Task 4: What does a quality edTPA lesson plan look like? (Essential Question D).
An important component of your edTPA is planning for instruction. One aspect of the planning for instruction component of your edTPA is your actual lesson plans. To help guide all candidates to think about and address all the required elements required by the edTPA the MSU, Mankato College of Education has developed a lesson plan template. You are required to use the edTPA template for this course and student teaching.
Pre-Posting: To help give a visual of what is expected in terms of content, quality, sophistication and overall general length, please view the example lesson plan.
To view the example lesson plan click on the link below.
Posting - What stands out to you? What do you see cutting across all of the resources you have read/seen on this topic so far? What are the cautions needed or “hints” for making this a quality product? How will you approach the edTPA lesson plan format now that you have seen this example? What will you do differently than you have done in the past? What questions do you still have?
Response Postings:
By Sunday, November 17: 11:59 PM. Response postings
Oh my goodness. Looking at this lesson plan has made me feel much better about the TPA lesson plans I’ve created in the past and the ones I’m currently working on for my field experience and thematic unit. I have a tendency to try taking on too much at one time. My mentor teacher has done a fabulous job of making me calm down, stand back, and think about one or two very specific standards to address for every lesson. For art especially, it’s so easy to get excited about a project and try to teach every element and principle, every related piece of art history, show too many examples, and basically bite off way more than I can chew for one individual lesson plan. Seeing how direct and straightforward this lesson plan is, and how clearly it addresses two very specific content objectives, makes creating TPA lesson plans less of a daunting task, and gives me a much clearer focus.
ReplyDeleteI also think the video we watched for Task 2, about breaking down and writing a language objective, has given me a great, systematic formula for creating language objectives (this area has always been a fuzzy one for me because I haven’t known exactly what to address).
Since I’ll be doing the majority of my field experience in the art specialist room at an elementary school, I’ll see more than 500 students every week on a 5 day rotation. This has also made edTPA semi-daunting because it’s hard really focus on specific student backgrounds, IEPs, ELL students, 504 plans, etc. I’ve recently narrowed my focus to one specific 5th grade class. I’ve acquired all the IEPs, information about ELL students, and 504 plans to better incorporate that information about specific assessment modification (which has also been intimidating for me when I’ve created TPA lessons in the past).
Questions/concerns I still have regarding edTPA:
1) So many of the components seem so similar to me. I think this is good in the long run, because it notes that I understand the importance of connecting all of the portions together. However, even after “unpacking” each component of TPA, and viewing example lesson plans, I’m still concerned about how much information to give for each edTPA component (It’s hard for me to find the balance between too much and too little).
2) This lesson plan addresses the needs of many students in the classroom, but not all. When we’re creating our lesson plans, do we need to include specific information about every single student in the classroom?
Karin - we'll need to touch base sometime about our student teaching. You and I are both going to be at the same elementary school.
DeleteYes! I'm doing my field experience at Olson right now so I'm there every Friday in the art room! Stop by anytime!
DeleteIt may also be really helpful to talk about ELL student needs and how specific students respond to certain assessments in the classroom. We'll definitely be in touch during student teaching. I've already chosen the class I'm going to focus on for my formal edTPA, and I know there are several ELL kids in that class that you'll probably be working with.
Karin-nice to hear that you have such a great mentor teacher to help guide you through the process! It makes a huge difference and can affect your outlook on teaching. I know most of my mentor teachers have looked at the TPA, pretty much laughed, and said real teaching is nothing like the TPA. That being said, I know the TPA is important and REALLY gets us as teacher candidates ready to always be thinking about standards, objectives, activites, etc. ESL content doesn’t have very many standards, so I can’t really relate to dissecting which standards to use on which lesson, but I can imagine it being difficult.
DeleteI don’t’ think that I can necessarily answer your second question, but my guess would be yes, we need to include specific information about every single student. I may be discussing something you already understand, but for our TPA we only need to focus on ONE group of students and write lessons for that group. That way instead of looking at the 500 students you have, you’ll look at one of those classes to write your TPA (maybe of 20-30 students) and get to know those specific students. Then if they only come in once a week, maybe you would create a unit over a five week span, with one lesson a week, total of 5 lessons. Hope this helps, sorry if it’s repeated info!
Karin, it sounds like you've got a great mentor teacher who is going to help you slow down and write appropriate lesson plans. That kind of feedback and support is great. I can't imagine creating lesson plans for 500 students. On the one hand, some of it will be easy, but when it comes down to knowing your individual students, that must be really challenging. However, like Molly said, I think you can limit it to one group for the TPA and really focus on that.
