What do I plan for my Early Childhood edTPA?
You will need to plan 3-5 learning experiences that build on each other toward a language/literacy learning goal. These learning experiences should occur over 3-5 days. These 3-5 learning experiences are called a learning segment.
Thus, a learning segment is a group of 3-5 learning experiences that build towards a central focus.
What should I plan for a central focus?
You need to choose a learning goal that is focused on developing language and/or literacy. In planning these lessons, you should integrate other disciplines such as Science, Social Studies, Math, etc. You also need to assure that your activities and materials are active and multi-modal. Plan to use as many of the students' senses as possible while planning hands-on experiences that get your students up and moving, participating in play, being sure to cater to as many different learning styles as possible.
Example Learning Segment Overview
When planning their entire learning segment, teachers need to think about what they want students to learn, how they will evaluate that learning at the end, and what experiences the students need in order to get to that learning goal.
Before writing individual lesson plans for each day, I encourage teachers to think about these five big things for the whole learning segment:
Language/Literacy Learning Goal
An Assessment for the Learning Goal
Vocabulary
Multimodal and Active Activities
Interdisciplinary Connections
EXAMPLE:
In the learning segment above, the teacher plans to use The Three Little Pigs as the central focus of her learning segment. She followed these steps:
First, choose a learning goal that you can introduce to the children, support with instructional activities and practice, and then evaluate at the end.
Second, it is important to immediately plan how you will evaluate your learning goal. This is so important because it is easy to get off-track with all of the interdisciplinary and multimodal activities that will be added to these experiences. Having the learning goal and assessment planned will keep your instruction focused. Click here to read my blog about choosing assessments.
Third, think of all of the vocabulary that your children will need to understand and use in your learning segment. Reminder: you don't have to evaluate their vocabulary - think in terms of exposure and practice.
Now, focus on ways that you can get the children using their hands, their voices, their senses, and their bodies.
Brainstorm all of the connections that you can make to other disciplines. You might not use them all but list as many as you can think of! Reminder: you don't have to evaluate the learning of these interdisciplinary connections. Think in terms of enrichment and exploration experiences!
Organizing your Learning Experiences
Now you are ready to sketch out your lessons. See below how the teacher from above could now take her information to organize her thoughts about her lesson.
Once you have an idea about how your learning experiences will build in a way that allows the children the opportunity to achieve the learning goal and express it, you are ready to write your lesson plans.
You can use any lesson plan template that you wish to write out your lesson plans. I sell one here on TpT. It is popular because it comes with a tutorial for completing it. However, if you use it, I suggest that you modify the section on Academic Language to only include Vocabulary. Your handbook only requires these things to be in your lesson plans:
standards
objectives
instructional strategies and learning activities
resources and materials
Lesson plans are only supporting documentation for the scoring of Task One. It is not crucial that they be perfect because they are not directly scored. The importance of planning at this point is to make sure that you have remembered to address the five big things (language goal; assessment; vocabulary; multimodal activities; interdisciplinary connections).
Getting Ready to Record:
Plan to record all of your lessons but be certain to get these things on your video:
students actively engaged in language/literacy development (see Rubric 7)
students engaged in multimodal activities that promote language/literacy development (see Rubric 7)
teacher (you) making connections to prior learning or to student assets (see Rubric 7)
teacher (you) asking questions and building on responses (see Rubric 8)
interdisciplinary connections (see Rubric 9)
Be sure to be ready for Task Two!
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Mamaw Yates
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