All students in reading textbooks and prompts encounter academic language – stuff that seems unnecessarily difficult but at the same time is important to understand. Well, guess what? There is academic language to the edTPA ® assessment, too

Here are a few terms you’ll need to understand :

Tracking” for instruction:  This does not refer to keeping track of student achievement.  Rather – are you grouping students homogeneously by achievement level?

Prerequisite skills:  These are skills that the learner must have BEFORE the lesson in order to be able to benefit from the lesson and meet the objective.  A simple example:  Skip counting by 5s is a prerequisite skill for a learning segment on telling time using an analog clock.  Another:  decoding ability is a prerequisite to reading for understanding.

Requisite skills:  These are skills that students will practice and strengthen while learning.  For example, if the central focus of a lesson is story elements (2nd grade), one requisite skill is the ability to listen.  Another might be speaking in full sentences to give answers.