Justin Riley

11/24/20
ISTC 731

Creating Change Through Professional Development

One of the roles I play in my school building is being a member of the Academic Intervention team. This team consists of
Administrators, Special Education Teachers, Reading Specialist, and our ESOL Teacher. Our primary role is to review and
evaluate student data and performance to monitor students who are below grade level in intervention and consider new
students or students of concern that may need an intervention. This gives our team the ability to collaborate and share
the school's needs equally between the three intervention areas of SPED, ESOL, and Reading Support. We are a relatively
new concept at the school and have only worked together in this team model for three years. The interventions, the
grade level articulations from year to year, and the progress monitoring were the focus for the first two years. Still, this
year's new Principal has tasked us with providing professional development to our staff and improving first instruction
with methodology and practices built into our research-based or our unique interventions. With the first quarter of
Virtual teaching down and now at least two more to go, our principal wanted the team to create a conference-style
professional development with different 30-minute break out sessions on how to improve or change our virtual
instruction. Each team member was tasked with pairing up with a general educator and creating 30-minute sessions to
enhance/ change our teaching.

I will be working with the second-grade team leader and one of my co-teachers. We will be creating our professional
development for our primary grade level teachers and para-educators and could have anywhere between 9-12
participants in each session. Within these teachers and paras, we have various comfort and skills levels relating to
technology integration into their typical teaching within the building and their comfort and anxiety level surrounding
Howard County's virtual teaching model. Jessica, the second-grade team leader, and I then set out to interview our
audience of primary teachers and paras and asked them what they were struggling the most with during virtual teaching.
The majority of them stated that they found the most difficulty in engaging the students in learning and to make their
teaching more interactive and less lecture style, which we know is not developmentally appropriate for K,1, and 2
learners throughout the 60-minute live synchronous session for each subject (ELA, Math, and Content). Jess and I had
been using Pear Deck in the spring before Howard County had officially approved this tool as an essential digital tool
meaning that parents can not opt-out of their child using or participating with this online platform. In our co-teaching
environment, we had seen how much our students were engaged and participating in learning by using this tool and
decided to make that the focus of our professional development. Many teachers were teaching in a lecture-style and
having students write and respond to verbal questions in their journals. There was no differentiation to the content to
support student learning, such as visuals, different ways to show understanding (drawing, verbal, or written/typed
responses), or integrating hands-on/virtual manipulatives. These teachers, though in school, know and use these best
practices in their typical instruction. When we asked the teachers and paras why they were not using these best
practices, all of them responded with "we didn't know how?" but none of them said "we don't know what they are?"

We titled our PD "How to Make Virtual Instruction Fun and Engaging Using Pear Deck." Our professional development's
primary goal is to help teachers feel comfortable creating and using Pear Deck lessons to help engage students and
track/monitor their progress. Through this professional development, we want to see teachers feel more comfortable
with teaching virtually and see more students turning on their cameras and completing in class and out of class
assignments within the first few months of the professional development. By the end of the six months or end of the
fourth quarter, we want to see teachers collaborating to share ideas and lessons and keep using Pear deck when
returning to a brick and mortar setting. By the end of the six months or fourth quarter, we also want to see
improvements in student attendance rates and participation grades compared to the first quarter of the school year.

To progress monitor the professional development's effectiveness, we will give each teacher an assignment to complete
and then bring back to the next session, such as exploring the program and creating their first Pear Deck after Session 1.
Each assignment will be related to the topic of the PD session.

PD Session Topics:
1. What is Pear Deck, and how can I use it?
2. How can I apply Pear Deck to my ELA and writing lessons?
3. How can I apply Pear Deck to my Math lessons?
4. How can I apply Pear Deck to my content (science, social studies, and health lessons)?
5. How can I use Pear Deck to benefit my SPED, ESOL, and my above grade level students?
6. Reflection and Expansion of Pear deck into Brick and Mortar learning.

Each 30-minute session will start with a quick review of the previous session through a Q and A session using Pear Deck,
and then the New Topic will be introduced. Features specific for the content area or topic will be reviewed, and
examples of how to use Pear Deck will be shown for that subject or topic area. The last 10-15 minutes of the session will
be a collaborative planning session where teachers will take a lesson from the upcoming week and design a Pear Deck
activity around that topic with the support of colleagues and experienced staff (Jessica and myself). Jessica and I did
have an opportunity to join a professional development session with one of the Pear Deck Team members from their
corporate office. Howard County typically prefers to use programs or Professional development models such as the Train
the Trainer, in which select employees within the school system take a professional development course. Ether become a
certified trainer for other staff in the system or take what you have learned from previous professional development and
keep transferring that knowledge onto others within the school system.

Through the design of our professional development, we are implementing a change in our teachers. We are focusing on
enhancing their knowledge about this new program to engage students in learning by giving them hands-on experience
working with the tool during guided sessions in small increments over six months and realistic expectations of
implementation over half a school year. We will also promote self-efficacy with our professional development, providing
our colleagues opportunities to observe Pear Deck being used in classrooms by myself and Jessica and the sharing of
success stories at the begging of each session from things learned previously. Teachers will also get the chance to use
Pear Deck's Jessica, and I have made to practice the program's classroom management aspect only at first before having
to create their lessons.

The instructional integration model that will guide our use of Pear deck will be the Thomas and Boysen Taxonomy
Technology Integration Model. The Thomas and Boysen Taxonomy is a technology integration model that looks at the
student and the knowledge, skill, or attitude acquired by the student using the technology. The taxonomy is broken into
five categories which are Experiencing, Informing, Reinforcing, Integrating, and Utilizing.
Teachers in our professional development will typically be using this tool in the primary grades to create lessons where
the student's learning acquired by using Pear Deck will be in the Experiencing, Informing, and Reinforcing stages.
Depending upon what knowledge the teacher wants the student to acquire utilizing the tool and from the lesson.

Being a special educator and Jessica, who is a teacher who has two daughters with IEP's we genuinely believe in the
benefits that UDL can bring to teaching. Within our professional development, we will be promoting teachers to improve
and enhance their ability to provide alternatives for Auditory and visual information by adding audio recordings of
themselves, videos, pictures, and charts to promote multiple means of representation within the Pear Decks that they
will create and also use from our collection of recourses. Again, we will ask our teachers to encourage varied ways for
students to respond, whether through writing, typing, drawing, selecting an answer, or moving objects. When our
teachers create their interactive slides, we will encourage them in our sessions and our sample lessons to provide options
for how the student would like to show what they have learned or know. We will also promote our teachers to scaffold
practice and performance with their students as they create their interactive slides, as we will do in the takeaway task we
will give the teachers to do after each PD session.

The tools in the Appendices section are items that will be used in the PD and examples of lessons they can modify and
use during the first month or two of the PD. I am currently working on this PD in Real-time for my school and will be
completing session one with my teachers at our December 16 th Staff Meeting. I am meeting with my co-teacher Jessica to
create our session two PowerPoint the week after Thanksgiving.
Appendices:

Session 1 PowerPoint:

Pear Deck Visuals to Use with Students

Sample Lessons for Teacher to practice with during Month 1