So when you think about student teaching, it is hard to think about anything other than edTPA. It is a daunting task that appears to hold your whole future in its hands. Being the anxious person that I am, I knew I had to tackle this thing pretty early on if I wanted to maintain any form of sanity. Before I could actually plan out my portfolio, I had to plan out my plan to tackle edTPA. There is a lot of planning involved in this process, to say the least.
My first step was to talk to my cooperating teacher and get an idea for a timeline. Now this sounds like a simple task but when your cooperating teacher makes up the plans for the day during his first hour plan, figuring out what we were doing a month down the road was not an easy feat. I decided to take things into my own hands and just tell him my dates and call it a day. I gave myself about a month to plan and complete all of the tasks in the Planning Task of the edTPA. I was starting to think of ideas early on, when things decided to take a drastic change. So we have requirements for our classes that are still going on during student teaching and one of those requirements is that we submit lesson plans for the upcoming week. I was submitting the lesson plans just like usual when I realized that I had developed an entire unit project. Why wait for edTPA to roll around when I could just use that? So that is exactly what I did.
I am in the midst of my filming now and wow, is it a lot of work. There is a lot of planning for the actual lesson and a lot of different scenarios that need to be thought of prior to teaching the lesson. However, I personally think that writing lesson plans and planning for a learning segment is not a difficult feat. The film has to demonstrate a whole mess of different understandings for a student so actually capturing all of those learning targets in one 20 minute video is a challenge, to say the least. I am very interested to see how the learning segment plays out and how the rest of the edTPA process goes. I have confidence that my plans will challenge the students and encompass all of their skills. I just have to show that on a piece of paper and a video clip.
xoxo
Miss C