Lessons · Teaching · the teaching performance assessment
The teaching performance assessment: your own teaching, submitted
California requires a candidate to pass a teaching performance assessment, in which you submit evidence of your own teaching: the plans for a sequence of lessons, video of you teaching your own class, samples of what the pupils produced, and a written account of what you did and what you would change.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
What it is for
A candidate left the assessment until the final term because it sounded like an examination. It is not an examination, it is a body of work about a real class over real weeks, and the class she would have used had moved on by the time she started. You cannot go back and film a lesson you did not film.
How to think about it
Read the assessment's own instructions in the first month, not the last term, and work out what you will need to have captured. Then arrange the consent forms for filming early, because a class where two families have not returned a form is a class you cannot use. Plan the sequence of lessons deliberately: the assessment wants to see you respond to what pupils did, so the evidence has to include what they did.
Worked example
Instructions read in month one, so I know what to captureYou cannot film a lesson retrospectively.
Consent forms for filming sorted before the sequence beginsOne unreturned form can rule out a whole class.
Plans, video, pupil work and my own written account: four kinds of evidenceIt is a body of work about real children, not a sitting.
Evidence of responding to pupils, because that is what is being judgedThe assessment looks for the adjustment you made after you saw their work.
Your turn
Name the written part of the submission, the part where you say what you would change.
A submission is planning, video of the lesson, pupil work, and written
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Filming a lesson that went well. The assessment is not a showcase; it rewards evidence that you noticed what pupils did and changed what you did next. A flawless lesson with no visible adjustment is weaker evidence than an honest one with a correction in it.