Information Processing TIPR +edTPA Prep

The teacher does a couple of things to get the students attention. He reminds the students to put away their devices before class starts to encourage attention to be on class. He calls the students attention between activities by saying "listen for instruction". Instruction often happens when the students are sitting. The students know this time is meant to listen since most of the activities require the students to be out of their seats. The teacher uses wait times but may need more structure when it comes to answering questions just to encourage some students to not speak unless called on. For the most part the students are good about paying attention when the teacher speaks. In order to encourage encoding the students practice the drama technique they are learning through a variety of games. One game the students enjoy is called the bus stop. Each student picks a character out of a hat and has to interact with the other students in their group at a "bus stop". The rest of the class guesses who their characters are. This encourages the kids to recall and reconstruct the knowledge they have gained in the previous units (pantomime, acting with your face, and acting with your voice). The activities incorporate the current unit with the methods learned previously. The teacher could occasionally pull out one of the activities from a previous unit so the students once again concentrate on that one technique.

edTPA
1. The teacher has structured his curriculum to build on the previous units. In the current unit they are putting all the previous units together. They have learned to act with their bodies, their faces, and their voices. They are now putting all three units together and acting scenes. The teacher has a day every two weeks where the play acting games that they have learned throughout the semester. So they can be doing charades, emotions on their face, and scenes all on the same day. This makes them recall and reconstruct the methods that they learned previously.
2. The teacher encourages the students to tie their personal experiences with the scene or character they are currently portraying. This encourages them to incorporate their culture, personal, and community knowledge into the acting. This could be done more in depth in further classes.
3. The teacher often praises the student for their current efforts and then discusses how they can take it to the next level. He then has them try it again to see if they can push themselves further.

The students need a little more variety in the practice/rehearsal stage in order for them to really generalize the knowledge. More visual examples could also be used to help demonstrate the techniques. In order for this to happen a screen, projector, and laptop would be needed in the stage space. Using a variety of methods to get the students attention also may be helpful as it gets loud when the students are doing the acting activities.

When I teach my lesson I will have the students perform a scene that requires them to use all of the previous knowledge from this class. The scenes will incorporate things that students have seen or experienced during their life. Allowing them to recall and rehearse things they have already learned. This should strengthen the ability to recall and use the information they have learned.