UABTeach Mentor Teachers can play a key role in helping UABTeach students prepare for passing edTPA. UABTeach students submit for edTPA during their Apprentice (Student) Teaching, typically in their last semester, but they can be building the skills they need for edTPA success in each of their UABTeach school placements.

Passing edTPA becomes a requirement in Fall 2018 for all newly certified teachers in Alabama. edTPA is a performance of teaching consisting of three parts:

• planning an instructional sequence of three to five lessons
• capturing 20 minutes of teaching in a public school classroom from the sequence
• assessing one sample of student work collected during the lesson sequence. The submissions is assessed at the national level.

Preparing UABTeach Students for edTPA

UABTeach is embedding edTPA preparation for our students into the rollout of all of our courses so that UABTeach students will be successful with this new, rigorous assessment of new teachers’ abilities. Across their education coursework, UABTeach students will build the skills for planning, teaching, and assessing required by edTPA. Good synergy exists between edTPA requirements and the UTeach curriculum, especially a focus on inquiry-based teaching.

Following are a few key things Mentor Teachers can do:

• Become familiar edTPA at a basic level by visiting its website.
• Help UABTeach students see the range of abilities and challenges your students bring to learning math and science. Planning for edTPA is most successful when it dovetails with the needs and interests of real students in real classrooms.
• Guide UABTeach students as they prepare to teach by inquiry in your class and debrief with them about how they can improve their inquiry teaching. Their edTPA videos must show them successfully teaching by inquiry, and the more teaching experience they can have before their edTPA submission, the more prepared they will be.
• Model good formative assessment practices with your students, involving your UABTeach interns in any way you can. Assessment in edTPA focuses on authentic, formative assessments (not paper-and-pencil tests), and multiple examples from your classroom of rich, meaningful assessments are critical to helping UABTeach students envision and execute the assessment they will submit to edTPA.

edTPA Resources

• edTPA website
• edTPA Myths and Facts (pdf)
• Five Tips for Cooperating Teachers (doc)
• edTPA Guidelines for Acceptable Candidate Support (pdf - revised August 2016)
• Acceptable Forms of Support for Candidates within the edTPA Process (pdf)

• The 5E Instructional Model (doc)

Step 1 (Elementary School) Lessons

• Elementary School Lessons (excel - lesson name, objectives, subject, materials, outcomes)

Step 2 (Middle School) Lessons

• Middle School Lessons (excel - lesson name, objectives, subject, and materials)

Step 1 (Grades 3-5): Inquiry Approaches to Teaching

• Step 1 Mentor Teacher Feedback Form (doc)
• Step 1 Final Student Evaluation Form (doc)

Step 2 (Grades 6-8): Inquiry-Based Lesson Design

• Step 2 Mentor Teacher Feedback Form (doc)
• Step 2 Final Student Evaluation Form (doc)

Knowing and Learning

• Final Evaluation Form (doc)

Classroom Interactions

• Classroom Interactions Form (doc)

Mentor Teacher Expectations

• The Mentor-Teacher__Expectations_Dec-2022.pdf (doc) form outlines your responsibilities to the UABTeach students and program. You will need to sign and return it.

IRS Forms

• Form W-9 (pdf), Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification. This form can also be found on the IRS Forms and Publications web page.

Mentor Teacher Course Involvement

• The Mentor Teacher Course Involvement document gives a breakdown of each UABTeach course field experience requirements, and the grade level UABTeach student teachers are expected to work with for each respective course.