Educational policy and mentorship: Transforming classroom practice and assessment in the art class

Abstract This paper is a narrative about the ways in which mentorship received by a high school art teacher through her Ph.D. program enabled her to reconstruct student assessment strategies to satisfy the demands of state imposed requirements for the review of teacher effectiveness. The context of the narrative take place in the wake of the PERA legislation (Performance Evaluation Review Act) implemented in Illinois in 2016. The assessment dilemma faced by the teacher was the expectation of administration to provide assessment data derived from inappropriate testing formats. The narrative traces the development of the teacher’s response to these demands and the ultimate resolution of the assessment problem achieved through her engagement with her doctoral program.