ELA TPE a

The English candidate demonstrates the ability to teach the state-adopted academic content standards for students in English-Language Arts.

What is this?

I taught this lesson about how to write an objective summary with 8th graders during my placement at R.L.S. Middle School. It includes a lesson plan with an essential question, state standard, learning objective, notes about prior knowledge and student motivation, linked materials for activities, instructional steps, and differentiation goals. Above are also the reading students broke down during the lesson and the Google slides I used to teach the concepts. Students were instructed to take notes on the highlighted portions.

Why did I choose it?

I chose this lesson plan because during my placement, R.L.S. was beginning the PLC process of breaking down state standards for each teacher to work on with their class. That meant there was a higher emphasis on standards in lesson planning than at other placements I've had, and I was able to use the PLC frameworks in my planning. The teachers had broken down the selected standard (CA RI.8.2) into a ladder of steps for students themselves to check off, so I used one of the steps as my learning objective: Students will define “objective summary” and its structure. 

What did I learn?

In applying the R.L.S. teachers' PLC ladder to my lesson planning, I learned to break down standards and create a single lesson focused on just one aspect of the standard. I also learned how to make standards comprehensible to students. The students received ladders to put in their notebooks so they could check off each aspect of the standard, which had been stated in student-friendly language. I was able to then assess whether they'd met the standard in the next lesson through a quiz shown on my TPE 5 page, and almost all students had.