DeleteRobin is awesome. I adore my mentor teacher, but she is a little too much like myself when it comes to organization. Getting any information from her is like pulling teeth. I'm concerned about not only gathering information for each student involved in the lesson, but having access to ANY of the information. I'm sure she has student IEP, 504, etc. somewhere, but I wonder if she really knows where any of it even is. My point is that gathering the data for each student can be a lofty task in itself.
DeleteLike Molly mentioned about some other teachers, she is one of those people who looked at the TPA and was like, "Haha, good luck with that!" I understand the TPA is something I need to do, and I do see it's value, but it would be nice if there was more support related to it within the actual schools. I could almost use two mentor teachers with one solely coaching me on TPA.
Anyway, nice breakdown of the information. You will do well Karin.
Okay, thank the lord for this example. I am so happy to see this. Why couldn't we have seen this WAY earlier in our teacher preparation courses?
ReplyDeleteI am going to break things down by section if that is alright. (Who am I kidding? I am going to break it down that way anyway.)
Central Focus: Awesome. What the lesson is about. I don't need to describe the entire unit, just keep it concise and simple.
Content Standards: I don't need to pack the entire grade level standard into every lesson.
Learning Objectives: I was already pretty clear on this. It's nice to see that similarities between the "know" and "able to" sections are acceptable.
Language Objectives: One question is the mention of the language support. Do we need to include a single reference to a support or all the supports? I think this may have been asked in class, but I don't remember the answer.
Language Function: This seems repetitive, but that's okay as I suppose it should be related to the objectives above.
Vocabulary: Pretty straight forward. I'm glad there is not only single words, but specific phrases.
Discourse and Syntax: I'm still a bit unclear here. Not so much what they mean, as much as what is the proper way to write them. This is where I would like to show a lesson to Teresa and get specific feedback on whether I am writing these statements correctly.
Language Supports: I have the same question here, as I did above in language function. Should every support be listed or just a sampling?
Monitoring Learning: Formal and informal assessments are clear to me. That is one nice thing that was good about Heidi's class last year.
The "Prior Learning and Thinking" down to "Struggling/Underperforming Students" makes sense.
"Family/Community/Cultural Assets" was a needed clarification. Not that the area would be left blank, but that rather than detailing specific parent/community/cultural involvement it is about detailing the benefits and potential issues related to specific students backgrounds. This is the same with the "Social/Mental Health" and "Other" sections.
"Saftey Issues", "Materials", and "Co-Teaching" is straightforward.
The "Research-Based Practices" are clear, but daunting. In the past I have not summarized the specific theories themselves, but listed them and their relation to relevant areas in the lesson. I'm not looking forward to writing a summary of pedagogy every time.
The "Learning Task" sections were always a bit tough for me. I tend to go back and forth between feeling like I write too much and not enough. I've had some teachers ideally want the entire lesson written out verbatim. I mean every single piece of dialogue that will be said is recorded here. I'm happy to see only specific, relevant dialogue is detailed. I don't have to write a literal script, but rather a detailed outline that includes necessary dialogue.
Overall this was a great learning tool. I am eager to complete my lessons now that I have a good understanding of what is expected.
Ian, it was a great idea to break down each of the sections. I think the easiest way to tackle this TPA is to look at it line, by line, like you did. I have many of the same questions as you do, but I think writing the thematic unit for this class will clear up many of the questions we may have. There does seem to be some overlap of areas, but I suppose that is on purpose to give support. I’m with you on the learning task section. Always difficult to gauge what the appropriate amount of information is. Personally, I don’t think a narrative script is necessary and might become overwhelming. I agree that this example was nice to see how it outlined the dialog, rather than writing verbatim.
DeleteLike you and Molly, I found it was really helpful to see this example. I had several “Oh, now I get it” moments in addition to a few “Hey, I was right!” moments. I'd like more instruction on discourse and syntax, too. It's still pretty new for me, in spite of all the time we've spent on it in my other classes. I also was a little overwhelmed by the “research-based practices” part of things; however, it was nice and brief and maybe once we’ve done it we will be able to reuse it in a lot of ways. At least, that’s what I’m thinking since I’ll probably rely on certain theories more than others. This person had a lot more detail in their learning tasks than I’ve had so far, but I think you and I are the same in that we don’t want to write a whole script for the lesson; I’m more of an outline user, myself.
