A Response to the TPA Lesson Plan Format

At first glance the TPA Lesson Plan Format can seem a little overwhelming, especially when you are asked to create fifteen of them.  I have quite a bit of experience with these and feel quite comfortable when it comes to filling these out, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.  This format really makes you think, think again, and re-think as well as justify what you plan on teaching your students.  When it comes to the TPA you must be able to justify everything that you are teaching, as well as backing it up with research and theory that we have learned as teacher candidates.

When I was first introduced to this format, I thought that I would have to make an outline like this for every lesson plan that I taught.  Then reality set in and I realized I would forever be writing lesson plans and never actually teaching them if I did that.  With that being said, I think that having to do so may TPA’s throughout my time at Eastern has opened my mind when it comes to planning thoughtful, engaging, and purposeful lessons.  I really think that this is a useful tool for beginning teachers because it helps to organize our thoughts as well as to better prepare us for the materials that we are going to teach.

There are very few things that I find problematic with this lesson plan format.  The first and most obvious would have to be the detail that you have to put into it.  These cannot be done on the fly so to speak.  They take time and concentration, and I think that there are a lot of teacher candidates out there that want to try to do them in the shortest amount of time as possible, which defeats their purpose.  You have to go into them realizing that they will take time and you cannot wait to do them until the last minute.

Aside from that, I only have one other problem with the format, and that is the parent and community connections. When it comes to writing TPA’s for my Social Studies classes I find this to be very easy.  When studying historical material, everyone seems to have some connection with the past and it was easy to prompt my students to go home and talk with their parents about how certain events have affected their families.  However, I struggle with trying to come up with ways of answering this prompt with my English Language Arts lesson plans.  I find it boring and repetitive to say something like, “Students will be encourage to go home and talk about what they have read and learned in class today,” or something like, “Have students ask their parents if they remember reading the text we are studying in class.”  With fifteen lesson plans to write, hopefully I’ll find some creative ways to answer this prompt.