edTPA Challenges: Time to Teach

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

edTPA Challenges: It’s Just the Beginning

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

Miss C is in Charge

As expected with any placement, the takeover process is gradual and very manageable. When it comes to my semester, I have been thrown in early with teaching. Now when I say teaching, I mean standing in front of the students and talking. I am not planning a schedule. I am not developing lesson plans. I am merely delivering a lesson.

Now, I do not want that to sound like a negative thing because I am so grateful to just be given this opportunity and to be in front of the students. I am not at the planning point in my semester other than a couple lessons here and there for my observations so I am right on track. That being said, I like going above and beyond every once in a while so when I saw the opportunity to plan a fun activity for my students, I ran with it.

As I mentioned before, I am one of those people who pins a million different lesson plan ideas and bulletin boards on Pinterest that I hope one day I will get to. That day finally came, at least for one of the lessons. Skimming through my Pinterest board, I found the perfect lesson to implement into the current curriculum.

My students were being introduced to slope and starting to take a closer look into how to find slope between two points and how to use a coordinate plane to their benefit when finding slope. With slope being such a visual concept, I didn’t think it made much sense for my students to continue practicing using worksheets when I could develop something much more head on. I am fortunate enough to have a cooperating teacher who is very supportive of my random ideas (a.k.a Pinterest ideas) that I want to try. I developed a rough draft of the plan to show him during our supervised study period to get the go ahead before tackling the project tonight for the next day’s class.

The students were going to have a Battleship tournament. That night after getting my go-ahead, I sat down with my mom (also in the education world) and forced her to play approximately 30 games of Battleship with me until I perfected the rules I wanted my students to follow. Once the rules were narrowed down for all levels of students, I had to develop a game board. Knowing that I am just beginning my journey as I teacher, I figured that a reusable board was the best course of action so that if I wanted to play this later on in my career or even later on in the week, I did not have to waste 20 more trees just so my students could play a couple games. The game board was simple, a coordinate plane, images of the “ships” they were to place on the coordinate plane, and printed rules to look back to for reference points. All of these were printed out, laminated, and taped to a manilla folder – thus my final product of reusable game boards. Each folder had two games on it, with two different sets of rules, to fit the levels of my students (see picture).

The rules were pretty simple. For the general education students, they were to place their ships on the coordinate plane at some angle, find the slope of their ship, and begin guessing coordinate points of their opponents ships. Once they hit an entire ship, they had to find the slope of the ship in order to sink it. For the honors students, they were to place their ships on the coordinate plane horizontally or vertically. In order to hit their opponent’s ships, they had to guess equations of line. The partner graphed that line to see if a ship was hit. This continued until all of their ships had been sunk. With the boards made, and the rules set, I was excited to see if my idea would be successful.

The next day I was pumped to show my cooperating teacher the work I had put in and see the game in action. The students were beyond excited to have a change of pace and no longer sit through a lecture and a worksheet. I, of course, adjusted the game as we went along through the periods as I saw more students playing and more ideas began flowing. By the end of the day, the students were mastering the idea of slope using the game boards. I think I was more excited than the students though. I was given the opportunity to see my hard work come to life and see students excited to use it.

With one successful lesson under my belt, I am excited to push myself and try many more!

xoxo,

Miss C

Before I Began…

Student teaching is this exciting time where we get the chance to practically run our own classrooms, try out all those lesson ideas that we pinned on Pinterest three years ago when we decided we wanted to become a teacher, and truly become adults and do what we feel we are meant to do. It is easy to become excited thinking about all of those things and overlook the seriousness of the upcoming semester. At least it was for me. That fairy tale dream of running my own classroom came to a crashing halt when I truly began to think about everything that I was going to be doing this semester. I mean I was actually going to be in charge of 150 13 year olds for four months. I would have to complete a portfolio on myself and my teaching (edTPA) that would determine my future. I would have to start applying for jobs. I would (practically) have my own classroom all to myself. It is a daunting task to say the least.

Being the type A person that I am, I made a giant checklist of everything that I needed to do to get ready for my upcoming semester to hopefully rid myself of the fears that had begun to accumulate. This giant checklist included reading everything I possibly could to prepare me for edTPA, trying to build a relationship with my cooperating teacher so that this semester would go smoothly, and learning how to live at home with my entire family after being on my own for 3 1/2 years. I really piled it on for myself.

Despite all of my preparation, the emotions that come with student teaching are inevitable. You are going to be scared. You are going to be excited. You are going to want to take advantage of every single second you spend inside your school. I was. I was ready to tackle this challenge head on and really push myself out of my comfort zone. I was secretly freaking out inside, maybe not so secretly if you ask my family and friends. I knew that this was the end all be all for me and that I needed to put 110% into this so I can get the most out of it.

Now that I am on week four of my placement, I can honestly say that the fear and anxieties that I had coming into student teaching were exaggerated but put the fire in me that I needed to succeed. Student teaching, although an intimidating experience from the outside, has been an exciting and more than worthwhile experience for me thus far.

xoxo,

Miss C