When creating the learning segment for your edTPA, you must have a central focus which is a description of the important understandings and core concepts that you want students to develop within the learning segment. The central focus that you choose must be based on your subject specific emphasis, which you will often here me refer to as the SSE. I've spoken a lot about subject specific emphasis and its importance to the central focus.
The folks who struggle the most with developing this are Elementary Literacy. This is due to a lack of guidance on how to choose their central focus and incongruity between the terms used in teaching practice and the terms used in the edTPA assessment.
The subject specific emphasis of the Elementary Literacy handbook consists of a central focus of either composition or comprehension. The central focus is supported by students learning to use an Essential Literacy Strategy. Students learn Related Skills (often called "daily skills" in practice) and these are the building blocks that enable students employ the Essential Literacy Strategy for comprehending or composing text.
I'm not surprised that teachers, whether new or experienced, find this confusing. In elementary classrooms across the nation, anything to do with words is taught in large language arts blocks. During this block, teachers will teach reading comprehension, composition, decoding, spelling, handwriting, grammar. They will bring all of the skills that they are teaching together by focusing on a story, theme, standard, or big idea. In some schools, all language arts is taught only as it is integrated in the learning of core subjects such as science or social studies.
Because a typical language arts block takes so many hours in 3-5 days, the folks who designed edTPA thought it best to ask teachers to focus on one just one part of their language arts curriculum. In looking at this graphic, you can see that your edTPA needs to focus on one small part of your language arts curriculum.
Now that you understand how your edTPA fits with your language arts curriculum, let's talk about the nitty gritty of how to choose your central focus.
Find Appendix A in the back of the official edTPA document called Understanding Rubric Level Progressions.
Find the standard that you will be focusing on during this learning segment.
The standard should either be Comprehension or Composition.
From the Appendix A chart, choose one Essential Literacy Strategy from the left hand column. Your Essential Literacy Standard should be strongly aligned with your standard.
Next choose 1-3 Related Skills from the right hand column.
Your daily lesson objectives should strongly align with your Related Skills.
An Example:
My Standard: CC.RL.K.2: With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.
This is Comprehension.
Essential Literacy Strategy: Retell a Story
Note the direct relationship between the standard and the ELS.
Related Skills:
Identify characters and setting.
Identify Beginning, Middle, and End.
Lesson Objectives: (You can have any number of objectives per day. They should be directly related to your related skills.)
Day 1 - The learner will identify characters of the story.
Day 2 - The learner will identify setting of the story.
Day 3 - The learner will identify the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
Now when you design your learning segment, keep in mind that your overarching goal is for students to either comprehend or compose text by using your Essential Literacy Strategy. They will be using daily Related Skills to accomplish the strategy. Now click here to find out how to express your Central Focus for the purposes of writing your edTPA.
Once you have a clear picture of what you will be teaching, planning your individual lessons becomes simpler. Use this inexpensive Learning Segment Progression Organizer to plan your learning segment.
See the Learning Progression Organizer demonstrated here:
Need more guidance on this? Beginning at 13:44, I demonstrate finding your ELS and RS.
You're going to do great!
Mamaw Yates
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