Professional Development Reflection

Overall, the professional development module went well. With the increased use of
Instructional Technology due to COVID-19, the participants were easy to gather as interest was
high in the topic. In an attempt to only involve staff members that work on my hall and limit
exposure, I only invited 8 people to the Professional Development. In hindsight, I should have
invited more and given the option to attend via Google Meet/Zoom. The platform of Google
Classroom in which I used since my peers are very familiar with it would have made this fairly
easy since there is a Meet link embedded within the Classroom already.

The opening survey and discussion were really one of the best parts of the entire Professional
Development module. It was really interesting and enlightening to hear the participants discuss
the reasons behind their selections on the opening survey in regard to the use of paper/pencil
assessment pieces versus digital assessment pieces. Despite the increased use of instructional
technology due to COVID-19, the participants identified a higher use of paper/pencil
assessment pieces. When asked to elaborate on that, the justification ranged from that the
items were already created from previous years, the assessments were found during
exploration of the topic in pencil/paper format, comfortability with the style, having to provide
read-to accommodations, and need for students to show work. When moving into the break
down of assessment types, the reasons were similar with the overarching theme being that
they typically stuck with what they were most familiar with.

I instantly realized that I had done myself and this professional development module an
injustice by not truly anticipating the majority of these responses or analyzing them further
before completing the actual plan for the instruction module. I was so focused on the Edulastic
lesson that I totally missed the opportunity to just advocate for digital assessment in and of
itself. So much of this discussion reminded me of various assignments I had to work on
throughout the Instructional Technology Program. My math teachers were of course similar to
me in thinking that they needed that scratch work and heavy analysis of it in order to effectively
plan further instruction. Some of the participants didn’t believe that their needs could be met
using digital assessment platforms such as correctly sentences so they stuck to paper/pencil.
Lastly, the survey showed that the participants had a very limited digital resource bank only
identifying Google and the Teacher Pay Teachers website.

The actual instructional portion of the module was mostly just discovery mode. As I went
through how to find items/assessments that were already created, the participants were
instantly heavily engaged. I do wish I had built in where they had a chance, even for a short
period, to actual engage with the software and look up items that relate to their current
content areas while keeping their opening survey identified challenges in mind. This portion
seemed fairly rushed, and I could tell that some of the participants were slightly frustrated since
they weren’t really able to explore on their own before we proceeded into item/test creation.
As I progressed into the various assessment types and the creation of them, the participants
voiced that they they were not expecting such a variety of assessment item types. Again, they
expressed that they would like some time to explore materials that were already created
before having to create some of their own.

I decided to alter the plan that I had made that required participants to dive straight into
creating items. I decided to allow them to explore the already created items that related to
their current content areas and start a portion of the actual assessment piece during the
module. I asked that they searched for one of their standards and use the filter options to
explore a minimum of three different item types. I walked around the room and helped them
add items they found to a new assessment individually so that everyone had ample time. As I
did so, I overheard conversations involving discovery of new ways to assess personal standards
which was the goal from the start, but I definitely reached it in a different manner than I
anticipated.

Since this change took place, I didn’t have as much time to model item creation. Therefore, I
had to create instructional videos and post them in the resources tab so that participants could
use them as they completed the rest of their self-created items outside of the technology lab. I
then introduced the assessment piece for the professional development module and how they
could access the rubric to self-assess as they worked.

In hindsight, I will definitely use the opening survey better in the future. Being overly familiar
with Edulastic, I believe I oversimplified the use of the application for first timers. In doing so, I
planned way too much for completion during this module. I think this module can actually be
broken down into several different Professional Development sessions as a series. The first of
which would just be using the research of pre-existing items to create an assessment, assigning
said assessment, analyzing assessment results, then with creating our own items/assessments
and inserting feedback/distractors.

This was reinforced to me as I analyzed the participants items. First, I think the parameters that
I put on the assessment piece were too constrictive. I asked for one assessment with at ten
items with five of those items being personally created. There were several participants that
asked if they could break this down into more than one assessment. They found the use of
different assessment items necessary, but they were really in need of smaller assessment
pieces that what I was asking for. For instance, one teacher was given a sort activity for short
works of literature punctuation versus long works of literature. She also had a couple other
short assessment pieces that she could use. So, she actually submitted her assessment piece as
four different assessments. Based on the final assessment, the math and science teachers were
the only ones that actually produced according to the rubrics. That tells me I did not really take
time to reflect on how each subject area would be impacted by the requirements of the
assignment.