What the Dane Ortlund Study Guide Actually Covers
The Dane Ortlund Study Guide is an edTPA preparation resource that breaks down the performance assessment into its component tasks. Most teacher candidates go through it before or during their student teaching semester. It covers the three required tasks: Task 1 focuses on instructional planning, Task 2 is about teaching and analyzing student learning, and Task 3 asks you to reflect on your impact and plan next steps. The guide goes deeper than the official scoring rubrics by walking through common mistakes people make when filling out the submission forms. Download the guide from the official Ortlund website. Start by reading through the entire thing once before you touch any of your lesson plans. That first read takes about forty-five minutes to an hour. The reason this matters is because the guide teaches you the scoring logic, and understanding the rubrics before you plan your lessons changes how you structure everything. Most people skip ahead and try to follow along with their portfolio build without knowing how the scorers are actually grading. The guide includes sample responses, template language, and worked examples. The most useful section for me was the one on aligning your lesson objectives to the rubric criteria. Here is what I mean by that. When you write your learning objectives, the guide shows you exactly which rubric language you need to mirror so that a scorer can check off the box immediately. If your objective says "students will understand fractions" and the rubric language references "demonstrating procedural fluency," those two things do not match and you lose points on Task 1 Criterion A. The guide forces you to connect the dots between what you plan and what the rubric actually rewards.
Task 2 is where most candidates struggle, and the Ortlund guide devotes significant space to it. The video submission component alone causes problems. The guide explains how to edit your clips so they directly answer the prompt. A common mistake I saw repeatedly was people submitting ten minutes of lecture video when the rubric only cares about a two-minute segment where students demonstrate the skill. The guide walks through the clip timing requirements and shows you exactly what the scorer needs to see in each segment. Cut hard. Include the moment where a student makes the connection, not just the moment where you explain it. I ran into a specific problem during my own review process. The guide recommends submitting video evidence that shows individual student responses, but my program required a full class recording. When I tried to extract individual student responses from the full-class footage, the clips looked disjointed and the context got lost. The workaround I used was to include a brief establishing shot at the start of each clip showing the classroom setup and group formation, then cut directly to the student work sample. It added maybe thirty seconds of video but it made the evidentiary chain much clearer for the scorer who had no prior knowledge of your classroom. Another section that does not get enough attention is the commentary writing guide. You have to explain your instructional decisions, and most candidates write the commentary like they are telling a story about their lesson. The guide pushes you toward analytical writing instead. Describe what you did, why you did it, and how it connects to the rubric criteria. This usually cuts the revision cycle in half because you stop getting feedback that says your commentary is too descriptive and not analytical enough.
Common Pitfalls the Guide Helps You Avoid
The biggest issue candidates face is the disconnect between their lesson plan and their assessment. The Ortlund guide highlights this early and gives you a checklist to verify alignment before you submit. Here is how it works in practice. You take your lesson objective and map each part of it to a specific assessment question or task. If you cannot find a direct match, your objective is too vague or your assessment is measuring something different. The guide includes a mapping table format that makes this visible in one page. A second pitfall involves the academic language section of Task 1. Candidates often list vocabulary words without explaining the language demand. The guide clarifies that the rubric is not looking for a word list. It wants you to identify whether the language demand is receptive, productive, or both, and specify the literacy skill involved. I have seen people lose half their points on this criterion simply because they wrote "students will learn the word 'habitat'" instead of "students will produce oral explanations using the term habitat in a cause-and-effect sentence." The difference is one sentence, and the guide makes it obvious. Task 3 reflection is another area where the guide provides specific frameworks. The common error here is writing a generic reflection that sounds like it could apply to any lesson. The guide pushes you to be specific about student work samples, exact adjustments you made, and measurable next steps. One counter-intuitive point the guide makes is that admitting a lesson did not go well can actually strengthen your submission if you explain what the data showed and what you would change. Scorers are looking for honest analysis, not a perfect performance narrative.
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Working Through the Guide Step by Step
Here is how I would approach the guide if someone asked me to walk them through it from scratch. First, complete the rubric overview section. This is the dry part, but it takes less than an hour and it sets the foundation for every decision you make afterward. Second, go through the Task 1 examples and compare each one against the actual scoring guide. The guide provides side-by-side comparisons of high-scoring versus low-scoring responses. Read both and note the differences in specificity and rubric language usage. Third, work through the video editing tutorial section before you film anything. The guide includes timing guidelines, file format specifications, and naming conventions that you need to follow exactly. I have seen candidates lose points because their video file was in the wrong format or their clip exceeded the time limit by twelve seconds. The guide spells out the technical requirements in plain language with screenshots of the submission portal. Fourth, draft your commentary using the sentence frames the guide provides. These are not meant to be copied verbatim. They are scaffolds that show you the structure and vocabulary expected in each section. Your job is to fill in the content with your own lesson details. This approach prevents the commentary from drifting into narrative territory and keeps it focused on analysis.
Finally, do a pass through the guide's checklist for Task 3. The reflection rubric has five criteria, and the guide gives you a verification step for each one. Check whether your adjustments are specific, whether your next steps are measurable, and whether your analysis directly references the student work you submitted. If you cannot point to a specific student response when making a claim, go back and add the reference before you finalize.
When the Guide Falls Short
The Dane Ortlund Study Guide is not a perfect solution, and it is worth noting where it has limitations. The guide assumes you are working with a standard K-12 setting. If you are in an alternative certification program, a special education co-teaching model, or a non-traditional classroom setup, some of the examples may not translate directly. The guide does address some variations, but not all. In those cases, you need to adapt the framework rather than follow it exactly. Another limitation is that the guide was developed over several years and some sections reference older versions of the edTPA rubric. The core structure has remained consistent, but if you are working with a revised rubric version from your university, cross-reference the scoring criteria directly with the official Pearson document. The guide is close but not always current on every minor update. For candidates who need more subject-specific guidance, the general EdTPA guide may not cover the nuances of your discipline. A science teacher doing a lab-based Task 2 has different challenges than a language arts teacher analyzing writing samples. The Ortlund guide gives you the general framework, but you will need to supplement it with discipline-specific resources if your program requires that level of detail. Many candidates use the guide as a foundation and then add subject-area templates from their university's edTPA support materials.
The main takeaway is that the guide is useful when you use it as a structural tool rather than a fill-in-the-blank worksheet. It shows you what good looks like, gives you frameworks to follow, and helps you avoid the most common mistakes. It will not write your portfolio for you, and it cannot replace the actual work of planning strong lessons and collecting genuine student evidence. But it does make the submission process significantly less guesswork, which is what most candidates need in the first place.
