Assessing Teacher Candidates’ Pedagogical Judgement: An Analysis of Clinically-Based Instructional Assignments

Research on clinically-based teacher education indicates that facilitating clinical experiences for teacher candidates improves their preparation for the profession. While we have answered the call to implement rich clinical experiences in our teacher education program, we have found that we also needed to design new, robust strategies to assess what the candidates are taking away from their clinical experiences. This paper describes our use of Horn and Campbell’s (2015) notion of “pedagogical judgment” to analyze the work of social studies teacher candidates in clinical placements. We describe a rubric developed to evaluate candidates’ pedagogical judgment and offer insights into the use of this assessment tool as a component of clinically-based teacher education. We explore how the use of this rubric enables targeted evaluations of preservice teachers around specific aspects of pedagogical judgments. We conclude that this rubric could offer a way to unpack how preservice teachers make sense of their emerging understandings and pedagogical practices