Beyond the planning period of edTPA begins the instructional task, also known as the time to actually teach what you have spent so much time planning. While a daunting task, the time actually spent in the classroom teaching the learning segment FLIES by. I felt like my unit came and went before I even realized what I was doing.
The nerves that come with teaching it are crazy. Now I am an anxious person so I can imagine that my emotions were the normal emotions times about twelve; however, there is a lot of fear of mistakes. You have spent so much time and energy planning out the perfect lesson and its only normal to want it to go perfect, even though as teachers, we know that is not a possibility. For middle school math edTPA, there are a lot of different goals that need to be met through the assessment and video. Personally, I knew the students would rock the assessment because I have lucked out with rockstar students for my student teaching; however, the video terrified me. To be able to catch on video students demonstrating all of their skills, regardless of their abilities, is a challenging task. My approach was to just video tape everything and hope for the best.
At this point in time, I have completed all of my videotaping and have taught all of my learning segment. I feel like Im in the home stretch but once I start the rest of the commentary, I know I will be just as stressed as before. This process is an overwhelming one but hopefully in the end, the results will be worthwhile. edTPA is thus far one of the most stressful parts of student teaching. I recommend throwing yourself into early though because this is the only thing I have going on right now, while in the future, I will have much more to deal with.
xoxo
Miss C