TPA Guidelines

The part I struggle the most with is the introduction of learning targets. Often, when I am starting a lesson, I just say "we are learning about compare and contrast essays today" or "we are going over sentence fragments". But in observations, I have been dinged for not placing the actual learning objective on the board. But since my mentor does not take that step, I also don't so that lessons feel as continuous as possible between her and I. When I have attempted to place the student-friendly learning objective on the board and have students interact with the actual objective, I got funny looks, confused faces, and outright frustration. So I continue to skip that portion of the "necessary" lessons because my students have not been gaining from it. I find that it is often unnecessary in high schools because even without telling students, if I ask them what the learning goal was, they can tell me.

Also, in my current makeup of students, I am struggling with drawing on previous knowledge. For example, I am having to reteach basic parts of speech, because some students are so behind that they are needing new instruction on it. I also have 26 IEPs and 504s in a group of 45 students, so accommodations are vast and tricky. Many of the accommodations include being able to use headphones or turn in work late. But I have students with rage cycles or violent behavior when they get frustrated, so I have to be careful about how I structure and scaffold lessons for those students.

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