Assets (personal/cultural/
community assets): |
* Personal: Refers to specific background information that students bring to the learning environment. Students may bring interests, knowledge, everyday experiences, family backgrounds, and so on, which a teacher can draw upon to support learning.
* Cultural: Refers to the cultural backgrounds and practices that students bring to the learning environment, such as traditions, languages and dialects, worldviews, literature, art, and so on, that a teacher can draw upon to support learning. * Community: Refers to common backgrounds and experiences that students bring from the community where they live, such as resources, local landmarks, community events and practices, and so on, that a teacher can draw upon to support learning. |
Central Focus:
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a description of the important understandings and core concepts that you want students to develop within the learning segment. The central focus should go beyond a list of facts and skills, align with content standards and learning objectives, and address the subject-specific components in the learning segment.
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Deficit thinking:
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is revealed when candidates explain low academic performances based primarily on students’ cultural or linguistic backgrounds, the challenges they face outside of school
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Discourse:
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Discourse includes the structures of written and oral language, as well as how members of the discipline talk, write, and participate in knowledge construction. Discipline-specific discourse has distinctive features or ways of structuring oral or written language (text structures) that provide useful ways for the content to be communicated. In the language arts and literacy, there are structures for composing, interpreting, and comprehending expository, narrative, poetic, journalistic, and graphic print materials as well as video and live presentations. If the language function is to interpret character development, then appropriate language forms could include written essays (with particular ways of citing textual evidence) or pattern sentences such as “The author used (action, dialogue, and/or description) to introduce (main character). One example of (action, dialogue, and/or description) was ____________, which suggested that the character was _______________.”
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Language demands:
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Specific ways that academic language (vocabulary, functions, discourse, syntax) is used by students to participate in learning tasks through reading, writing, listening, and/or speaking to demonstrate their disciplinary understanding.
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Language function:
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The content and language focus of the learning task represented by the active verbs within the learning outcomes. Common language functions in the language arts include identifying main ideas and details; analyzing and interpreting characters and plots; arguing a position or point of view; predicting; evaluating or interpreting an author’s purpose, message, and use of setting, mood, or tone; comparing ideas within and between texts; and so on.
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Language supports:
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The scaffolds, representations, and pedagogical strategies teachers provide to help learners understand, use, and practice the concepts and language they need to learn within disciplines (Santos, Darling-Hammond, Cheuk, 2012).The language supports planned within the lessons in edTPA should directly support learners to understand and use identified language demands (vocabulary, language function, and discourse or syntax) to deepen content understandings.
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Learning environment:
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the designed physical and emotional context, established and maintained throughout the learning segment to support a positive and productive learning experience for students.
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Syntax:
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The set of conventions for organizing symbols, words, and phrases together into structures (e.g., sentences, graphs, tables).
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