student work from From Studio to Classroom ll, one of our undergraduate methods courses. Faculty noted that students had developed quite a lot of confidence and ability to teach skills and techniques (a positive result of our emphasis on having students use the making of the project example to illuminate the learning potential within a project). But we also noted that students were less aware of the importance of engaging their K-12 pupils in meaning making. As a result, we revised one of the major assignments in the course– the First Learning Segment–and asked students to devote a lesson at the start of every project to engaging pupils to bring their own subject matter, ideas and concerns to the making of the project.

Continuous Improvement Chart

NYS Certification, ADE-TPA  and changes to our capstone performance assessment

We responded to changes initiated by the NYSED policy change which required all teacher education programs to administer their own performance assessments as part of teacher certification and submitted our required plan to the NYSED in June, 2023.  Prior to submitting our plan, in Fall 2022 we field-tested a modified edTPA (ADE-TPA) to assess our teacher candidates’ readiness to teach and analyzed our scoring process, as well as the performance assessment itself, We are using the same modified performance assessment for Fall 2023 (we are using 3 of the 2022 scorers and 1 newly trained alumni) and will  begin the process of developing our own performance assessment in Spring 2024, with a roll-out scheduled for Fall 2024.

Modifications to Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 performance assessment include:

Length of segment now 4-6 lessons, instead of 3-5

Students can submit up to 6 video clips instead of 2. Total remains at no more than 20 minutes

Lesson Plans no longer need to be edited to 4 pages

Student teachers must support and assess pupils’ language acquisition but language function requirement has been removed

Documenting language acquisition is uniformly through writing (except for one student teacher who’s working with 1st graders)

External Scorers:

Four ADE-TPA Scorers were recruited from ADE alumni. We approached former students who had scored well on their EdTPAs and who we believed would be attentive readers of the current students’ submissions.

Scorers were instructed to use the resources provided (ADE-TPA Exemplar and a detailed edTPA resource for scorers). Scorers were told that they could consider the candidates’ submissions holistically, could gather evidence broadly from the materials submitted and could make inferences as it seemed appropriate.

Scoring was complete by February 1st, 2023.

Anticipating a degree of discrepancy between the scorers’ results, we assigned two scorers to every submission and decided we would average the two scores. While there was indeed lack of agreement in the scorers’ findings, we were not able to discern a pattern in these discrepancies–one where one scorer was consistently scoring submissions higher than the other scorer, for instance. A debrief with the four scorers did not significantly illuminate the source of the discrepancies. Thus, we determined that we needed to implement a protocol to improve inter-rater reliability. Since we are only using this ADE-TPA for one more semester (Fall 2023) and are developing our new TPA, which we will assess using our Program Rubric, we determined that we would wait until next Fall to implement this scoring improvement. At that time, as we roll out our new TPA, we will increase scorers’ compensation and scorers will assess submissions individually and then meet to discuss their findings and arrive at a single score.

As part of our focus on meaning making, one of the areas of improvement identified in our accreditation report (2021) (see Continuous Improvement Chart ), we designed a professional development event for faculty and alumni.  As we reported briefly in the 2021-2022 SoA Assessment Report, we held a Teacher Rounds event on November 15, 2022. What follows is a more thorough discussion  of that event which was based on an analysis of artifacts from teacher candidates’ work and helped us gain a deeper understanding of the issues around meaning making and how we could improve our curriculum. The student work included the  Project Examples which were the focus of our QAR Plan-Do-Study Act cycle 2018-2021. By looking at our teacher candidates’ instructional artifacts (project examples, lesson plans, and pupil work)  at key stages in the degree program (Student Teaching 1 and SAS), we hoped to identify areas for instructional growth and revise our curriculum accordingly. “Does our candidates’ work (and their pupils’ work) reflect our goals for what candidates should know and be able to do?” More specifically, and related to our year-long focus on meaning making, we were looking at evidence and asking:“Are our student teachers’  pupils making work that is authentic, meaningful to them, and connected to their lives?”  The work being examined was created by teacher candidates and their pupils in Spring 2022.

Teacher Rounds

A total of 6 ADE faculty and  6 alumni participated in the Teacher Rounds. Attendees were divided into small groups and given 3 bundles of artifacts from ADE student teachers’ lessons. Artifacts included the teacher’s project example, the questions posed in the art classroom, the visual resources shown to pupils, and finally, 3-5 examples of the work pupils made under our student teachers’ instruction. Work was  selected to demonstrate the range of pupil responses.The event was conducted remotely and participants were directed to spend 5 minutes independently reviewing each group of artifacts before engaging in a 10-minute discussion about the work and the evidence, or lack thereof, of pupils’ meaning making. The discussions confirmed that teacher candidates were teaching skills and techniques with confidence and rigor. Faculty who had been teaching ADE for a number of years noted improvement in this area.  The discussions also confirmed that teacher candidates were struggling to engage their pupils in making art work that was personally meaningful. Participants noted that there was some misalignment between the teacher’s intent, the visual resources, stated learning objectives and the children’s work that resulted. They noted that the  visual resources were problematic: either too sprawling and not focused or too few. They also noted that there were sometimes too many learning objectives and other times too few.  Finally, they noted that candidates’ questions were not organized in a hierarchy that facilitated the pupils’ engagement and association.  

Actions Taken in Response to Teacher Rounds

We adapted the ADE Lesson Plan Template to include a prompt that asks the candidate to articulate their own meaning making, thus making it easier for them to help pupils connect to the project’s opportunities for pupils’ meaning making (see below).