TPE Introduction

After going through all the TPEs and trying to pick just one, I think that TPE 4 is the most important because it involves content, planning, and teaching methods. The first strand requires that the state standards are addressed, which to me represents more than knowledge of the standards, but an ability to connect them to relevant lessons. The second strand involves the ability to recognize which standards are the most important and the order in which they must be taught in order to present academic content in the most efficient way possible. The third strand suggests that a teacher knows and uses a wide variety of teaching strategies in order to make the content accessible to all students. The combination of these three parts leads me to believe that TPE 4 is the most important because it serves as the connecting point between knowing the standards and delivering them to students.

It doesn’t seem like any of the TPEs are irrelevant, but TPE 8 is confusing to me because of its vagueness. I think it’s trying to cover knowledge of how students learn at different ages and how students process information, but the last three strands—“understanding how to learn about students,” “using methods to learn about students,” and “connecting student information to learning” need to be made more explicit to me.