Something to Say: Using Dialogic Pedagogy in the edTPA to engage secondary English students in textual analysis

The edTPA (teacher performance assessment) is a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of pre-service teacher candidates that is completed during their residency semester. This assessment is used by the University of Wyoming College of Education, in conjunction with Pearson, to emphasize, measure, and support the skills and knowledge that teachers use in the classroom (http://edtpa.aacte.org/faq). I created three interconnected lessons associated with various assessment tasks required by the edTPA: planning, instruction, and assessment. These lessons were carried out in a sophomore American literature course at Laramie High School. The primary focus of the learning segment featured in this series of documents is engaging students in dialogic pedagogy to foster collaborative learning opportunities that allow students to access and analyze texts more effectively. The use of dialogic pedagogy in this learning segment is a teaching/learning technique that positions the teacher as the facilitator of both small- and large-group discussion. This requires that students learn by engaging with one another by speaking and doing activities collaboratively to foster both reception and productive language skills. Rather than traditional models of teaching – in which the teacher is the "keeper" of knowledge that is distributed to students via lectures, PowerPoints, etc. – dialogic pedagogy relies on the students' input throughout the dissemination and construction of information. By pairing dialogic strategies to various reading comprehension tasks, students were observed to make meaningful connections to the central text featured in the learning segment (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain) through their historical analysis of the novel.