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.