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Teacher Performance Assessment


Why do I submit video clips instead of a videotape of the complete lesson?

The video clips represent critically important teaching and learning tasks in the content area.  Sometimes these occur within a single lesson and sometimes they do not.  Pilot test results suggest that the link to the video is more than sufficient for scorers to identify patterns in the way that you work with and respond to students.

How do I select my video clips to show active engagement of students in their own understanding of the concepts, skills, and/or processes relating to the learning objectives?

The focus of this task is to show how you structure learning activities that engage students in developing their own understandings of the content and how you further your students’ knowledge and skills by actively monitoring their understanding while teaching.  The video should feature instruction where you interact with students or students interact with each other and you have an opportunity to respond to student questions, concerns, or needs.

The video that you select should clearly show student engagement in the learning activities of the lesson.  The individual voices of students as they are working on a task or with each other should also be audible.  The work the students are doing should be complex, showing student thinking, analysis, and judgment.  If your students are not accustomed to engaging in these kinds of interactions, you should point out how you are supporting them in developing the skills.  Lessons that require students to only focus on recall of facts or information or to practice a set of narrow skills, conventions, or procedures are not appropriate choices for the Teaching Event video.

What are routines and working structures in the classroom?

Routines in working structures include any regular classroom norms or expectations that guide teacher and student behavior.  These may include, for example, group work roles, class discussion norms, behavior norms, designated classroom spaces for particular kinds of activities, or strategies for efficient paper handling in the classroom.  Some of these routines or working structures might have been established early in the school year by your cooperating teacher, and some may be specific to a task, activity, or unit of instruction.  Many student teachers may implement new routines for working structures for the class when they assume the full teaching responsibility for the class, trying new group work structures or different learning tasks than the cooperating teacher.  The commentary offers you an opportunity to tell the assessors what routines or working structures are new to the students, if any, and how you prepare the students to work within the structures.

How do I show that I am monitoring student learning? 

In the commentary, you are asked to describe your monitoring strategies.  The video should show how you respond to student questions, concerns, or needs.  You can draw upon any of the interactions in the video to highlight how you listen to students and respond in such a way that you are supporting them and building on their thinking and ideas or how you informally assess students as part of the ongoing instruction.  You may also provide any additional information about your students that will help an assessor understand and interpret the monitoring strategies seen in the video clips.

Your ability to show that you are monitoring student learning in the video selection may depend on the strategies you have chosen for engaging students in the learning process.  Strategies that do not allow you to engage in discussion or conversation with students may limit your ability to demonstrate that you are monitoring the student progress during instruction.  For example, if you deliver a mini-lecture followed by a discussion during which you check for student understanding, you may want to describe the content of the mini lecture and provide a video clip that focuses on how you checked student understanding of the content presented.

What role does the reflection play in the Instruction section of the TPA?

The TPA would not be complete without asking how your instruction leads to your next steps of planning for future instruction.  Reflect on the learning that resulted from the experience is featured in the video clips.  Explain how, in your subsequent planning and teaching, successes were built upon and missed opportunities were addressed.

You may have also addressed this question to some degree in your daily reflections.  You do not need to be repetitive in your response to this question.  If your response is very similar to your daily reflection, refer the assessors to the daily reflection response. 

Instruction: How will my response be scored?

The scoring rubrics for Instruction include guiding questions.  For each question, the assessors will assign a score level. 

How does the candidate actively engage students in their own understanding of the discipline-specific focus for the video clips?

The assessors will examine the video and the response to the commentary questions to determine not only the degree of intellectual engagement among the students in your class, but also the strategies that you use to enable the students with varying learning needs to engage in the learning tasks.  For this rubric, engagement does not mean that the students are busy and participating in tasks.  There must be evidence that the students are intellectually engaged.  They are thinking, reasoning, or analyzing.

How does the candidate monitor student understanding during instruction and respond to student questions, comments, and needs?

The assessors will examine the evidence from the video and the written commentary to determine how your instructional techniques and interactions with students allow the students opportunities to respond to prompts, questions, or activities in ways that require them to think and reason.  The assessors will also evaluate how your responses to students help guide students’ understanding by supporting their thinking and building on their developing ideas.  Reasonable attendance will account for the fact that you are still in the early stages of learning how to use different teaching strategies effectively.

Pause for Self-Assessment: Instruction

After you have taught your Learning Segment and completed a draft of your instruction section of the Teaching Event, reflect on your instruction by answering the following questions.  You may also want to share your responses with your cooperating teacher.

  • What evidence in the video clips demonstrates that students were intellectually engaged in the learning tasks?
  • During your video clips, do your students have enough opportunity to contribute their ideas to allow you to show that you can monitor their thinking and understanding?  Do your contributions show how you are directing or guiding student learning?
  • What evidence can assessors see in your video and your commentary that show that your classroom is a productive and supportive learning environment for your students?

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