Running head: TELLING MY STORY 1

Telling My Story Using My PDPQ

Maria Laique

National University
TELLING MY STORY 2

Progress Towards Competencies

California’s TPE Domains are equivalent to Nevada’s NEPF Standards. Since I live in

Nevada, I will be using the NEPF standard 1 when talking about Domain A. I started teaching

about 3 years ago. When you go through the ARL program, it is very rigorous and you have to

learn everything in 3 months than a teacher who goes the normal route via a degree and gains

experience and knowledge in many years. Standard 1 indicates that new learning is connected to

prior learning. This means that I have to make sure my students can connect what they learned

previously to what we will learn currently.

Strengths and Needs

I think I have a good grasp on indicators 1 and 2 within this standard. I would say these

are my areas of strength. Indicator 1 states that teacher activates all students’ initial

understandings of new concepts and skills. I usually start my lessons by asking my students

about what they already know about the topic. As they tell me, I write it on the board. This helps

me understand how much they already know about topic. Indicator 2 states that teacher makes

connections explicit between previous learning and new concepts and skills for all students.

Once I see what they already know, then I take that information to make connections with new

material they don’t know yet.

An area I could use a bit more practice on is indicator 3, which states that teacher makes

clear the purpose and relevance of new learning for all students. Sometimes I get really excited

about a topic and I tend to forget stating why learning this new material is important.

Potential TPE competencies

A TPE competency that I would like to learn and implement in the classroom is, having

students read with a purpose. My experience with teaching intermediate students, has shown me
TELLING MY STORY 3

that students easily lose focus of what they’re reading. They can read the words, but when I ask

them to summarize what they’ve read, they seem to draw blanks. Learning a variety of strategies

to hold students accountable for what they are reading, will make reading a lot more enjoyable

and purposeful.

Rationale

I chose standard 1 indicator 3 for an area of improvement, because students need to be

able to understand the importance and relevance to the real world when learning something new,

otherwise, they may feel it’s not worth learning and underestimate its importance. This may

cause students to not learn effectively. They won’t retain information, they won’t participate and

some of them may even become disruptive. Establishing a clear purpose for learning content

serves as a priming mechanism for new learning and results in increased student understanding

of the content (Gagné, 1977).

References

Gagné, R. M. (1977). The conditions of learning. Petaluma, CA: Holt McDougal.