TPA Guidelines

I haven’t had any experience with lesson planning, let alone the TPA lesson plan format. The guidelines for TPA are very extensive and it seems like a lot of work, time and effort goes into lesson planning. A lot of it makes sense to me, though. In class, we often talk about having clear reasons and purposes for doing what we choose to do in our classrooms. The TPA guidelines give clear reasoning for what the lesson is, why you’re teaching it, what you hope the students gain from the lesson and which state standards you’re meeting. The guidelines also talk about assessing the objectives, which are student-centered and measurable. I think it’s important to know how you’re going to be assessing a discussion or watching a movie, things that students aren’t going to turn in. I recently observed two classrooms at Ferris High School with one of my other classes. One of the classes was a Senior AP literature course. The teacher had students create a graphic organizer to recap what they read the day before. I asked how he would be assessing the students’ work. The teacher said he only has about 10 grades in the gradebook each quarter. While some teachers might not grade this way, I think it’s important to know how you, as a teacher, are going to grade your students. It seems this style of lesson planning really prepares the teacher for what they’re going to teach and how they’re going to do it. I’m a very organized person and I like planning things down to the last detail so I appreciate how extensive this lesson plan style is. I wonder, though, if schools have a preference on the style of lesson plan a teacher uses or are teachers allowed to use whatever type they are comfortable with. Do principals or administration ever check lesson plans? I know that we’ve talked about borrowing other people’s activities for our own lesson plans. For our purposes at Eastern, when we do borrow another person’s idea, should we somehow credit or cite them in our lesson plans?