- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1758437
- First Name Jennifer
- Last Name Ellis
- Institution UTC-STEM Education
- Role/Position Noyce PI, Associate Professor, Director of STEM Education
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Biological
- Target Audience Higher Education Institution Administrators, Noyce Master Teachers, Project PIs / Co-PIs / Other Faculty/Staff, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Research, Assessment, and/or Evaluation
- Session Length 30 minutes
- Additional Presenter(s)
Kendra Duncan, Kendra-Duncan01@utc.edu, edTPA Coordinator and Clinical Faculty for UTC’s School of Education
Goals
Participants will learn how to effectively prepare STEM students for edTPA and how to translate those best practices into teaching in a high needs school. Special emphasis will be placed on how the UTC STEM Education program integrated edTPA strategies into the UTeach curriculum to ensure STEM students had the right foundation to perform well on the edTPA. More importantly ensuring STEM students can apply those best practices beyond edTPA submission but into their own classrooms when they become in-service teachers.
Evidence
UTC candidates majoring in Science: STEM (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) complete the Secondary Science edTPA. Between Fall 2017 ? Fall 2018, candidates demonstrated the strongest performance in: Planning and Carrying out Investigations (NGSS Practice 3/edTPA Rubric 1: Planning for Content Understandings); Constructing Explanations & Designing Solutions (NGSS Practice 6)/edTPA Rubric 8: Deepening Student Learning While Teaching); Analyzing Student Work (edTPA Rubric 11). UTC Science candidate performance exceeds state and national mean performance on 10 of 15 assessed edTPA rubrics (Planning for Instruction & Assessment/Instructing & Engaging Students in Learning/Assessing Student Learning).
UTC candidates majoring in Mathematics: STEM complete the edTPA Secondary Mathematics portfolio. STEM Math candidate performance at UTC in Spring 2018 exceeded both state and national mean performance on all 15 assessed edTPA rubrics (Planning for Instruction & Assessment/Instructing & Engaging Students in Learning/Assessing Student Learning).
Proposal
STEM Teacher candidates often find it difficult to conceptualize what each edTPA language demand looks and sounds like in a classroom setting. Resources and best practices will be shared to support STEM teacher candidates to further develop students’ language use. This session will assist participants in developing a deeper understanding of the edTPA Academic Language demands: language function, vocabulary, discourse, and syntax. Participants will learn how to effectively integrate edTPA best practices into the UTeach curriculum to provide students with a solid foundation to perform well on the edTPA and to translate these best practices into their own STEM classroom. Participants will use the associated language rubrics and commentary prompts to analyze exemplars. Participants will examine the edTPA resources that are available for use with STEM teacher candidates to strengthen competency of the language demands. The presenters will share lessons learned from their successful implementation of edTPA into a UTeach/STEM Education curriculum. Participants are invited to share successes and challenges of their institution’s edTPA implementation of STEM Teacher Candidates.