EWU's TPA guidelines and edTPA Making Good Choices

For me, the hardest part of learning how to be a teacher is the tedious lesson plans (especially having to do 15 for this class!!). I struggle the most with how to organize all these ideas I have in my head into either one or multiple lesson plans, and because I don’t have the experience of being in a classroom, I’m unsure of what works in a classroom or how to manage time effectively. I found the article “edTPA Making Good Choices” to be extremely helpful as I am making my lesson plans for this class. What I liked the most about this article is the section on “Knowledge of Students”. In this section, I learned that the lessons we create should be student focused. This article also pointed out that when catering to students with certain needs its important that the our reasoning for the actions we take are “based on your knowledge of your students and not based on assumptions or stereotypes associated with their age or ethnic, cultural, or socio-economic backgrounds.”

As for the edTPA Lesson Plan Guidelines, this is the first quarter that I’ve seen a shorter format of the lesson plan, and I actually really like this one because of the questions being asked in each section. In the long version of the lesson plan it doesn’t have these questions, so I constantly had to reference my first lesson plan to see what I needed to each category. I also like the shorter format because it combines some of the sections from the longer format into more cohesive sections.