Evolution of Teaching Knowledge

Top secret test development stuff revealed: we are at the 5 year point in the life of our professional teaching knowledge examination. Therefore it is time to reassess the assessment and make sure it covers the material teachers need to know in order to succeed. We assembled our panels of experts and have had a series of meetings over the last 6-9 months and some great work has come from those meetings.

We will be adding more depth and questions to the exam to create requirements on special education, English language learners and gifted & talented students.

What we are saying (and everyone "knows") is that all teachers will have these students in their class and need to know how to work with them. It is also saying that the job of the teacher is getting more complex and more demanding - and so will our program.

The test development team will now move through the process of blueprint development for the new exam, question writing, field testing, item selection and finally standard setting. Our goal is to complete this over the next 15 months and have an upgraded Professional Teaching Knowledge Exam by the beginning of 2009 for all of our teacher candidates.

The demands of teaching change - and so shall we.