Performance Assessment of EFL Student Teachers’ professional Competencies: A Case of Iranian Farhanghian University

The quality of the teacher is deemed to be an essential component of any education system. In view of this, over the past decade, performance assessments have gained momentum in teacher education context and in assessing pre-service teachers’ professional competencies. In Iran, Farhanghian University, having put performance assessment in its educational agenda, has recently set up a national project named Evaluation of Teachers' Professional Competencies aiming to assess the attainment of professional competencies by student teachers as part of its teacher licensing requirements. Taking this issue into account, this study intends to design and validate a framework of teacher competencies to be used in Farhanghian University. To this end, the researchers conducted a thorough analysis of relevant studies on teacher education, effective teaching, teacher competence, and teacher evaluation. Following this, they examined pertinent national documents, and explored teacher educators’ and curriculum developers’ perspectives via in-depth interviews. Analyses of the collected data yielded a performance assessment rubric with six domains to be utilized in evaluating the EFL student teachers’ professional competencies.