edTPA FAQs

The edTPA (educational Teacher Performance Assessment) is a national, performance-based assessment adopted by the state of Maryland for teacher licensure decisions, and implemented in dozens of other states. The edTPA was developed at Stanford University in partnership with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). It is a subject-specific portfolio of materials that assesses teacher candidates’ (interns’) readiness to teach, including planning, instruction, and assessment.

The edTPA is a portfolio collection of artifacts and evidence from your internship experience. There are many different, subject-specific edTPAs, but all have three tasks: Planning, Instruction (including a video clip of your internship teaching), and Assessment. Some edTPAs have a fourth task that involves additional teaching and/or assessment.

• Find out more about edTPA

The edTPA is done during your internship placement. You need to inform your mentor teacher about the edTPA requirements prior to, or on the first day of, your internship.

In the state of Maryland, the edTPA replaces Praxis 2 pedagogy tests as an assessment of candidate pedagogy. You can find out more about the state’s implementation timeline.

Depending on the subject, additional content-specific Praxis tests may still be required for graduation from Salisbury University and teaching licensure in the state of Maryland. Make sure you talk with your advisor and follow the Maryland Praxis 2 licensure requirements.

The edTPA costs $300. This fee includes the national scoring and score reporting to the candidate and to Salisbury University (designated by the candidate during registration). Additional score reports cost $50. To retake a single task that was not passed, it costs $100. Resubmitting two tasks costs $200. Completely retaking the edTPA costs $300.

Registration is done on the edTPA website. Go to the Candidates/Register page for more information.

The edTPA gives a registration overview for additional details.

Discuss with your mentor teacher about permissions forms that were gathered from students and who has not given their consent to be recorded. Then, share the edTPA resources with your mentor teacher so they are aware of your requirements, including the subject(s) and content you will teach for your edTPA.

You need three important documents that will give you the information you need to complete the edTPA.

The edTPA subject area handbook has all of the task descriptions, prompts, requirements, and rubrics that will be used to score the edTPA.

The Making Good Choices document that gives you advice about completing the edTPA successfully.

The Understanding Rubric-Level Progressions document helps you understand the rubrics and what they mean. They are broken down into greater detail than the way they are presented in the edTPA handbook.

You should ensure you have copies of these three documents and carefully read them before, during, and prior to submitting the edTPA portfolio. You will get access to them once you register for your edTPA. Your seminar instructors and/or faculty will make sure you have these. It is suggested you share these with your mentor teacher as soon as possible.

The edTPA portfolios are submitted in Watermark Student Learning & Licensure (formerly Via). 

Directions for submitting edTPA portfolios.

In seminars, you will discuss timelines and due dates to work on and submit your edTPA. See the edTPA submission and reporting dates.

Make sure you have given yourself enough time ahead of the due date to upload and review video files, complete all the necessary writing, and complete the submission process. Do not procrastinate with the edTPA. It is your responsibility to stick to those as closely as possible.

At Salisbury University, the edTPA is embedded in education courses and the internship seminar. During the education program, candidates may review and use edTPA scoring rubrics, study handbook language, or do assignments based on the edTPA. The work you do on those assignments cannot be used on the actual edTPA that gets submitted.

While putting together your actual edTPA, your seminar instructors, mentor teachers, and faculty can all support you and assist with edTPA understanding and timelines, but their roles are limited in how much help they can provide. By design, almost all of the decisions, writing, recording, and editing are the responsibility of the candidate completing the edTPA – you.

Internship seminars will be used to help guide you to understand and navigate the edTPA process, but the work of completing tasks – including making most decisions, planning lessons and assessments, writing commentaries, video recording, video editing, and submitting the final portfolio – is the responsibility of the intern. Seminar instructors and mentor teachers are not allowed to provide a lot of substantive help, but they can read what you have written, ask you questions what you have written, and support your progress by making sure you stick to the submission timeline.

• Review the types of support faculty and seminar instructors can and cannot give you.
• Review the types of support mentor teachers can give you.

We suggest discussing a timeline with your mentor teacher. Consider that you will want enough time in front of the students to get to know them and feel comfortable with one another. Then, you will probably be ready to teach your edTPA lessons.

We suggest doing a number of trial runs of recordings. Determine what your recording device will be and record some lessons prior to teaching the edTPA lessons. Analyze if the correct number of students can be seen, how students may need to be placed for the video, if you can be seen as you move around, if the video quality is acceptable, and if you and the students can be heard throughout the video during whole-group, small-group, and independent instructional scenarios. If you are using a device that is internet or phone enabled, we suggest placing it in airplane mode (or the equivalent) so that incoming calls or messages do not pause or end the recording during your important lesson.

If your clip has moments that are inaudible, follow your subject-specific handbook to determine what appropriate captions or transcript options you may have.

