I'm a senior in my education program. I've written a few TPA lesson plans by now, and I've got a trembling grasp on how to create lesson plans. I do as the artist does and recycle those parts of previous lesson plans of which are renewable. And yet there are still parts of the lesson plan that I end up not "getting." Practice makes perfect, I know, but no amount of practice will make the edTPA less daunting, less looming and sinister somewhere in the middle-distance of my educational career. With the addition of the guidelines on Dr. Agriss' blog, they help ease some measure of burden, but as a college student with a separate-yet-parallel adult life full of bills, parenting, debilitating chronic insomnia, and finding time to regain composure between teetering bouts with psychological breaks, my shoulders are chapped and my back is weary. I skimmed through the edTPA's "Making Good Choices" document, a full 40 pages of tips and tricks for the discerning heavy-lidded eye, and decided that maybe it's worth weeding through with a comb of finer teeth so as to perhaps glean some extra burden-lifting advice for completing my edTPA.
I'm the kind of guy who doesn't study for a test and still gets a solid 85-90 percent. I wade ankle-deep into my textbooks and pull out with 4.0 GPAs consistently. But the edTPA? The edTPA scares me. In these waters there be monsters, and to defeat them, I must wade further.
When it comes to my lesson planning, I find that what I need the most help on is the use of academic language, and figuring out how to use formative assessments in practice. Writing down theses assessments is all well and good, but to put them to use in the classroom is a whole separate bag of cats, especially considering the other task-juggling required. I know firsthand that teachers in the classroom don't put together lesson plans for each day of instruction, and I imagine that helps once the monster has been vanquished, but before then, I cannot reliably fall back on shortcuts to get me through the edTPA. I've got to buckle down and strike true.
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