TPA Task 1
It was a pleasure to read your postings. We all now have a better picture of what each of you is doing. As you are settling in, it's time to start on your TPA if you haven't already. Kasia and Emily, you should be able to support each other as you work on your lessons etc. Rosie, Monica should remember some from Michael working on it last spring. Of course, I'm here to assist whenever you need me.
This week let's focus on Task 1 of the TPA. Secondary, you need to choose which class section will be your focus group for the TPA and I would suggest doing some lessons right away so you become familiar with the students and the curriculum. Before you begin, register with Pearson and read through the TPA Handbook then go back and reread Task 1. Copy the rubrics that are near the end of the document so you can refer to them as you write. Good practice is to read the instructions ie commentary, prompts and rubrics for the Task you are going to work on. Note that Task 1 includes planning for Task 2 (Engaging Students) and Task 3 (Assessment). Complete the Context for Learning form with the help of your cooperating teacher. This is information needed when you respond to the Planning Commentary. Always refer to the rubrics for the Task and use the rubric language whenever possible in your written responses.
Those are a few quick tips. This week write about what you have learned about your students from working on the TPA. How does this information impact what you are going to teach? What will be the central focus of the lessons used for the TPA? Finish up with a weekly highlight and a challenge. Remember to respond to at least one other person's post.
Hope it's been a great week for each of you!
posted by Chris @ 9:21 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
After completing the Context for Learning segment of the TPA, I learned a lot about my students. I was surprised to see that we have 3 ELL students in the class and 2 other students who speak another language at home. After learning this, I started to pay more attention to these students. I asked them to read aloud to me during DEAR time, or made sure to check up on them a little extra during our writing time everyday. Since I am completing the Elementary Math TPA, I will be sure to pay close attention to these students, along with the students on IEPs.
The central focus of my lessons will be a lesson on solving story problems. Since I using a math series that uses the spiral method, it touches on something different everyday and then comes back to in during the next unit. I am unsure if this is going to work with the TPA or not and will have to read over the information again. If it doesn't smoothly connect with the TPA format, I can create a couple of supplementary lessons to use instead of the text.
A weekly challenge for me was to be sure to give more positive than negative comments to a student who is a nice kid but often is not doing what he is supposed to. It is so easy to correct kids for being off task, talking when they're supposed to be quiet, or for putting their hands all over the walls in the hallway but so hard to remember to praise the little things when they do them.
A high for me was today the kids got to use the science lab!! We have been working hard since last week to put it together and have each station ready for the whole unit, so it was great to see the kids enjoying themselves and really learning a lot this morning!
I hope everyone has had a good week and enjoys the weekend :) :)
Rosie, I really liked what you mentioned about focusing on giving more positive comments to “off-task” kids. I fee like this has been a challenge for me too. I think if I provided more positive comments when those generally “off-task” kids were actually were on task and doing what was asked, it might encourage them to continue the positive behavior. I will definitely try to focus on that this week. Thanks for sharing that.
Also, in response to your comment last week---My roommate is from a town outside of Warsaw, but has done 10 years of school in the states. She is back here, working on her dissertation. It is nice to have someone who can show me around and teach me Polish, while also being able to speak English. That is neat that you also have connections in Germany! I hope you got to play some basketball, I don’t think you will “lose your skills” haha. I bet you impressed everybody! I’m a bit worried because it sounds like you and Emily have your lessons and stuff all figured out, and even though I have been teaching I still can’t decide on what class to focus the TPA on and what lessons to do! (more on that later in my post.)
TPA Info:
I have been going back and forth between which classes to teach. Since the school is preparing the 9th and 10th graders for the IB curriculum their last two years, the curriculum and expectations are pretty much set for them. The teachers do have leeway here in there in which materials and the approaches they use. The issue that I’m trying to figure out is what they will supposed to be covering at the time that I’m supposed to be doing the filming and documenting. Right now would have been perfect (but too soon) because they are both starting a new segment that will go for about 3 weeks. By the time I feel like I will be ready to film, they will be wrapping up their segments and the lesson plans will be minimal, because it will be all geared towards them finishing up their projects. The next learning segments will start around the first and second week of Oct. My question-will this be too late to be doing the filming and lesson plan documentation? I have been teaching already, and this next week I will be fully teaching all classes, except for one period on Monday, because my mentor teacher is going to model a reading strategy for me. Tomorrow I also have created the lesson plan for the 10th grade class based off of the short story, A Rose for Emily. I wish I had been able to document this next week, because most of the lessons are very engaging and a collaborative effort of my mentor teacher and my ideas. Oh well, I know there are plenty more opportunities to start the TPA documentation, but I still can’t figure out whether I want to do the 10th grade class (they have great input and participation) or one of the 9th grade classes (smaller group, and a bit more challenging on the classroom management side of things).
I’m going to meet with my mentor teacher today, and maybe we will be able to come up with something. I will report back tomorrow with a clearer picture of where my TPA will be focused and heading. I just wanted to throw some of my brainstorming at you guys. Haha.
The things that I know so far: The school doesn’t have IEP’s, but they do have SST’s that are much more informal. The teachers or parents can mention a student for an SST, and basically there is a meeting with all of the student’s teachers, the principal and counselors (sometimes the parents if needed) where they discuss the issues around the students academic or social learning difficulties. Sometimes it can be something as simple as giving the teachers background information on a student in order to meet their needs in a classroom. Other times, it is a meeting on the steps that need to be put in place for the student to have success, and others it’s just a “lets keep an eye and see how things go” type of meeting.
The school is very diverse, like I’ve mentioned before. English is probably about 80% of students’ second language. Many of them are very proficient in English, but there are those who do struggle and we have to be very clear with our directions, checking if they understood, and giving them resources to resort back to for further clarification of expectations and directions.
