TPA Lesson Plan

I actually just did my first "real-life" TPA lesson plan for a lesson that I taught this morning. Some of the sections were so easy I thought that I was missing something and other sections were so dense that I didn't even know what to write down. I hate how redundant it seems. State the learning objective, revisit the learning objective, restate the learning objective, have students state the learning target in their own language... Why??? I get the point of having a clear learning objective that is specific and measurable, but honestly, it is a waste of time to be stating and restating it so many times. I also think it is a waste of time and hugely ineffective to have students in high school write "I can" statements. Maybe for elementary students that would be beneficial, but it is an ineffective filler for HS students. 

I think the different prompts in the TPA are useful because they really make you think about what you are doing and how students are going to benefit from the lesson, but I also think that the prompts are somewhat redundant and ask the same question in many different ways. Ask me about differentiated instruction once and I will make sure that I have it, but other than that, it is busy work. 

The other aspect that threw me for a loop was behavior management strategies and parent/community involvement. I am teaching honor students who rarely forget to do their homework, are rarely off task, and who rarely skip class, so I really don't have to worry about behavior management, but it is still on the TPA (and I understand the importance of this for other classes, but do I have to answer it if it doesn't apply??). Parent and community involvement is also one of the categories and I can understand how that is important for larger units but for a single lesson plan it might be irrelevant, and in my case was. For both the behavior management and parent/community involvement sections, I pretty much just made up some answer and called it good. I felt like I did that with a lot of things on my TPA and I'm not sure if that was because I haven't been taught how to do one or if those questions were just pointless. Im still trying to figure that out.