Graduate teachers’ and the teacher performance assessment: the case for architectures of judgement

Across contemporary teacher education contexts, professional standards and performance assessments have been implemented to shape what counts as evidence of ‘quality’ teaching. In Australia, a Teacher Performance Assessment has become the central mechanism through which preservice teachers assure and evidence ‘classroom readiness’. This article examines how evaluative judgement develops within practicum contexts structured by such accountability architectures. Drawing on the Theory of Practice Architectures and three illustrative case-studies, this article advances the concept of Architectures of Judgement, offering a specification of how assessment arrangements structure the warrants through which professional competence can be recognised, articulated, and defended. The analysis shows that evaluative judgement is not simply an individual capability, but an epistemic-ontological practice constituted within cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Across three cases, preservice teachers’ evaluative judgement took forms of alignment, negotiation and resistance, revealing how authorised warrants of ‘quality’ become stabilised as credible professional reasoning. In making visible the architectures through which judgement becomes recognisable as legitimate, this article reframes teacher education as a site of ethical and epistemic formation, not just as standards compliance and identifies considerations for making more dialogic and educative assessment architectures.