On Saturday, Coppell High School TAFE members competed at the University of North Texas at Dallas for the Area 11 Competition. This year, 13 Texas Association of Future Educators (TAFE) members from Coppell High School are advancing to state. 

TAFE students were tasked with teaching various topics by making interactive lesson plans to present to teachers and college students who served as judges.

The TAFE Teach Tomorrow Summit and state competition is Feb. 28-March 1 at Kalahari Resort in Round Rock.

CHS senior Sunya Ajani has competed at the area competition for three years. This year, she competed in the Teacher Created Materials MS/HS event and the Lesson Planning Humanities event for seventh grade GT language and literacy. In her lessons, Ajani focused on accommodating students with different learning styles.

“For Teacher Created Materials, I made a game. It was a play on the arcade game Plinko,” Ajani said. “A lot of the time, people don’t realize that there’s a lot of different types of learning styles. There’s people who would prefer visual elements in learning or prefer moving around. That’s kinesthetic learning.”

In preparation for the competition, the club presented and provided constructive feedback to each other. It took weeks to flesh out ideas for projects and gather everything needed to compete.

“There’s lots of logistical planning that goes into it because you have to plan ‘when am I going to teach this lesson?’ or ‘how am I going to get all of these materials?’ All these months of work is what goes into making it to state,” Ajani said.

This is sophomore Alyssa Gray’s first time competing in TAFE. She competed in the Teacher Created Materials MS/HS event with her partner, sophomore Dinesh Somasundaram. Together, they received a 97 on an interactive lesson plan they created to teach 11th grade U.S. History.

“We were trying to think about how we could make the activity interesting. We went with a military theme and we made these dog tags and chains,” Gray said. “I was super excited but also kind of nervous going into it. I didn’t know how they were going to react, but then when I heard we were going to state I was like, ‘oh my gosh, they actually liked it’ It’s a big deal.”

CHS TAFE advisor Raneta Ansley is pleased with the team’s work and preparation for the competition.

“I was really really proud of all of our participants who made it to state,” Ansley said. “It’s very exciting for them, they’ve worked hard to compete and they should be proud.”

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