DeleteIan, I smiled when I got to your explanation of Language Function, "This seems repetitive." I think that's a good sign. We had a good talk earlier this semester with Dr. Chapman about a lot of the information we're discussing and practicing being "common sense" or "repetitive." It's nice to know that just by being around these standards, and being forced to really think about the way we present information, we've already become more knowledgeable about how all these pieces tie together. I think I'm still a little apprehensive about the differences between some of those "language" sections when it comes to how objectives and supports are different and how they should be worded, but practice in Gina's classes and in our other KSP courses has clearly prepared us for this more than we've realized so far, and that's encouraging!
DeleteIt was great to see the way someone else wrote up a lesson plan in this format. I’ve gotten some feedback from my observations, but that’s about it. Seeing someone else’s thinking put onto the page really made a lot of things clear for me and provided some reassurances, too. In a lot of ways, the sample lesson plan isn’t very dissimilar from the ones I’ve written. The biggest difference is it’s a lot longer than the ones I’ve written. They had a lot more detail about the research-based theories behind why they are planning their lesson a certain way. They know a lot more about their students than I have gotten to know, and they really detailed their activities. I see that I will probably need to be more explicit with the step-by-step instructions in my activities. They had nothing about common errors or misunderstandings; I always thought this was supposed to be a big deal.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that struck me was that, although the person who wrote this knew a lot about their students and was able to plan a lot around their individual needs, did they only have four students? If we have a class of ten or twenty, do we need to make notations for each and every one of them, or just those who might require contingency plans?
Mike- I kind of talked about your question on my response to Karin’s post. I’m not positive, but just wrote about what I understand that needs to happen. I think we do need to look at the 10-20 students and make notions for each of them. I don’t think we need to go in-depth about every single one of their interests and backgrounds, but important to look at IEP’s, 504 plans, and other unusual situations specific students might have. This guy wrote about interests of his students, and I think if you only have 4-5 students that’s ok, but I wouldn’t think you would write about special interests of all 20 students. Maybe if a student has autism, and has a special interest that makes learning easier for him or her, that would be important to note. Or if a student is very religious and you are teaching about another religion or culture, note that they may require special attention (obviously to be culturally sensitive) but that you need to make an adaption because of some reason. Hope I wasn’t just babbling, we can hopefully clarify this in Tuesday’s class.
DeleteI had one last question for you, did you see in the video the part where they talked about the TPA task 4? Do other content areas have a task four and we don’t? Or do we have a task 4 and I just couldn’t find it? Let me know what you think!
Mike I agree that the "common errors and misunderstandings" section seems to be a big one. It also seems like language is often the culprit when it comes to misunderstandings. I wish there was some example information there, because I feel like potentially, everything could be misunderstood depending on how clearly we've represented each aspect of the lesson! I'll make sure to bring this up during in class discussions (I'm sure we'll talk about it anyway), because it would be helpful to see some concrete examples for that section.
DeleteI agree with Ian, wishing that we could have seen this example a little bit earlier. It makes the TPA seem more “real” and not as daunting as a task. It is great to see some of the areas filled out that we have left blank in the past and examples of how to do so. I’m in the midst of my theories-based class, so it seeing how the example was stated is helpful in how to apply the ESL theories to my lessons.
ReplyDeleteI feel that with my current situation field experience/student teaching (in an elementary school) I will have an easier time filling out the TPA than I will in my high school placement. The current lessons I am teaching are to very small groups, of only 3-5 students and I am able to get to know the students more easily because there is so few of them. Filling out the specifics on students should come more easily than if I had a group of 20+ students like I did last semester at the middle school setting. I’m curious (as it seems that most of you are as well) how I would follow through with all of those students and their contingency plans when there are SO many students.
I guess I’m still confused on the co-teaching area. Why is it on the TPA if it’s not required? Is it to get us thinking more about co-teaching and the different roles that are played in co-teaching? I know that in my field co-teaching is a very strong possibility and something that is very beneficial for my students.
Like you and Ian, I was glad for this example. It's interesting that the four of us are all K-12 licensure candidates, because our experiences are going to be very different as we move between elementary and middle/high school.
DeleteI'm not really sure about the co-teaching thing, either. Since we are supposed to be co-teaching next semester, will we need to write more there? The example didn't really have much, but maybe that's all we need to write. Sorry I can't offer much new information; hopefully the solidarity helps!
I also don't quite understand the co-teaching section's relation to edTPA if it's not "required." I'm assuming it's just for the sake of planning since it'll be such a big part of our experience. Co-teaching happens so naturally in the art room, teachers spend most class periods walking around and helping students with individual projects, questions, and problems. "Co-teaching" kind of becomes a version of "taking all of the help/hands we can get," so I'm not too sure how I'll tackle that section. Yet.
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