FTCE Prekindergarten/Primary PK-3 cheat sheet

Florida's school grade formula combines student achievement (percent proficient in ELA, math, science, social studies), learning gains, gains of the lowest 25 percent, and graduation or acceleration components.

The Florida Educational Equity Act and Title IX require comparable athletic and program access regardless of sex; compliance is monitored through district equity reports.

The Florida Consent Decree (1990) governs services for English language learners: identification, ESOL instruction, parent notification, and trained teachers.

McKinney-Vento Act: students experiencing homelessness enroll immediately without records, keep school of origin when feasible, and receive transportation.

IDEA safeguards include prior written notice, procedural safeguards notice, independent educational evaluation requests, and due process timelines.

Section 504 eligibility requires a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; it is broader than IDEA.

FERPA permits disclosure of directory information unless the parent opts out in writing; disciplinary records have separate disclosure rules.

Mandated reporting: Florida requires reporting suspected child abuse, abandonment, or neglect to the central abuse hotline; school employees are mandatory reporters.

Records retention and public records requests in Florida schools fall under Chapter 119 and State Board of Education retention schedules.

MTSS is a three-tier framework: Tier 1 core instruction for all, Tier 2 targeted small-group intervention, Tier 3 intensive individualized support with progress monitoring.

Progress monitoring uses brief, frequent measures (e.g., curriculum-based measurement) graphed against a goal line; data points, trend, and aim line drive decisions.

Florida's B.E.S.T. Standards define grade-level benchmarks in ELA and mathematics; ELA benchmarks are organized by foundational skills, reading, communication, and vocabulary.

The B.E.S.T. ELA benchmarks include fluency expectations and text-complexity requirements that increase by grade band.

Formative assessment informs instruction during learning; summative assessment measures achievement after instruction. Both are required for a balanced system.

A PLC cycle is: examine data, identify the problem of practice, set a SMART goal, implement with fidelity, and re-check results.

Instructional walkthroughs collect low-inference evidence (what students say and do) rather than evaluative judgments.

Value-added and student growth models estimate a teacher's contribution to achievement gains; they require sufficient data and are reported with confidence intervals.

The Florida standards assessment and progress monitoring results must be communicated to parents in understandable terms, including how to help at home.

Adult learning (andragogy) principles: adults need relevance, problem-centered learning, autonomy, and immediate application to their roles.

The Florida Principal Leadership Standards cover student achievement, instructional leadership, organizational leadership, and professional and ethical behavior.

The Florida Leadership Standards are organized into four domains and ten standards used in administrator preparation and evaluation.

Effective professional development follows the Standards for Professional Learning: sustained duration, active learning, collaboration, modeling, and coaching.

Coaching cycles: pre-conference with goal setting, observation with data collection, reflective post-conference with feedback and next steps.

Distributed leadership assigns instructional leadership functions across teacher leaders, coaches, and administrators rather than concentrating them in one role.

Deliberate practice requires a clearly defined skill, immediate feedback, and repetition with refinement to improve performance.

The zone of proximal development frames scaffolding: support should be just enough to let the learner succeed with assistance, then be withdrawn.

Effective family engagement uses two-way communication in families' preferred languages and formats, not only one-way announcements.

Crisis communication sequence: acknowledge the situation, state known facts, identify next steps and timelines, and provide a contact point.

Communication with staff should specify the what, why, who, when, and how of a change to reduce ambiguity.

Active listening techniques include paraphrasing, reflecting feeling, asking open questions, and summarizing before responding.

Written school communication should match readability to the audience; plain language and short sentences improve comprehension.

Confidentiality rules limit what can be shared about student discipline, grades, and special education services with other parents and staff without legitimate educational interest.

Meeting facilitation: set an agenda with outcomes, assign roles, time-box items, and record decisions and owners.

Cultural responsiveness in communication means recognizing differing norms for eye contact, silence, and directness and avoiding assumptions.

A complete sentence needs a subject and a predicate; a fragment lacks one, and a run-on joins clauses without correct punctuation or conjunction.

Comma rules: separate items in a series, set off introductory elements, join a dependent clause to an independent clause, and mark nonrestrictive clauses.

Semicolons join two independent clauses or separate items in a complex series; colons introduce lists, explanations, or quotations.

Subject-verb agreement errors occur with intervening phrases, indefinite pronouns (each, everyone = singular), and collective nouns.

Pronoun-antecedent agreement requires matching number and gender; singular they is accepted in many style guides for unknown gender.

Verb tense consistency: do not shift tense without a time cue; use present perfect for past action continuing to the present.

Modifiers should sit next to the word they modify; misplaced and dangling modifiers create ambiguity.

Academic vocabulary tiers: Tier 1 everyday words, Tier 2 cross-content academic words, Tier 3 domain-specific terms.

Phonological awareness includes syllables, rhyme, onset-rime, and phonemic awareness (individual sounds); phonics maps sounds to letters.

The Simple View of Reading: reading comprehension = decoding x language comprehension; both components are necessary.

Scarborough's Rope: word recognition strands (phonological awareness, phonics, fluency) intertwine with language comprehension strands (vocabulary, background knowledge, syntax, inference).

The five pillars of reading instruction are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Phonemic awareness is oral manipulation of individual phonemes; phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds in print.

Fluency has three components: accuracy, rate, and prosody; fluency predicts comprehension.

Vocabulary instruction is most effective with explicit definitions, contextual examples, multiple exposures, and morphological analysis.

Comprehension strategies include predicting, questioning, visualizing, monitoring, summarizing, and identifying text structure.

Text structures: compare-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution, chronological, and description; each has signal words.

Screening identifies students at risk; diagnostic assessment pinpoints skill gaps; progress monitoring tracks response to intervention.

Place value: each position is ten times the value of the position to its right; the base-ten system underlies regrouping algorithms.

Fractions: a/b means a parts of a whole divided into b equal parts; equivalent fractions multiply numerator and denominator by the same nonzero number.

Operations with fractions: add and subtract with common denominators; multiply numerator by numerator; divide by multiplying by the reciprocal.

The area model and partial products connect to the standard multiplication algorithm and support conceptual understanding.

Properties: commutative (a+b=b+a), associative ((a+b)+c=a+(b+c)), distributive (a(b+c)=ab+ac), identity, and inverse.

Perimeter is the distance around; area of a rectangle is length x width; volume of a rectangular prism is length x width x height.

Ratios and proportions: a proportion states two ratios are equal; solve by cross-multiplication or scaling.

Measures of center (mean, median, mode) and spread (range, interquartile range) describe data; outliers affect the mean more than the median.

The Standards for Mathematical Practice include making sense of problems, reasoning, modeling, using tools, and attending to precision.

Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (0-2), preoperational (2-7), concrete operational (7-11), formal operational (11+); conservation emerges in concrete operational.

Vygotsky: social interaction and the zone of proximal development drive learning; scaffolding supports development.

Erikson's psychosocial stages in early childhood: trust vs mistrust, autonomy vs shame, initiative vs guilt, industry vs inferiority.

Kohlberg's moral development: preconventional (obedience, self-interest), conventional (social approval, law and order), postconventional (social contract, universal principles).

Maslow's hierarchy: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization; lower needs generally precede higher ones.

Bloom's taxonomy revised: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create; objectives should target higher-order levels.

Classical conditioning pairs a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned one; operant conditioning uses reinforcement and punishment to shape behavior.

Positive reinforcement increases behavior by adding a stimulus; negative reinforcement increases behavior by removing an unpleasant one.

Classroom management: establish routines and expectations early, use proximity and non-verbal cues, and apply consequences consistently.