About CalTPA

Instructional Cycle 1 focuses on developing an engaging content-specific lesson for one class and 3 focus students based on what you learn about their diverse assets and needs, including their prior knowledge, interests, and developmental considerations. In this cycle, you will demonstrate how you select an appropriate learning goal(s), how you determine what you expect your students to know and be able to do, and how you will assess that learning. You will develop content-specific student activities and instructional strategies to develop your students' thorough understanding of the content you are teaching. This cycle also focuses on how you monitor student understanding during the lesson and make appropriate adaptations to support individual student learning needs. As you teach and video-record the lesson, you will demonstrate how you establish a positive and safe learning environment, provide social and emotional supports through positive interactions with students, and use resources and materials to enhance content-specific learning.

Instructional Cycle 2 emphasizes the interaction between standards, assessment, and instructional decision making. While standards describe what students are expected to know, understand, and be able to do, assessment is the ongoing process of gathering evidence from multiple sources to determine what each student actually knows, understands, and can demonstrate. Assessment results are then used to improve instruction. Effective assessment will evaluate a student's academic progress, but may also include measures that examine other aspects of educational development. Assessments should provide valid, reliable, and fair data to support high-quality teaching and learning activities for teachers, parents, and students. Assessments help teachers make informed decisions about which curricular goals or strategies need to be strengthened, how instructional strategies can be modified or expanded depending on what students are understanding or misunderstanding during instruction, and whether or not a particular sequence of instruction has been successful. In this cycle, you will provide feedback to students about their academic performance(s) based on informal assessment(s), student self-assessment, and formal assessment results.