Program Element Description

The Teaching for Justice Rubric is a tool that identifies and describes important elements of teaching practice that the Urban Teaching Apprenticeship Program (UTAP) aims to cultivate in future teachers. This document will be used in a variety of ways through the coming year: 

1. This will become a guide for conversations between student teachers, cooperating teachers, and university mentors.
2. This will be used as the formal assessment tool for students teachers in their fall and spring field reviews with the goal of enhancing clarity in terms of student teacher progress toward certification.
3. This document will be a tool for instructors at the university to communicate with one another, as well as student teachers, cooperating teachers, and university mentors about how courses contribute to the development of student teachers’ capacity to teach for justice in the field.

Program Element

Chris Dean _Rubric

Why was this program element your focus?

“This tool was developed as a way to put our vision of teaching for justice into concrete descriptions of classroom teaching that can guide the preparation of novice teachers. The tool draws on a variety of frameworks of teaching practice that are central to our vision of what it means to teach for justice. This includes state-level frameworks, such as the PDE 430 and the PA Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education Competencies, and frameworks that grow from research conducted by members of the UTAP community, like the study of Social Justice Educator Practice and the Core Practices of Project-Based Learning. All of these frameworks provide valuable insights into teaching for justice, but can be overwhelming for novice educators and create a fragmented vision for teacher educators seeking to collaborate to develop novice teachers. To that end, the Teaching for Justice Rubric brings these multiple frameworks together into one document that can serve as a tool for novices to understand their development and for teacher educators within the community to develop a shared language and coordinated effort focused on teaching for justice.”

Community of Practice Reflections

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How might other teacher educators use this tool?

“This tool is highly contextualized and responsive to the needs of educators in a particular program who are seeking to collaborate to better understand and work toward a shared goal. To that end, simply taking this tool and using it in other settings is unlikely to be successful. Rather, we believe that tools like this must be developed by and within a community seeking to collaborate. Therefore, our tool might be used as a starting point or as an example of a possible outcome, but we discourage its use by others in this exact form. A community of teacher educators who collaborate closely to develop novice teachers must cultivate a shared understanding of their goals, values, and practices. The development of tools like this can serve that purpose.”