Key Concept 15: Professional Learning

Part of what I believe assisted in the success of my internship experience is that my professional development was embedded in a pre-existing meeting structure. As planned, I had six opportunities to inject professional development around formative assessments and specific technology platforms during the Internship time period. As I outlined in my Process and Products section, before the internship started I led a professional development session on what formative assessments are and some ways that technology could be used to make that process easier and more effective. I then spent some time during each subsequent scheduled meeting times to introduce a platform to try (Socrative, Quizizz, and GoFormative), help teachers create logins, and brainstorm effective ways to use the platforms in our different content areas. Since I had several of my meetings canceled I did not have time to do the same sort of training with Flip Grid as originally intended.

Quizizz and GoFormative seemed to be the most popular new platform choices amongst my teachers, and Socrative became a favorite with one my department colleagues who sat in on that training since her grade level meeting was canceled that day.

This teacher came up with the idea of using multiple iterations of the same quizizz in a competitive way to improve their understanding. She provided an example from her Immune System unit where she used a quizizz that she wrote an initial time and then after giving them time to look up information they were unsure about, had them repeat it to improve their score. Since this initial endeavor, she has repeated this process, mostly with pre-made quizizzes in all three courses she teaches.

GoFormative has taken a little bit more time to get up and working with teachers as it is best done on laptops which are not always easy to come by during this testing season time of year. The two teachers who have worked with it the most both needed one on one time to fully troubleshoot the platform and the larger lesson around the usage of the formative assessment. My History teacher was most interested in using it after my example map quiz, but ended up first using it to aid in the district mandated writing assignment which his students were struggling to get started on. We spent an afternoon creating his formative assessment, testing it out with his technology, securing laptops for usage, performing a test run which found some things to improve, and then sketching out a lesson plan for him to follow the following Monday in class. He was pleased with the results and wants to continue to use the platform once the testing season is over and laptops are available again.