Early Childhood Education Program
Dear Mentor Teacher,
Thank you for hosting a UWG Teacher Candidate for the 2015-16 school year, the
Georgia requirement for initial teacher licensure shifts from the Teacher Work Sample to
the edTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment) Portfolio. All teacher preparation
programs in Georgia will be using the edTPA to evaluate a teacher candidate’s
readiness to be recommended for licensure. We appreciate your participation in
supporting teacher candidates to be successful with their edTPA portfolio.
The edTPA portfolio for Elementary Education consists of completing four tasks during
their internship in field placement. The teacher candidates will be required to follow a
timeline to complete the tasks in order to be ready to submit for national scoring through
Pearson. We ask that you work with the teacher candidates as they prepare their
portfolios. You will receive a copy of the timeline to assist you in working with the
teacher candidates.
The teacher candidates will have five full days on campus writing and preparing their
files for submission. If you have any questions or concerns, you can email me at
lsteed@westga.edu or call me at (678) 839-6078 and I will get back to you as quickly as
I can. Again, thank you for hosting our students and supporting them as they complete
this teaching assessment.
Lyn Steed, Ed.S.
Lecturer
Early Childhood Education edTPA Coordinator
University of West Georgia
Task One
Planning
Literacy
lessons based
on students’
needs
In this task, teacher candidates will write a 3-5 lesson segment to
teach one reading comprehension or writing composition
standard. The learning segment must be focused on a specific
teaching strategy with learning goals, instructional materials and
technology that best supports student learning. The teacher
candidates will create or adapt formative student assessments to align
with the specific standard and learning goals for each lesson using a
rubric with specific criteria to evaluate the formative assessments. The
teacher candidates will complete a commentary answering prompts
justifying how plans meet student-learning needs.
Task Two
Instruction
Teaching of
the lessons
Task Three
Assessment
Analyzing of
the formative
assessments
Task Four
Mathematical
analysis of
teaching
In this task, teacher candidates are asked to video tape all the lessons
in the learning segment in order to find two unedited video clips. This
video needs to highlight their instructional strategies, student
engagement, and students using the strategy in different assignments.
The teacher candidate will complete a commentary answering prompts
analyzing student engagement and use time stamps and captions as
evidence to demonstrate support for learning.
The teacher candidates will analyze the formative assessments from
the learning segment. After analyzing the assessments, the teacher
candidates will choose three focus students’ work samples to provide
feedback to support and extend students’ learning. The teacher
candidates will complete a commentary answering prompts that
evaluate the learning outcomes, discuss the patterns of learning, and
explain how students are developing content understandings. The
teacher candidates will justify, through research and/or theory, next
steps to support learning for future lessons.
The teacher candidates will analyze formative assessments from three
lessons taught by the mentor teacher to identify mathematical error
patterns. The formative assessments need to give the students the
opportunity to demonstrate conceptual understanding, procedural
fluency and either math reasoning or problem solving skills. The
teacher candidates will choose three focus students with the same
error pattern. The teacher candidates will plan and teach a
reengagement lesson. After the re-engagement lesson, the teacher
candidates will give another formative assessment in order to
determine the effectiveness of the strategies used to develop the
students’ mathematical understanding in the identified area. The
teacher candidate will complete a commentary answering prompts that
require him/her to use reflective and analytical writing of the whole
class mathematical understanding, the three focus students error
pattern, and the three focus students’ learning of the selected math
standard after the reengagement lesson.