Tuesday, February 12, 2019

EWU's TPA guidelines and edTPA Making Good Choices


I was working on a draft of the ‘edTPA Lesson Plan’ portion of my final unit plan project today and found myself becoming increasingly frustrated. I was taking a stab at each of the sections but kept feeling like I didn’t know exactly what belonged in each box. After lamenting my difficulty finding any succinct guide in a quick online search, I decided to take a break from the lesson plan for the time being and work on my blog post assignment for tomorrow, and boy am I glad I did!

The readings for this blog post were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Up until now, I haven’t received any direct instruction on the edTPA format, and I found that while comprehensive, on its own the lesson plan format isn’t necessarily intuitive. I know what “Lesson Connections” means, but it’s difficult to remember everything that that one section can contain when the only prompt is “Lesson Connections”. 

The “EWU edTPA Lesson Plan Guidelines” article was particularly helpful in that it succinctly and clearly laid out each section of the edTPA Lesson Plan document and asked questions to direct how one might fill out each. Reading it was kind of like taking a quick look at each section under a microscope: the details really started to become more visible. When I take another crack at my edTPA Lesson Plan draft I plan to make direct use of this article.

The “edTPA Making Good Choices” article was also helpful but in a different way. It was not as succinct or easily applicable as EWU’s Guidelines but it did give a better glimpse at the big picture of the edTPA. It also gave some better descriptions of the more nuanced parts of the edTPA, like the descriptions of how and what kinds of research to include in the “How specific do my references to research and theory have to be?” section. This article might be more difficult to apply directly to the lesson that I am planning right now, but it will be a great reference to turn to when I feel like the EWU Guidelines aren’t quite enough.

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