Many states have begun requiring edTPA as part of the process to grant teacher candidates their licenses upon or after graduation.
Here's my journey with edTPA
I am a dual major in Lutheran Early Childhood and Special Education. This means I am completing the Special Education Handbook, so my story may be a little different because my requirements are a little different.
All of the handbooks have similar formats and tasks in that they cover:
Planning
Instruction and Assessment
Each of those tasks has additional parts that may include work sample, baseline data, video clips, assessments and more.
My university was very gracious and we went over rubrics and the handbooks multiple times before actually completing the "real" edTPA in my student teaching semester. We even did a Mock edTPA during a pre-student teaching clinical to practice the whole process. I highly recommend reading through the handbooks, looking at the templates and rubrics and actually figure out what it is you're doing.
Basically, you are planning a unit of 3-5 lessons, teaching and videotaping yourself, and then analyzing how you and the learner(s) did.
Throughout this process you are showing that you can support individual learners you have to explain/describe/justify a whole lot. Find some good research and theory that applies to both the content and strategies you want to use in your unit.
For task 2 [instruction], you are videotaping yourself and then analyzing how your teaching went. You may videotape all four lessons, but then you can only actually keep up to 20 minutes worth of your instruction. Choose those clips wisely because the more you can include in those clips the better!
For task 3 [assessment], you are analyzing how your learner did and justifying next steps. Here is where you show completed assessment records and more. You discuss how you gave the learner feedback and they were able to participate directly in the lessons to achieve the unit/learning goal. Then again you are explaining how the learner performed based on what you planned for and what was shown in the clips previously.
When you break it down this way it doesn't seem so scary. All teachers plan, instruct, and then analyze how students do. We become reflective practitioners naturally through the process of teaching. This process is definitely tedious and a lot, but try to think of it as a really long and annoying paper. It should be stuff you're already doing (minus the videotaping)! One big tip I read in my journey was to remember that the scorers are not looking for perfect teaching or even that your student meets the objectives perfectly. They want to see that you can justify everything you're actually doing and respond to that teaching.
I hope my experience and explanations help you out a little bit and I have compiled a short list of tips that can prove to be helpful! I will be praying for you as you work through this!
edTPA Tips
- Start early
- Keep a flash drive or Google Drive account where you can back up your documents
- Read the Handbooks
- Actually Read the Handbooks...Especially Understanding Rubric Level Progressions and Making Good Choices
- Find a partner (in education) who you could peer edit with and could give you feedback
- Find someone you can email your documents just to make sure you don't get an error codes (it would also be great if they could read through just to check grammar and that things generally make sense)
- Remember the point is not to be perfect!
Disclaimer: I completed the Special Education Handbook which varies from others. I completed it in 2017 and handbooks sometimes change, so in a couple years the task may require different things. This is a generalized post about what I experienced.
