a. Explain how your
understanding of your students’ prior learning, experiences, and development
guided your choice or adaptation of learning tasks and materials to develop
students’ abilities to comprehend, construct
meaning from, interpret, and/or respond to a complex text.
b. How are the plans
for instruction sequenced in the learning segment to build connections between
students’ prior learning and experiences and new knowledge?
c. Describe common student errors or misunderstandings
within your content focus and how you will address them.
d. Explain how, throughout the learning segment, you will
help students make connections between textual references, constructions of meaning,
interpretations, and responses to text to deepen student learning.
e. Describe any
instructional strategies planned to support students with specific learning
needs. This will vary based on what you know about your students but may
include students with IEPs (individualized education programs), English language
learners, or gifted students needing greater support or challenge.
[Begin
response here: ]
This is Question Four of six.
The need to prepare this TPA on such a reality-free timeline has unquestionably delayed my entry into teaching my mentor's full schedule. Because I have had to prepare pretty much half of the semester for the class I'll be videotaping - 9th grade Honors English - and have spent almost the whole week writing up the commentary, I haven't even started in on 11th grade College Prep English and won't be able to do so until after next week.
I built the major aspects of the unit, which I'm pretty excited about teaching, last weekend. It will incorporate both To Kill A Mockingbird and 1984 as well as articles, at least one TED talk video, instruction on writing comparison essays and excerpts from Black Boy, all in an investigation of how we find authority figures we can trust and how we can deal with legitimate authority figures who are untrustworthy. I taught the first lesson in the unit today and was very happy with the student responses to it. But up to now I've been doing nothing but answering all the Commentary questions and I still have one more to do before submitting it, along with the lesson plans for Oct. 1-5 and all supplementary materials, by Monday night.
What makes this whole exercise so frustrating is not just the time it takes away from my learning how to teach (as opposed to learning how to be assessed as a teacher). It's the rigidity of it all. As I guided my students in their quickwrite about authority figures today, I realized that I should add the question of how they define an authority figure and whether trust and respect are a necessary part of that authority. So I added the question, and that's what sparked the most intense responses from the students. EVERYONE wanted to tell the class, "Well, I think an authority figure is a little different from that. ..." If I hadn't been able to add that question because I knew I was being graded on teaching what I had planned to teach, the students might not have wanted to participate as much from the very start and they might not have learned as much about life and themselves from all the reading and writing we'll be doing together. So this could have been one case in which assessing the teacher meant limiting the teaching. Not good.
On the other hand, the TPA student manual provided a good laugh. Here it is, the third week of the semester, I'm supposed to have planned out my lessons for a month from now, and the manual suggests I might want to confer with my "cooperating teacher" (why isn't she being given the dignity of mentorship?) a good two months in advance about the videotaped lessons. Hmmm. That would have put us in July. Thanks for the advice, Pearson.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen