edTPA Reflection

For the first time since I've started my journey to becoming a teacher, I was exposed to edTPA this semester. edTPA is an assessment that all teacher candidates need to complete before officially becoming a certified teacher. This assessment is used in over 40 states and tests the skills that all teachers need to have in order to be an effective teacher. This task seemed daunting at first, but once I got started I realized that my class and fieldwork experience prepared me perfectly to answer all of the questions. edTPA is broken down into three tasks that all have numerous subtasks. Some of them are very short in length and some of them are a lot longer. Task one is all about planning and focuses on everything that happens before the lesson. Task one has five subtasks which all describe and explain the planning that went into my instruction. This part is supposed to prepare you to get into the classroom, and make you think about why you're making the educational decisions that you picked. Task two is only two parts and focuses on your actual teaching. Task 2A is just a video of me teaching a direct instruction lesson to the students, and task 2B forces me to discuss and analyze what happened in the video. This task is meant to analyze my own teaching, which was very beneficial. I had never actually seen myself teach before, so it was cool to be able to see myself in action and then reflect and learn from what I did. Task three focuses on student work samples. I had to grade student work from my lesson and reflect on how that showed what the students did or did not learn during the lesson. I also had to think about how student work would affect my future instruction if I were to keep teaching the same class. All of these prompts took me a lot of time to complete but were all worthwhile in improving my understanding of what happened this past semester. I'm going to have to fill these tasks out again for my social studies class next semester, and this time I'll feel much more comfortable filling them out. I'm not going to wait until the last couple of weeks of class to start filling them out; instead, I'm going to start working on them as soon as I finish my teaching lesson. This will give me plenty of time to make sure that they're perfect! If you want to check out my edTPA from this semester, here's the link to my eFolio which contains all of the edTPA tasks and much more!