The Education Department prepares majors to perform the following tasks, as specified by the Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP) of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Subject Matter Knowledge

  • Engage students in learning experiences that emphasize different cultural and racial perspectives
  • Enable students to acquire, synthesize, and apply complex knowledge and subject-specific skills and vocabulary, such that they are able to make and assess evidence-based claims and arguments and ask questions about social justice

Well Structured Lessons

  • Develop well-structured and highly engaging lessons with appropriate pacing/sequence and challenging, measurable objectives
  • Use appropriate student motivation strategies, including engaging activities, materials, resources, and technologies
  • Organize grouping to attend to every student’s needs
  • Invite connections to personal interests/experiences, and use curriculum resources that highlight the lived experiences and cultural backgrounds of BIPOC.

Adjustment to Practice

  • Analyze assessment results to determine progress toward intended outcomes (including outcomes that differ significantly according to race, gender, language status, or disability)
  • Use data to adjust practice and implement differentiated interventions
  • Make appropriate modifications of lessons and units.

Meeting Diverse Needs

  • Use a varied repertoire of practices, including culturally responsive pedagogy, to create opportunities for each student to meet or exceed academic standards and behavioral expectations

Safe Learning Environment

  • Use rituals, routines, and proactive responses that create and maintain a safe physical and intellectual environment where students take academic risks
  • Create an environment that supports students in playing active roles in preventing behaviors that interfere with learning
  • Establish an environment in which students affirm their own and others’ differences and initiate dialogue about these differences
  • Respond appropriately if misunderstandings arise related to such differences

High Expectations

  • Effectively model and reinforce ways that students can consistently master challenging material through effective effort
  • Successfully challenge students’ misconceptions about innate ability
  • Follow up individually with all students from a strengths-based perspective.
  • Provides feedback on drafts/emerging thinking and makes time for revisions. Enables students to leverage existing funds of knowledge and cultural/linguistic resources

Reflective Practice

  • Regularly reflect on the effectiveness of lessons, units, and interactions with students
  • Use and share insights gained to improve practice and student learning
  • Adjust their teaching after reflecting on how their personal identity influences their perception of students, curriculum, and pedagogy
  • Question the legitimacy of discipline policies, grading practices, or other systems that produce unequal outcomes according to race, gender, language learning status, or disability