Ok, well I sort of threw a lot into this, and still have a bit more of the question to get back to you guys on. I will leave it at this until I figure a bit more out.
This past week: (sorry for all the posts this time!)
The camping Trip was both a highlight and a challenge. The challenges=the weather. It was pouring rain the whole time except for a couple hours at the start of the trip and a couple hours during the last day. We did a caving and climbing adventure on the first day. The cave was so intense. I love adventures and physical challenges, but I have to admit, it was a bit scary for me! There were only two caverns that you could sit up in, and the rest of the time you were slithering through the cave, hands always in front of your head or else you would get stuck! I was so impressed that we had 100% participation from the students! A couple students didn’t want to go in, but once they saw their peers come out safely, albeit very dirty, they went in as well. There was only one kid who got stuck, but luckily it was towards the end and the students in front of him and behind him really stepped up to the plate and talked him through it and assisted him. We were able to pull him out and he was all smiles! We did have an injury that night when the kids were in their cooking groups. A boiling pot of water was knocked over and spilled on a girls lap. She was tough, but when we assessed the damage we needed to take her home. She had huge blisters on the inside of her thighs to the point where she couldn’t even walk and smaller blisters were starting to form along with major inflammation and redness. ☹ She was such a trooper through the whole ordeal.
The next day the students broke up into three groups and went through a 2hour rotation at three different activities. One was an orienteering scavenger hunt that some of the teachers set up in the forest, the other was a ropes course that resembled something you would see in Tarzan-very cool- and the last was a zip-line from a castle wall into the forest where the ropes course was. It was really neat to see students in a different element. The real leaders become evident and the camaraderie amongst all the 59 students was quite encouraging the whole day…They were soaking wet and freezing, but they kept doing what we asked of them and challenged themselves in many ways!
We ended the trip with a kayaking and brain teaser race. Luckily the rain stopped for a bit during this.
Another challenge that came for me, was after the kayaking we passed out letters to the students from their parents. Before the trip we had asked all the parents to write a letter. In the years past there were always a small handful of students who didn’t get letters and the teachers would write one for them. This year only one student’s parents didn’t write a letter. They even talked to the dad face to face and he still didn’t write one. It was heartbreaking. Another teacher and I sat down and wrote a letter that had as much meaning and encouragement as we could muster, but I knew it wasn’t going to be the same. When we passed out the letters, his face lit up and he said “I didn’t know my dad would write a letter!” This made me want to cry, especially after I peeked over at him when he was reading and I could see his face drop a bit when he realized it wasn’t from his parents. He quickly put the letter in his pocket and tried to save face in front of his friends…
The trip, overall, was a great experience. It will be interesting to see if classroom dynamics are any different this coming week because of it.
I started working with Ms. Liff on ideas for the TPA really early in the semester. She suggested I make a lesson segment featuring "The Lottery" and reading comprehension. She has always wanted to teach this story, but has never had time to do so.
At first, I was a little apprehensive about teaching "The Lottery" to 8th graders. It is a heavy story with a lot of opportunity for discussion about society. I didn't read it until 10th grade, and I wasn't sure if 8th graders would be able to handle it. I don't want to discount my 8th graders. I think they are very bright, but it was their maturity and varying comprehension levels I was concerned about. After talking with Ms. Liff and getting to know my students better, I resolved to stay with "The Lottery" lesson and modify it to make it more relatable to 8th graders. So I am going to introduce a book they are more familiar with, "The Hunger Games", as a comparison novel. Ms. Liff and I scheduled time for me to implement my lesson segment next week. The video permission slips have already been returned, and I am just about finished with the Task 1 planning commentary.
I think what Task 1 has helped me the most with, is in figuring out what my students are and are not yet capable of doing. There were activities I had at first that were geared towards high school level classes. I modified those, while leaving them still available for those students who wanted to challenge themselves. With 96 kids, I have every type of learner from highly capable to those who still rely on outside support. It was very important to me that every student be reached.
One highlight of last week was having the entire class to myself on Thursday while my teacher was doing interviews for Junior Leadership Seminar. We did a number of activities including a spelling test, a video prompt, and essay writing. It went very well. However, I am beginning to see my biggest challenge with these students will be discipline. I already know them so well and talk to them frequently about their life outside of school, so they don’t see me as a disciplinarian. I had to get after them frequently for talking to their friends when they should have been working, which is hard for me to do because I don’t like to be the mean guy. I want to get to a point where they respect me enough to follow directions without me having to be mean.
Kasia- your comment about your student and the letter made me want to cry just reading it. Sometimes the hardest challenge we have is not with the students, but with the parents. They have so much of an impact on their child's education and their experience in school, and some don't realize it. It was so nice of you to write a letter to him, but that must have been so hard seeing his reaction when he realized it wasn't from his father. Stay strong and keep watching him for any warning signs in his writing. I had a lot of kids write about troubled home lives in letters to me, and I shared them with the counselor.
Kaisa- thanks for all of the posts! If I were you, I'd go for the best behaved class. I would be afraid of getting too distracted by the disciplinary side of things to do my best teaching the lesson.
Don't worry, Emily is just really on the ball! haha. I am still planning with my teacher what I should do. We start a new math unit next week, so I am going to try to film and document that lesson as well as two others. As I mentioned earlier, I am having a hard time connecting the first lesson with the other two because of the spiral technique used. Eventually it all makes sense, but when you focus on a chunk of lessons, it doesn't look like it does.
My teacher is very regimented and the whole grade level does the same lessons every day so I don't want to tweak it and have our class be off base because of it. These are things I am still mulling over and will hope to figure out this week!!
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