2014 Articles

What’s the Hardest Part of edTPA?

Theoharides, Niove

The idea for my edTPA unit came to me while watching the news. Diane Sawyer was interviewing Malala Yousafzai on ABC’s 20/20 and I immediately realized that this paralleled perfectly to the book we had just begun in my third grade ESL self-contained class. A text-to-world connection! I thought to myself, “If this idea doesn’t persuade edTPA that I am worthy of being a teacher, then I don’t know what they want.” Then again, at the time, none of us knew (or know now) what edTPA wants from us. Despite the endless depths of knowledge questions we bombarded our professors with, who did their best to negotiate the meaning of the new and vague edTPA, there was no way to prepare for the unit I was about to design. I saw the news. I made the connection. I immediately began planning for the next day’s lesson.