Review your subject-specific handbook to determine what and how much gets recorded. Generally, you will teach 3-5 lessons in sequence (called a learning segment, in edTPA terms) and choose video clips of teaching (3-20 minutes) as evidence of your teaching effectiveness. To give yourself enough possible clips to choose from, we suggest recording the entirety of each lesson, even if you do not use most of the recordings for your final edTPA. The edTPA requires clips to be continuous and uninterrupted; you are not allowed to splice together short videos into a larger clip, so do not edit moments together.

Salisbury University has agreements with partner schools to use students’ district consent forms for recording. You do not need to provide additional consent forms to the class. Check with your mentor teacher to see what students/families have or have not given the district their consent to be recorded.

If students (and/or families) have not given their video consent, those students should still participate in the lesson but must be out of the view of the camera. We recommend considering placement of the students and the camera to ensure they are not seen.

Current information about the edTPA can be found at the edTPA AACTE website.

The Making Good Choices edTPA document is a vital one in helping understand the edTPA portfolio.

If you have questions about compressing the video file size so you can upload it or covert it to a file format that meets the edTPA requirements.

If you use a Mac computer and have technical questions.

The edTPA website has additional, specific FAQs for candidates.

If you have questions while working on the edTPA, your seminar instructors serve as good resources. Keep in mind they are limited in what types of help they can give you.

If you have other questions about the edTPA specific to Salisbury University, you can contact Dr. Starlin Weaver (sdweaver@salisbury.edu), the edTPA coordinator.

The edTPA (educational Teacher Performance Assessment) is a national, performance-based assessment recently adopted by the state of Maryland for teacher licensure decisions, and implemented in dozens of other states. The edTPA was developed at Stanford University in partnership with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). It is a subject-specific portfolio of materials that assesses teacher candidates’ (interns’) readiness to teach, including artifacts related to their planning, instruction, and assessment. Find out more about the edTPA.

The edTPA requires interns to plan, teach and video record, and assess lessons, often including instruction for smaller groups of focus students. The edTPA assesses an intern’s readiness to teach by providing artifacts (such as lesson plans and assessments, video clips of their teaching) and commentary in which they explain, justify, and reflect upon their practices. It is designed to encourage student-centered thinking and instruction which is interactive and positively impacts student learning. The goal is that the intern will teach developmentally-appropriate, culturally-relevant, and engaging lessons to your students.

Salisbury University has worked with partner districts to use the video recorded permissions that were given to students at the beginning of the year. Please check with a school administrator if you do not have access to determine what students have provided recording consent.

Generally, 3-5 consecutive lessons (called a learning segment, in edTPA terms) need taught for the edTPA. We suggest to interns that they record each moment of their 3-5 lessons because they have to select clips of 3-20 minutes that represent their effective teaching. The clips generally need a minimum of 4 students and the intern visible, but ask your intern if their specific edTPA has different requirements.

If students (and/or families) have not given their video consent, those students should still participate in the lesson but must be out of the view of the camera. We recommend considering placement of the students and the camera to ensure they are not seen.

edTPA gives explicit instructions on the types of things you can and cannot help interns with as they complete their edTPAs.

Generally, continue to allow the intern to have instructional agency in your classroom, give them information about students and the contexts of students and the school/community, help them create and stick to a timeline to complete the edTPA, help them obtain video consent from students and/or families, offer video recording assistance (if needed), and read and provide probing questions about the intern’s draft writing without doing any editing or giving answers to the questions you posed.

It is also permitted that you use the edTPA rubrics for observational evaluations. You can use them to give feedback to interns about their teaching before they begin working on their edTPA.

The NEA has also published suggested, task-by-task supports that mentor (cooperating) teachers offer to interns completing their edTPAs.

There are also instructions about what types of support school leaders and administrators can offer the interns.

The instinct of teachers is to teach. However, the intern cannot submit video clips with your instruction in it. If completely necessary, of course you can, but realize the intern may lose a valuable video clip if you intervene in any way. We suggest holding off teaching (direct instruction and/or questioning and/or follow-ups and/or management) until after the video recording ends.

The edTPA requires candidates to submit video evidence that does not include the candidate’s name, the names of you (the mentor teacher), the school, district, or last names of students. This helps protect confidentiality. Surely, some of those names may come up during the lesson segment, but the intern cannot choose and submit clips for their edTPA with those in them.

Any students who have not completed the required video recording permissions also may not appear in the video.

For the edTPA lessons, it is best if the intern follows your student to the other classroom for literacy instruction. If this is not possible, the intern is responsible for working with the clinical placement coordinator to come up with another option where they will be able to teach the required literacy lessons to complete the edTPA.

Many edTPA resources can be found at the edTPA AACTE website.

On that website, you can find opportunities for webinars designed for mentor (cooperating) teachers, which is highly recommended for you.

For issues or questions about placement information related to the edTPA, you can contact Paul Gasior (plgasior@salisbury.edu), Clinical Placement Coordinator.

If you have other questions about the edTPA specific to Salisbury University, you can contact Dr. Starlin Weaver (sdweaver@salisbury.edu), the edTPA coordinator.