To be considered a competent educator, there are almost 2000 strategies, concepts, and terms that you must know. However, since teachers wear so many hats, who has the time to learn them all? Don’t worry; we have you covered. In this series, we will discuss all the teaching and learning strategies, concepts, and terms that you need to know to be considered an effective educator. There are over 70 articles in this series, so pace yourself. We recommend reading one piece per weekday, which will allow you to complete the series in three to four months. We hope you enjoy it.

Click here to read all the articles in this series.

TA (teaching assistant) A student, usually in graduate school, who assists a professor with instructing an undergraduate course, generally as part of an assistantship or even fellowship. At some institutions, TA’s give lectures and grade assignments.

Talent Development Learning experiences, curriculum and support services for gifted and talented students that can help them reach their potential.

Talent Search An initiative that uses assessments to find students with high potential and provides opportunities for them to participate in various challenging actives outside of school.

Task Analysis A method of breaking down overarching goals into their components parts which are then sequenced for teaching.

Teachable Units Specific sets of information that is sufficiently small to learn through direct instruction.

Teacher Certification or Teacher Licensure Refers to a mandatory document needed in order to teach in the public school system

Teacher Education Courses Are classes that focus on training you to be a teacher.

Teacher Efficacy The degree to which teachers perceive their efforts to be determinative of the success of their students.

Teacher-Centered Philosophies Are those that transfer knowledge from one generation of teachers to the next. In teacher-centered philosophies, the teacher’s role is to impart a respect for authority, determination, a strong work ethic, compassion for others, and sensibility. Teachers and schools succeed when students prove, typically through taking tests, that they have mastered the objectives they learned. The two teacher-centered philosophies are essentialism and perennialism.                       

Teacher-Guided Writing Lessons Class exercises for writing instruction based on the specific needs of students, which focus on distinct aspects of written language, such as spelling and punctuation, that are unfamiliar to the learners as well as broader elements of language such as prewriting, paraphrasing, and editing.

Teacher-Leaders Educators who effortlessly employ well-known leadership skills to organize and empower fellow teachers and students ― skills such as building trust, inspiring self-reliance, modeling approachability, identifying obstacles, and juggling a variety of responsibilities. Ultimately, such skills work to benefit students and teachers alike by improving the environment and facilitating learning.

Teaching Hypothesis A lesson plan that a teacher determines, after collecting and analyzing educational data, is the most beneficial to a particular student’s learning needs.

Teaching Portfolio Is a compilation of works collected throughout your teaching career that highlights your work and accomplishments.

Technical Adequacy A measure of the reliability and validity of an assessment tool.

Telegraphic Stage  A stage in oral language development in which two words are used to express an idea.

Telescope To teach and assess the same amount of learning experiences in a short duration of time, in an attempt to carve out more time for enrichment activities that better fit the interests, needs, and readiness levels of gifted students.

Tell/Summarize (literacy skills) The capacity to retell what happened in a story by highlighting the important points. It requires that the student not only decipher the main points but also convey it in a manner that will make sense to the listener.

Temperament Differences in the way individuals reaction to situations. The degree to which individuals can and do regulate their emotions.

Temperament Personality traits that play a critical role in the responses a child elicits from caregivers and that will ultimately shape their overall personality.

Test Bias When the way an assessment is administered or interpreted in a manner that disadvantages specific groups of students or people.

Test-retest Reliability An assessment of the correlation in results between a test’s first administration and a second administration of the same test after a short period.

Test-Taking Strategies A plan, tactics, techniques related to the preparation for and taking of a test.

Text Boxes An informal writing teaching tool in which the Text Boxes visually mirror the paragraphs, diagrams, and photos on a particular page. Each Text Box has two columns: the first column contains students’ notes about key facts, and the second column contains students’ reflections about the text and questions about what they have read.

Text Cohesion The unified presence of lexical connections within a given text, which gives it meaning.

Text complexity A degree or quality regarding the level of difficulty of a text which is measured by looking contextually at the qualitative and quantitative as well as the reader and task-related aspects of a given text.

Text Features and Text Structures Helps young readers understand  important about a text and  not.

Text Organization Vital for reading comprehension, the arrangement of the relationships between words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger segments of writing.

Text-Based Collaborative Learning Learning characterized by students working together with a partner or in small groups to better understand their reading of a text.

Text-Related Tests Assessment tools which measure the development of the strategies and subskills emphasized in a reading series or text based on grade-level.

Textually Implicit mean In QARs, the quality associated with an answer to questions that can be found in the text but require students to synthesize materials within the text.