edTPA - Making Good Decisions

Within this informational PDF was a sub-section called "How do I represent my thinking and teaching in writing". This sub-section actually helped me think more clearly about the edTPA. All of our choices and how we decide to do things within our classroom as teachers shows our thinking. It shows our originality as a person and how and why we decided to do a certain activity or teach a lesson a certain way. This is the originality factor to teaching that I love. We have the freedom to teach and express our own thoughts and ideas in the classroom as we please. It might not match other teacher's or be perfect, but it's us. But even so, with that originality factor, we still have to justify and give a constant rationale for why we chose to do things a certain way. As teachers, it seems as if we are constantly going to have to be explaining ourselves. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that aspect, but of course, I'm going to do it.

I love how they even included in there "Perfect teaching is not expected". Well duh, no one is perfect, there will never be a perfect teacher.

Giving purpose to everything we do is important as well. It is called our learning objective, but it is really the purpose. What is the purpose of the lesson? What is your purpose for teaching this lesson? how does it connect to other lesson purposes? Understanding it this way is way easier for me to clearly see what I'm doing.

Another comment made is "If you focus only on teaching facts and/or following procedures without deepening students' understanding of related concepts, you will not fully address your subject-specific learning focus." Even though this is very specific, it is broadly true. This actually relates back to the "pedagogy of oppression" and the idea of a banking system at schools. If teachers are constantly spitting out facts and procedures and telling students what to do without having the students think for themselves or provide their own opinions, then they won't actually be learning anything. They will honestly only be learning how to memorize and repeat. I'm glad that this was included within here. It helps reiterate the fact that we are deepening students' understanding of not only what we are teaching, but also their own thoughts and opinions on it and their own way of understanding it.